Thanks to her grandfather, a three year old card carrying member of The National Rifle Association, was the little darling of the Gun lobby's annual convention and arms dealing fest over the weekend in Houston. While the sight of little kids playing with real guns was unsettling to some...especially in light of the Newtown tragedy, something else that happened in Texas is really disturbing. a self described libertarian group called Defense Distributed claims it has manufactured a fully functioning plastic handgun...made entirely with a 3 D printer. The group, which counts gun advocates, computer techs and students from the U.S. and Germany, says it made the weapon from a second hand 3D printer, that cost about 8,000 dollars. The gun is hardly perfected...it supposedly fell apart after firing six shots, but the bullets were real, standard 38 caliber rounds. Here's the really scary part...the group---which advocates Second Amendment rights plans to publish on line...a blue print for making the plastic weapon---a gun, that can kill like any other..but because it's made entirely of plastic it would be entirely undetectable by a metal detector...at an airport...a courthouse....a high school---and as mind boggling as it sounds...this Texas based group wants to manufacture assault style guns too...with the use of 3D printers..some of which are available for purchase for less tha 2 thousand dollars at office supply stores like Staples...Gun Control hasn't gotten much traction in Congress this year, but this could be a game changer....Senator Charles Schumer is speaking out against what Defense Distributed is doing, noting that sooner or later, these weapons might be perfected, and become a tool of terrorists...capable of bringing down a plane...shooting up a school or other public venue. The company that makes the 3D printers being used to turn out the plastic pistol, Stratasys says it can't control what people do with it's machine//anymore than an automaker can prevent a drunk driver from speeding down a highway....but Schumer, comparing the advent of the plastic gun...to the gun used in an attempt to kill the President in the Clint Eastwood movie LINE OF FIRE...is authoring legislation that would make possession of these home made guns illegal. Nice idea, but legal is not usually a key word in the vocabulary of wanton killers or terrorists, home grown or foreign.
It's something else for society to worry about...giving new meaning to the term...
Death by Technology.
