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IPFS News Link • 3D Printing

THE NEW RADICAL, CODY WILSON, AND THE FUTURE OF 3D-PRINTED GUNS

• http://www.theverge.com, by Tasha Robinson

The mood in the room after an early Sundance screening of Adam Bhala Lough's The New Radical was polite, but a little icy. Viewers who stayed for the post-film Q&A asked sarcastic questions like "Do you think it's okay for my 12-year-old son to download gun plans off the internet?" and "If I have a machine shop that can produce a nuke, should I?" They were mostly aiming these questions at the film's central subject, Cody Wilson, the face of the 3D-printable gun movement. The New Radical touches on other crypto-anarchists, hacktivists, and the Second Amendment enthusiasts touting printable guns as a form of "radical equality." But the movie repeatedly comes back to Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed, which develops printable files for weapons, and sells a self-contained CNC mill called Ghost Gunner, used for making untraceable guns. In the documentary, director Adam Bhala Lough follows Wilson through the past several years of activism: putting 3D gun files online, being forced to pull them back off by the State Department, partnering with Iranian-British rebel Amir Taaki on the DarkWallet anonymous Bitcoin use project, suing the State Department on First Amendment grounds, and much more.


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