There are no signs on the wall outside Cody Wilson's office. There is nothing in the windows or doorways; just a row of blinds and "No Smoking" stickers on the sides of the door. Gunners rarely do business without appointment. From the sidewalk outside, there was no indication that the unit was even occupied, let alone full of construction materials that could completely eliminate the concept of gun control.

This is Wilson's framework. In his office in Cross Park, northeast of Austin, the man who was condemned and revered for making the first full-function 3D printed gun is now carefully designing the production of high-precision cutting machines designed to cut the last Hole to enter the working lower receiver of the semi-automatic assault rifle by rotating the metal parts of the originally unusable part.

"The technology here is called digital control," Wilson explained, his eyes fixed on the aforementioned factory Ghost Gunner. "You actually have a mobile tool bit, which is controlled by a computer and tells it where it is in space. It is performing an old way of working: it is milling those holes. This technology is pre-war technology. That's it. It is miniaturized [in the form of a ghost shooter]."

The workshop is littered with boxes of raw materials: bearings, couplings, chip guards and ball screw blocks. The heat shield is located next to the helix at the long end of the workshop. Eight contractors—all men in their 20s and early 30s—moved mechanically around the long table in the center of the room.

They work on 12 stations in total, assembling hardware, Arduino boards and wire structures. Wilson only contracts with an engineer with any technical experience. The others are former bartenders and bookstore residents. One is a part-time gun instructor. The other has previously served as a representative of T-Mobile.

"We don't like debate," someone explained after being asked why he worked for Wilson. "We want to make the debate irrelevant. If everyone has a CNC milling machine and everyone can make a gun, how do you enforce gun control?"

Ghost Gunner may use old technology, but it is indeed the first of its kind: a hands-free machine for producing the most coveted gun parts. Other parts—such as buttstocks, sights, and barrels—can be purchased online using a credit card. No background check, no waiting period. But when its manufacturing completion rate exceeds 80%, the lower receiver becomes a "gun". After that, anyone who wants to sell the item or provide others with access to the item will need to obtain a federal firearm license and a serial number — the serial number is engraved on the receiver — for the weapon.

The Ghost Gunner takes advantage of the other side of the law: if the receiver is only 80% complete when purchased by an individual, that person can make the final cut, attach it to the parts they bought online, and own a gun. Registered. Wilson said he has sold and shipped more than 650 such machines and ordered a total of 2,000.

"You have a lot of middle-aged men, they have a lot of disposable income, but young technology startups don't cater to them very well," he pointed out. "We have many products that can meet the needs of these people and serve our own non-profit goals." (These goals will be described in detail later.)

The machine runs on CAD (Computer Aided Design) files and can be easily loaded onto a Windows computer. Ghost Gunner’s sales copy reads: “Through simple tools and point-and-click software, the machine will automatically find and align to your 80% low position and start working.”

Wilson started the test cut and waited for the motor inside the box to heat up. In less than two hours, he started designing a new gun.

Wilson and a few friends desperately set up a distributed defense system.

The non-profit organization was established in 2012 and was originally a liberal movement. In theory, Wilson hopes to bring the power of guns to the public in the most basic and easily available way. More simply, he wants to 3D print a gun.

Defense Distributed starts with the gun parts and runs the script to print the code of the receiver and AR magazine. A video in January 2013 found that Wilson fired four bullets from a printed magazine at a shooting range outside Austin. In another video shot a week later, he fired 13 bullets with an assault rifle, and then fired 6 bullets in rapid succession. Other videos show that the magazine can handle more than 350 photos. On February 25, a video was released showing Wilson and his partner fired 600 rounds from the printed lower receiver.

Every time Defense Distributed publishes a video, they will publish the CAD files used to print the parts to DefCAD, which is a website they created as a forum for such files. DefCAD works like a search engine: log in, search for attachments, and download scripts for free.

On May 6, 2013, Defense Distributed released a video showing Wilson wearing blue jeans and a black polo shirt. He fired a bullet with an off-white plastic .380 single-shot pistol made by a Stratasys 3D printer. After Wilson shot, the symphony arrangement gradually strengthened, and then the screen was filled with standard promotional images. The jets flew in formation in the sky. A red sun rises. The gun can only be fired once, but it is a working gun. Wilson said, "Technology is more powerful than props."

Wilson immediately became a cult figure for some people, posing a threat to others, and making national headlines. The CAD file of this pistol—called the Liberator—was downloaded more than 120,000 times in two days. But on May 8, Wilson received a letter from the law enforcement agency of the Defense Trade Control Compliance Office (DTCC), a subsidiary of the U.S. State Department, stating that publishing the Liberator CAD file may violate federal laws, namely the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ITAR regulates the sale of guns by American residents to foreign customers, and DTCC believes that Wilson is actually exporting liberators by publishing documents, because anyone with documents and a 3-D printer can click "print" and have a gun. (At the time, the United States did not have any restrictions on privately manufactured guns for personal use, as long as the guns contained enough metal to be detected by security scanners.)

"DTCC/END is reviewing the technical data publicly provided by Defense Distributed through its 3D printing website DefCAD.org, most of which seem to be related to the category 1 items of the [US Ammunition List]," read the letter. "Defense Distributed may have released ITAR-controlled technical data without prior authorization from the Defense Trade Control Agency (DDTC), which violates ITAR."

The State Department requires Defense Distributed to submit 10 sets of requests for determination of commodity jurisdiction for different gun directives, including those belonging to liberators. The State Department also recommended that Wilson remove DefCAD from his files until a judgment is made.

The notice prevented Wilson from publishing instructions for the new model. At that time, the code scripts he wrote for the Liberator had spread all over the world; Wilson reported that they were downloaded in more than 80 countries. The State Department claims that this may violate ITAR, but first they need to determine whether ITAR even applies to Liberator files, effectively sending DD into a bureaucratic black hole.

On May 6, 2015, two years before the release of the Liberator video, Defense Distributed filed a lawsuit with the State Department, claiming that it is a violation of DD’s ability to issue instructions on how to 3D print gun parts and guns. First Amendment case. Wilson also accused the State Department of finding that DD violated ITAR was wrong, and that the investigation and subsequent uncertainty violated the Second and Fifth Amendments. DD also requested a preliminary injunction to prevent DTCC from restricting the distribution of documents until a final decision is made on whether they violate ITAR. After months of back and forth, the request for the ban was rejected. The decision is currently awaiting an appeal from the Fifth Circuit Court of the United States. Wilson believes that this is a struggle of libertarians, not a fight of gunmen.

In the two years since Liberator was invented, there have been some legal efforts to restrict it and similar guns. In November 2013, Philadelphia became the first (and only) city to ban the manufacture or possession of 3D printed guns. The following month, US Congressman Steve Israel of DN.Y. tried to pass a federal law prohibiting the possession or manufacture of any gun that could evade metal detectors. The bill is dead; Israel is amending it.

Ghost Gunner started to fund litigation. It started booking in October last year and announced via a YouTube video that the video stitched together footage from the factory and held a press release with California Democratic Senator Kevin de León in January 2014 in a dim garage. Yes, condemned non-serialized assault rifles. When de León said: "You plug in this lower receiver", Wilson plugs his receiver into Ghost Gunner. When De Leon said: "We are even beginning to see the industry and market for ghost guns," Wilson flashed a $999 price tag in white on the screen. Six months after the video was released, DD began shipping boxes. Wilson estimates that seven shipments are shipped every day. He keeps a waiting list of two spreadsheets.

"It took us a few months to find a place to make these quickly," he said. "Now we are working hard to shorten the delivery time and shorten the order to the point where materials can be obtained faster."

With the launch of Ghost Gunner, Wilson did everything he could to keep it upright, submitting a request for pre-publishing approval to the Department of Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security (DOPSR), and passing the State Department when DOPSR gave DD a turnaround. He learned from the State Department that this machine, its user manual, and operating software are not subject to ITAR, but the CAD files he sold with Ghost Gunner need to be reviewed.

On December 31, 2014, DOPSR told Defense Distributed that it refused to review these documents and instructed Defense Distributed to DDTC compliance and law enforcement agencies. However, the office is not responsible for such licenses. Defense Distributed asked the State Department how to deal with it through appropriate channels in early January. Five months later, when Wilson filed a lawsuit, the State Department did not respond to the inquiry.

Legal experts trained on the Second Amendment issue told the Chronicle that there is currently no law prohibiting the distribution of Ghost Gunners and related CAD files. A memo issued by Defense Distributed attorneys sent by Wilson to vendors questioning the legality of Ghost Gunner also stated that the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Administration does not require Ghost Gunner owners to obtain a federal firearm license, as long as they Use the mill strictly for personal use-and the situation is likely to remain that way. According to Mike McLively, a full-time lawyer at the Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence Law, lawmakers in our country have little opportunity to take the initiative.

"I don't think there is a big appetite for overseeing things like this now," McLiverley speculated in his San Francisco office. "You have a lot of Second Amendment issues contained in it. Now, many policies are driven by'Well, there is a major crisis, we need to deal with it'. Not many times you ask Congress or state legislators to resolve it in advance. Question. They usually respond. It may be difficult to convince Congress that this is a major issue."

In fact, it's hard to imagine any politician will try so hard to reduce the gun debate on the platform to stop the ghost shooter. According to a study conducted by Jaclyn Schildkraut, a researcher at the State University of New York at Oswego, and her Texas State University colleague H. Jaymi Elsass, the United States has suffered more mass shootings in this century than 13 other major countries combined More. There have been so many mass shootings in this country that the names of the gunmen behind them are mixed.

In some cases, such as Sandy Hook and the Aurora Massacre in Colorado, AR-15 was used in filming. But only once was a gun made by a gunman: John Zawahri, a 23-year-old man in Santa Monica, killed 5 people in 2013 with a gun he assembled. He bought parts from the Internet. The report pointed out that his record of mental health problems prevented him from buying guns in a more traditional way in 2011.

"This is a very new thing, I think until you meet someone grinding their gun at home and using it..." McLiverley began. "Unfortunately, gun politics in this country will only receive attention after mass shootings. I hope this is not the case of'I told you', but maybe this is what the lawmakers need before they are willing to do something. ."

Wilson pointed out that, in a practical sense, price points and efficiency issues make Ghost Gunners more like a philosophical statement than the actual choice of most Americans, but its application—for those on the other end of the debate—changes. It's more terrifying with every hypothesis. In short, Wilson hopes to provide a way to make guns for anyone with the necessary funds and working knowledge of computer software. This means that convicted felons, mentally ill persons and subjects of injunctions, as well as others who currently restrict the use of firearms, will be able to make their own firearms. People have such questions about this is part of the reason Wilson did it.

I asked Wilson at a lunch meeting in early October how he would react if someone was banned from buying guns. He contacted the ghost gunner with his hand, made an assault rifle together, and fired at the public.

"I haven't really been tested, but there are similar situations," he said. "In the UK, they arrested this man-this was a year ago-because of drugs, they found a 3D printer in his basement. So I got a call from the BBC... I remember Feelings: "Oh damn it. Oh damn it. The damn storm is coming. "

"I was affected, but not.

"Many times in our work, before we release some key things, I have done a psychological check. At every point I am willing to do: willing to support it; willing to contradict my ideas is our opponent's pervert Moral ideology; even rudely, we are the only serious people when we say things like'freedom'."

Wilson, 27, was born and raised in a conservative family on the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas. He spent many years as a boy scout, but rarely set foot in any corner of gun culture. His father owns some, and his uncle has a hunting lodge. He believes that both are formative, calling them both "backgrounds." He never hunted and didn't care much about guns when he was a kid.

He was a popular child, serving as the student council chairman at Cabot High School and then as the student chairman at the University of Central Arkansas. He entered liberalism through Ron Paul, and after reading Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans-Hermann Hope, and Michel Foucault, his views improved. "By the time I was halfway through high school, I had entered a radical position that the Second Amendment was so that you could form a resistance army," he said. "The old ideals of old republican realism: the government has been reorganizing and we need a pressure relief valve. I believe this. I still believe this. This is mainly the ideology of the Second Amendment. So I always have this. Ideas." However, Julian Assange's open source information portal WikiLeaks made him consider his own involvement in anti-national activism.

In the fall of 2011, he moved to Austin to participate in UT Law, but he didn't know what he wanted to practice. Therefore, during high school and UCA, Wilson began studying at law school. He joined the Libertarian Longhorns team and began to spend time at Brave New Books. The idea for Liberator and its CAD files came about when he was talking on the phone with Ben Denio in his first year. Ben Denio was his DD partner since his undergraduate degree and moved to Austin last year to work for Ghost Gunner. "He was like,'There is a 3-D printer. We can print a gun,'" Wilson recalled. "It sounds stupid, but,'Gosh, this is a WikiLeaks gun.'"

Wilson dropped out of school in May 2013, and two days later he posted a video of him filming the Liberator (coincidentally, on the same day he received the letter from the State Department). Sandy Hook happened in December and he began to notice a wave of reforms to gun control across the country. "If we want to get ahead, we have to work all the time," he said. "Any specific thing we intend to do, we may not be able to legally do it within three or four months."

He told me this in Jim's restaurant, which is a humble all-day breakfast restaurant off Highway 183 that Wilson frequents. There, Wilson was not a frightening weapon maker who made headlines like Wired’s "15 Most Dangerous People in the World", but a guy who often stopped to sit with friends and business partners. People for a few hours. The waitress there called him the noodle king when he ordered pasta, and when he asked them about their views on national security, they laughed happily. "We tried to figure out what he did for a living, but we could never figure it out," explained Madison, a waiter, who worked on the floor with her mother. "Financial stuff...we think he might be a gambler."

"This is surreal now," Wilson said later of his actual work. "When I met Assange in London last year, he said,'Oh, the 3D printed gun. That was 2013.' It has passed and has been assimilated. CSI has beaten the damn 3D gun horse at this point. Time?

In fact, despite the subject, it is safe to say that Wilson's daily life has become a routine matter. The hype video is gone forever. Since Ghost Gunner began shipping, Defense Distributed has not released any gun-related clips. Demonstration of drama shooting? That's an old hat. Although he still collects guns-equating his love for machines with Jay Leno's fascination with cars-he says he rarely shoots.

"I have to shoot in front of a TV camera, so it's a chore," he said. "Then you have to clean it up. You are wasting money. I like... If I have them now, I just want to keep them there."

In fact, Wilson's current working day is between the CEO and the office manager. One morning in late October, I went to the store and learned that he needed to take a bucket of metal parts for recycling, and then called Chase Bank for wire transfer. After the website refused to process the payment, he spent the entire winter and early spring dealing with PayPal on the grounds that they were not compatible with Defense Distributed products, and after both UPS and FedEx refused, he had to find the delivery of Ghost Gunners Work around his business. (He is currently signing a contract with a freight forwarder who is a UPS distributor.)

"This is nonsense, man," he said. "I hate it. I keep telling people:'We are a software company, swear to God.' But you only need to take this road to really do it. All I want to do is put gun software on the Internet. This That’s why it exists: to fund litigation so that we can start putting instructions back on the Internet. That’s how I recognize it now. I can’t do this and hurt me every day. It’s cool. We produce this very well. Great. I would love to produce other things. But I don’t do it every day..."

Wilson has another lawsuit-he said a Florida manufacturer was accused of defrauding $ 26,000 worth of sample parts-and he hopes to appear in court in January. Then there is the issue of maintaining his current business operations. Wilson reorganized Defense Distributed in the summer to accommodate Ghost Gunner as a for-profit subsidy.

"If it is done effectively, at least $2 million worth of sales are worth," he said. "If it's not for serious mismanagement. Since the summer, I have been trying to maintain the economy because we have to win the lawsuit-which may take years. But we are not just running a company and trying to keep the cash flow very good. We also Another version of the product must be developed. This is still a business."

When I stopped in late October, Wilson was considering product improvements.

"The next 400 machines must be equipped with better software," he said. "We did not get good results from the software. We have known the key problems of this machine for four months, but we have not been able to fix them. If we ship another 400 machines without solving our software problems. "

Wilson and DeNio are also testing the new motor in the afternoon. This is the larger form of brushless DC motor they currently use. They hoped that the greater instantaneous torque and the new end mill could provide better cutting results, but they encountered problems when editing the script.

Wilson said the organization is working to modify the Ghost Gunner to release a version that can cater to other assault rifles. A bracket of different sizes can produce the AR-10 lower receiver; the new CAD file can be cut equally easily. On November 15, Wilson announced that Defense Distributed will now sell itself 80% of the completed receivers, making it a one-stop shop for 80% and the last 20%. He hopes to use the money he recovered to open another office for a lawsuit from Florida. The day before I came in, Wilson received a contract from the landlord to take over the unit next to Defense Distributed. He bought 500 lower receivers, which he plans to sell for $55-a significant drop compared to the current prices of other lower receivers found online.

Wilson's final project is best summarized as "Kickstarter for guns". In 2012, when the Indiegogo website determined that his efforts did not meet the terms of service, Defense Distributed's crowdfunding activities were banned. Therefore, Gunspring will provide a place for gun lovers to support each other's prototypes. "In most cases, we want to see hardware and accessory projects that are already suitable for AR-15," Wilson said. Slings, stocks and attractions.

Then there is the lawsuit, which he hopes will take place shortly before the Fifth Circuit. He filed a notice of appeal in early August and can only wait now. Wilson is eager to start publishing gun instructions again, but insists that the lawsuit is more meaningful. "We want the battle itself. We want to win this battle. We want to register it as a winning battle," he said.

"The gun thing is unique. Especially in American politics. You touch it and it will resonate in people's hearts. We understand this power. It's not even genetic. It's just death and conflict in the masses. This kind of imaginary authority. Ultimately, this involves politics itself. It is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, all the way down."

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Cody Wilson, Gun Control, Second Amendment, Defense Distribution, Liberator, Ghost Gunner

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