Editorial Board
Your Future Will Be Manufactured on a 3-D Printer
This article is for subscribers only.
Would you like to build your own gun? There are plenty of ways to do so, legal and otherwise. Last week, a group called Defense Distributed offered you a new one: It published instructions for creating a plastic firearm using a 3-D printer. One guy even fired a real bullet with it.
Not long afterward, the U.S. State Department demanded that the group take the blueprints down, alleging that they may violate export-control laws. Defense Distributed complied, but not before at least 100,000 people had downloaded the plans.