by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
When I saw the cover of the September 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
The cover picture was of an automobile built using a 3-D printer. The story about the latest technological/mechanical leap was headlined: “How to make a car…in 2 days.
I shouldn’t have been surprised because in our June 2015 issue TGM reported on the Defense Distributed lawsuit against the US State Department related to Internet publication of the company’s software plans for manufacturing a defensive firearm using generally available 3-D printing technology. The Second Amendment Foundation is supporting the suit which challenges the government’s policy on the basis of the First, Second and Fifth Amendments.
So far, however, we have not heard of any attempts by the Luddites at the State Department to block knowledge of homemade automobiles assembled using similar 3-D technology, but then this is a car and doesn’t have any relationship to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the government’s excuse for going after Defense Distributed and its free software.
Yes, that’s the latest high-tech news. Someone has built a car that works, although not a speedster since it is currently only powered by a souped-up golf cart engine, but they are not giving up on a bigger engine, maybe an electric one. According to Popular Mechanics , the inventor, Jay Rogers, has the latest sample of his 3-D car parked in his Knoxville, TN, garage. The magazine reported that Rogers, now operating under the company name of Local Motors, has plans for at least two factories to start manufacturing and selling the cars sometime in the near future. The car by the way has a name: the Strati.
But that’s how technology hops ahead. The 3-D gun probably wasn’t the first useful product of the 3-D printing technology, and the Strati probably is far from the last.
If you’re heading to the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix Sept. 25-27, you’ll learn more.
Cory Wilson, president of Defense Distributed, the designer of the high tech 3-D defensive firearm anyone can make at home, possibly with the right software and 3-D printers available from Amazon.com and similar sources, is scheduled to be one of the speakers at the 30th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference. Chances are, we’ll all learn a lot from Wilson.
