Colbert: 3-D Printed Guns for Everyone! (VIDEO)
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Stephen Colbert takes a shot at the latest internet-famous celebrity—the 3-D printed gun. But while there’s been a lot of speculation surrounding its legality and the actual threat it poses, at least one person who tried making one has decided they’re not worth the effort.
After the Department of Defense ordered the blueprints taken off the Internet, Caleb Kraft of Hackaday tried to make a printed gun himself. He was not impressed with the results.
According to The Inquisitor, Kraft found that going to a hardware store and picking up the necessities to make a homemade zip gun would have been “cheaper, easier, safer and more reliable.”
It’s worth mentioning that despite the multiple sources of blueprints that Kraft attempted to use, all of them came with errors that prevented proper printing—errors that he had to manually fix. And some still wouldn’t print properly.
Nonetheless, that information doesn’t make Cody Wilson, the leader of Defense Distributed, an advocacy group promoting 3-D printed guns, from being any less disquieting as the self-appointed leader of the movement.
Colbert mimics him in the clip, “What do we want? Guns! Why do we want them? I dunno.”
But despite his undefined motivation, it's likely Wilson will continue to provide material for Colbert in the near future. The University of Texas law student made the first-ever 3-D printed magazine for an AK-47 assault rifle earlier this month—and he named it after Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a known gun control advocate.
The gesture’s foreboding connotations aside, that’s not the maneuver of someone who’s going to relinquish a fight, let alone a national spotlight.
What do you think of 3-D printed guns? Are they a threat, or just a lot of noise? Let us know in the Comments.
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A Bay Area native, Andri Antoniades previously worked as a fashion industry journalist and medical writer. In addition to reporting the weekend news on TakePart, she volunteers as a webeditor for locally-based nonprofits and works as a freelance feature writer for TimeOutLA.com. Email Andri | @andritweets | TakePart.com
