The Imura Revolver 3D Printed Gun

[WarFairy]

On one hand - but on the other it would make anyone with a 3d printer capable of producing an untraceable and fully disposable firearm. For a few bucks.
And that's not a good thing.

Using the same argument that scientists have used down the years: ie: 'we designeda gun but we don;t want it to ever be used against people' - also does not work. have you met 'people' ?
Give them the means to make a cheap firearm - and they'll do it and people will definitely get shot by it.

You designed a GUN because it was a challenge.
Why not design any number of other things that are a challenge, that can't be used for hurting someone else.

Nope - that just doesn't wash. The reason for designing a gun is 3 fold.
1) huge publicity, I mean massive world wide publicity.
2) you like guns - that's not a crime, but it's rarely given as an honest answer.
3) you're some kind of fanatic who believes that the only way to make the world safe is to give everyone a loaded gun.

There is no moral high ground for you on this issue WarFairy.

I can see the attraction of desiging a cheap gun. But I'm also not blinkered or self delusional enough to refuse to see how it will be used and by who.

And yes, you can say if it's not you designing it - then it would be someone else. Alas this is also true.
That doesn't make it right.

And using .22 long ammunition is the right move for a gun designer but the wrong move from the point of view of an englishmen. As it's the most widely used ammo in my country and the one it would be easiest to get without a licence.
At the moment in the uk the criminal element doesn't often use firearms.
So thanks for trying your best to change that.
I'm sure all the future victims of plastic guns will also thank you.

A gun is NOT just an engineering and design challenge - never has been, never will be.
Own up to that or quit.

The finished product may very well only contain the sum total of a few dollars worth of material, but factor in the cost of the printer, the failed items, calibration prints, and most importantly, the time it takes to not only set up the printer to a level that will produce a functional part, but to produce an acceptable version of that particular part, and it is bloody expensive. Eventually, a crime may be committed with a 3D printed firearm. That's just humanity for you in a nutshell. On a long enough time line, any item that exists will be used to kill someone. Whether it was a firearm, car, aircraft, or what have you, a 3D printer will eventually be party to someone's death. It may eventually turn out to be one of my designs that takes a life, but it could just as easily save one.

FOSSCAD designs things other than firearms, it just so happens no one writes articles or forum posts about them.

As to your three points:

1) I can't stand publicity. People online LOVE to crap on early efforts. Look at any gaming forum to see that. They'll do it even if they haven't the foggiest idea of what goes on behind the scenes of that screen shot they're ripping apart. CAD is no different. The number of posts and articles I've read screaming about issues, both existent and non-existent is brain numbing, and that's just on the technical side. Then there's people calling me a monster and telling me that I have no morals what so ever, but that's an entirely separate issue. The ONLY thing I want is to design and test my ideas. People watch the FOSSCAD twitter feed for renders, screenshots and release announcements. We don't send anything to media at all, they come to us.

2) I very much do enjoy firearms. They've been a part of my life since I was knee high to a butterfly. Their construction and operation, quite simply, fascinates me.

3) There is no way to make the world safe. Never has been, and never will be. My designs don't make the world any more or less safe. Firearms have existed for centuries, and will continue to exist for centuries hence, just as knives have, and just as sharpened sticks and stones have.

There were no considerations for the design outside of the functionality of the design itself. Politics and social impact aren't design considerations. People will do what they always have done regardless of if I am a hermit, write the STL files on the side of a building in big neon letters, or give the files away on the internet.

Whether someone is shot, stabbed, beaten, strangled or any of the other myriad and horrible ways mankind has devised to destroy one another doesn't make a difference to the victim. People will always kill people. There is no fixing that simple fact. A half pound of plastic, steel tubing, rubber bands, a steel pin, and a few weights isn't going to change that. If someone puts a gun to their own head and pulls the trigger, whose fault is it? Is it the manufacturer of the firearm? Is it the designer? Is it the guy who first figured out that adding cotton to nitric acid produced gun cotton? Is it the one that first ground together charcoal and salt peter? This design I've released isn't especially complex. It borrows concepts from a few places, but the further you go down the hole of blame, the more it looks like a fractal spiraling out. I am, of course, not absolved of any blood on my hands due to the design, should you decide to see it that way, but I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the person that takes my files and creates them with the intent to do harm on his fellow man. Morality is a tricky thing, my friend. I don't see it as an inherently bad thing to create a firearm, knife, or any other weapon. It is just one of an infinite number of machines. I do see it as an inherently bad thing to use a firearm on another human being without due cause, I.E. they are about to deprive you of your health or life.

The whole problem I have with all of this is that the Liberator, one of the first, and certainly the most talked about Printed Firearm, has thus far not been used in any crime that harmed another human being, and if I'm doing the right searches, hasn't been used in any crimes at all. Its been online for quite some time and there hasn't been a single one.

I have no guilt for anything someone does with my designs that is against the law or harms another living thing. That blame rests squarely on them, and them alone.

As far as the design challenge goes, it was a challenge to satisfy all of my self-imposed limits on the design. It had to be legal under the USA's Undetectable firearms act, thus the four metal weights. It had to be automatically indexing without the use of a fragile pawl, thus the modified Webley-Fossbery grooves on the cylinder. It had to carry a comparable load of ammunition to commercially available semi automatic .22lr handguns, thus the 8 round fast swap cylinder. It had to stand up to repeated firings, thus the chamber and barrel liners in steel. It had to fit into a package such that it would not be unwieldy, thus the configuration of the striker with the weight parallel to the rear face of the cylinder. Finally, it had to be top-opening, because that's just bloody cool. Could it have been made more simply? Absolutely. The core operating system of a firearm is absolutely simple. Drive a pin into the primer, contain the expanding gas, expel projectile. Doing that more than once with ABS plastic as your primary material is not easy. It can be done through brute design, like the Liberator. It can be done through appropriation of other parts, like all of our AR-15 designs. Or it can be done with repurposing of parts, like the Imura using the precision tubing. Designing one of these is absolutely a challenge, and a damned interesting one at that, especially if you put the effort into making it as safe as it can be with the materials available.