Just about every new technology is married at first to some illicit activity — the Internet and pornography, for example. Or bitcoin and drug dealing. Or Whisper and also drug dealing (only Whisper hasn’t grown out of that one yet). For 3D printing, a technology that has the ability to literally save lives and cure ailments, that darker element is 3D-printed guns.
The newest weapon in the ever-growing arsenal of 3D-printed weaponry is a metal handgun called the Reason. According to 3Dprint.com, this is the second run of guns in Solid Concepts’ 1911 line of 3D-printed firearms, the first of which ran for nearly $12,000 a pop.
The gun is made through a more hardcore printing process than you’d use to make shitty jewelry. The Reason is printed using Direct Metal Laser Sintering, where metal powder is melted layer by layer with a laser for an extra-accurate printing.
Solid Concepts isn’t going to be making the patterns widely available like in the case of Defense Distributed, who ran afoul of the State Department for trying not just to 3D-print firearms, but widely distribute the patterns. No, Solid Concepts is owned by publicly traded 3D printing giant Stratasys and has the trappings of a humble, apolitical industrial shop.
Then again, whoever designed the Reason model decided to print the preamble to the Constitution on the grip, right below the trigger — that’s the part about dissolving political bands and succeeding from unions and such. We’re going to go ahead and say that’s a political statement.
Here’s a video of an earlier Solid Concepts handgun in action in a small shooting range in Texas:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCfhLEbPBiY]