An emerging technology known as 3D printing is hailed by some as the future of manufacturing. Pundits believe that when 3D printers become cheap enough for the average household, consumers may stop frequenting shops for certain goods. Instead, they predict that we’ll simply download blueprints for our sci-fi printers and ‘print’ products in the convenience of our own homes.

Saying that the technology is promising would be an understatement, but it’s not without its faults: critics stress that it could be abused to bypass gun controls and acquire weapons without legal permission. To make things worse, plastic could used to print firearms that cannot be traced by metal detectors.

This seemingly nightmarish scenario may soon become a reality if a University of Texas law student by the name of Cody Wilson gets his way. Eight months ago the 25-year-old picked up a $8,000  Stratasys Dimension SST printer on eBay and founded Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization dedicated to produce a firearm that can be downloaded from the net.

A couple days ago Forbes’ Andy Greenberg published the first pictures of a prototype gun Wilson calls the “the Liberator”. The firearm has seventeen components, sixteen of which are printed in ABS plastic. The only exception is a single nail used as the firing pin.

Wilson plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for the Liberator once it’s complete, but his project is already drawing criticism  from lawmakers. Congressman Steve Israel recently commented that:

“Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser. When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. Now that this technology is proven, we need to act now to extend the ban [on] plastic firearms.”

The senator, and others, have noted what SiliconANGLE editor Kyt Dotson says will be a cultural conflict about regulating weapons, “3D printers represent a technology that may have great implications for the culture of prohibition–that idea that ‘things’ can be controlled by regulation. Certainly this has become true for questions of copyright when it comes to the ease-of-copying and the digital era; but now 3D printers are bringing the ability to produce tangible objects into the hands of consumers–and, with the introduction of the physible, the ability to download plans for those objects from the Internet.”

The printable-gun, of course, also includes a metal slug to make it detectable by metal detectors (and thus not violate current regulations against undetectable weapons.) However, Dotson adds that this slow progression towards showing that a 3D printer can in fact print a firearm shows the march of technology will enable more complex and durable objects. Guns themselves are extremely simple, such a weapon is already easy to make out of supplies from Home Depot; but there are numerous simple household machines that 3D printing could produce that a working gun could become proof-of-concept for why this could be very useful for producing tools on-the-spot.

[Image credit: Michael Thad Carter for Forbes; image of Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson]