The Liberator Rides Again

During World War II, a Polish refugee working with the US Army had a radical idea: the US could manufacture cheap and easy to operate handguns, then parachute drop them by the thousands into occupied Europe.  Resistance fighters in France, Greece, and Poland would be able to fight the Nazis if we could just give them simple firearms that could be used without training.

Within months, the FP-45, or Liberator pistol was designed and its production was begun.  The crude but effective pistol was made of stamped sheet metal at a low price.  A single-shot pistol, the units were produced for only $2.40 each and a half million were manufactured.  They were packaged in cardboard boxes with ten rounds of ammo, a dowel rod to push the empty casing out of the barrel to unload the weapon, and a wordless cartoon instruction sheet.

While a few thousand were actually distributed, there is no proof that the resistance ever actually used one of these pistols against the enemy.  Instead of being effective weapons, they became collectors' items.    One of these guns with the box and instruction sheet sells for over two thousand dollars today.

Why weren't they used?  Mainly because they were just not that good as a weapon.  Who would want to use an inaccurate, single-shot gun--that could not be reloaded till it was unloaded using a stick--to go up against a Nazi soldier with a real weapon?

Surprisingly, the gun is making a startling reappearance--but this time it is made of plastic.  The gun parts can be printed using a 3D printer, then assembled and fired by practically anyone.  Using small-caliber rounds, it needs almost no metal parts.  And the prospect of an unregistered gun that can pass undetected through metal detectors has Congress freaked.

Prepare yourself for the "nut" point of view.  Congress needs to relax.

First off, this is something that probably cannot be stopped.  Legislation will not make people forget how to do this.  The plans for the gun are available all over the internet and they aren't going to disappear.  I don't understand what passing laws against these guns is supposed to accomplish.  Congress shouldn't care if law-abiding citizens want them, and criminals won't care if they break the law by making them. 

While 3D printers are getting cheaper, today there are probably far more metal lathes and milling machines in private hands than these printers.  If you know how to use a lathe, you can make a much better, and just as unregistered, firearm than this plastic toy.

The new gun is also named The Liberator, in honor of the gun from World War II.  The new gun resembles the old gun, and has most of the flaws of the older gun, too: it is not terribly reliable, it is not very accurate and it is a single shot gun with a rather weak cartridge.  I wouldn't want to use this one on Nazis, myself, (or anyone else I really meant to hit and do damage to, either).

The people who came up with the plans for this gun didn't try to sell the gun, they just gave the plans away.  They posted the plans on their website, making it possible for anyone to download the blueprints for free.  And just as fast, our government got a court order shutting down the site, but not before the whole world learned it was relatively easy to make the gun.

This is reminiscent of when Charles III of Spain put censors in the Pyrenees in a futile attempt to keep the writings of Voltaire out of his kingdom.  But the people of Spain didn't need the books: the ideas of French Enlightenment  (including the concept of the government's power deriving from the people) slipped through to inspire the peasants of Spain to produce the Constitution of 1812.

Congress needs to remember the 1960's, when there was serious outcry about the availability of cheap, poorly-made handguns, commonly called Saturday Night Specials.  The guns usually used small-caliber  bullets and held relatively few rounds;  the only way you could hit the broad side of a barn with them was to be inside it with a pocket full of extra ammo.

Street gangs back then frequently made their own single-shot guns.  Called Zip Guns; quite a few were made using a car antenna as the barrel.  The guns were frequently more a danger to the person using them than to the intended victim.

Congress acted: cheaply-made small-caliber weapons were made illegal and, immediately, gangs and criminals acquired much better firearms--well-made, reliable, and accurate firearms with high-capacity magazines.   Today, If you are the victim of a violent crime, you are not less likely to be shot, you are just less likely to survive the shooting.  To Congress, this is progress.

While that World War II version of the Liberator was probably never used by the Resistance against the Nazis, the gun did have a beneficial role in the war.  The Nazi's knew of the gun, but were unsure how many of them were in the hands of ordinary Europeans.  This had an impact on troop morale and forced the Germans to alter their policy toward the citizens of conquered countries.

I think the designers of the new Liberator had exactly that in mind when they named the new gun.