Government - Future of Gun Control
3D Printed Guns are Now Legal… What’s Next? By Jon Stokes
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n Tuesday, July 10, the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a landmark settlement with Austinbased Defense Distributed (https://defdist.org), a controversial startup led by a young, charismatic anarchist whom Wired (www.wired. com/2012/12/most-dangerous-people)
once named one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world. Hyper-loquacious and mediasavvy, Cody Wilson (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody_Wilson) is fond of telling any reporter who’ll listen that Defense Distributed’s main product, a gun fabricator called the Ghost Gunner, represents the endgame for gun control, not just in the US but everywhere in the world. With nothing but the Ghost Gunner, an internet connection, and some raw materials, anyone, anywhere can make an unmarked, untraceable gun in their home or garage. Even if Wilson is wrong that the gun control wars are effectively over (and I believe he is), Tuesday’s ruling has fundamentally changed them. At about the time the settlement announcement was going out over the wires, I was pulling into the parking lot of LMT Defense in Milan, IL. LMT Defense, formerly known as Lewis Machine & Tool, is as much the opposite of Defense Distributed as its quiet, publicity-shy founder, Karl Lewis, is the opposite of Cody Wilson. But LMT Defense’s story can be usefully placed alongside that of Defense Distributed,
because together they can reveal much about the past, present, and future of the tools and technologies that we humans use for the age-old practice of making war.
The legacy machine Karl Lewis got started in gunmaking back in the 1970’s at Springfield Armory in Geneseo, IL, just a few exits up I-80 from the current LMT Defense headquarters. Lewis, who has a high school education but who now knows as much about the engineering behind firearms manufacturing as almost anyone alive, was working on the Springfield Armory shop floor when he hit upon a better way to make a critical and failure-prone part of the AR-15, the bolt. He first took his idea to Springfield Armory management, but they took a pass, so he rented out a small corner in a local auto repair ship in Milan, bought some equipment, and began making the bolts, himself. Lewis worked in his rented space on nights and weekends, bringing the newly fabricated bolts home for heat treatment in his kitchen oven. Not long after he made his first batch, he landed a small contract with the US military to supply some of the bolts for the M4 carbine. On the back of this initial success with M4 bolts, Lewis Machine & Tool expanded its offerings to include complete guns. Over the course of the next three decades, LMT grew into one of the world’s top makers of AR-15-pattern rifles for the world’s militaries, and it’s now in a very small club of gunmakers, alongside
a few oldworld arms powerhouses l i k e G e r m a n y ’s Heckler & Koch and B e l g i u m ’s FN Herstal, that supplies rifles to US SOCOM’s most elite units. LMT’s gun business is built on high-profile relationships, hardto-win government contracts, and deep, almost monk-like know-how. The company lives or dies by the skill of its machinists and by the stuff of process engineering — tolerances and measurements and paper trails. Political connections are also key, as the largest weapons contracts require congressional approval and months of waiting for political winds to blow in this or that direction, as countries to fall in and out of favor with each other, and paperwork that was delayed due to a political spat over some unrelated point of trade or security finally gets put through so that funds can be transfered and production can begin. Selling these guns is as oldschool a process as making them is. Success in LMT’s world isn’t about media buys and PR hits, but about dinners in foreign capitals, range sessions with the world’s top special forces units, booths at trade shows most of us have never heard of, and secret delegations of high-ranking officials to a machine shop in a small town surrounded by
10 July 2018 Black Business News www.blackbbusinessnews.net 1-323-291-7819