In Woody Allen’s first film, “Take the Money and Run,” released in 1969, Woody Allen’s character (Virgil Starkwell) attempts to escape from prison by making a gun out of a bar of soap and is almost successful until he goes outside only to have that gun turn to suds.
In a case of life imitating art, the September 7, 1988 edition of the Chicago Tribune reported that an inmate at the Cook County Jail, wanted for three homicides in California, escaped from that jail using a bar of soap carved as a gun. He was subsequently captured in Ohio found sleeping in a car at a roadside rest area. Between his escape in Chicago and his apprehension in Ohio, that escaped inmate stabbed a person in an attempted robbery in Dearborn, Michigan and stole a 1984 Mustang from a car dealership during a test drive with a salesman. A former cellmate said he used to carve wax figurines.
In my October 20, 2010 blog entry I discussed how a technology known as 3-D printing can be used to create an object by stacking layers of plastic or metal material on top of one another.
This technology can enable inventors and developers of new products to build prototypes themselves while sitting at their keyboards quickly and relatively inexpensively.
It may also soon allow one to create a gun, a real working weapon, not a bar of soap, although, apparently, soap guns can be an effective substitute to real ones. The New York Times reported on October 7th that Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, is in the process of building a completely functional 3-D printed gun and posting the instructions online in the next couple of months. In his video, Mr. Wilson, describes the gun as the “world’s first 3-D printable personal defense system.”
According to the Times article, 3-D printers can be had for as little as $500.00. It points out that a plastic gun made in this fashion could be melted down after being used to commit a crime and reprinted as a statute of the Buddha, for example. Oh, and a plastic gun won’t be detected by a metal detector.
The National Rifle Association did not respond to a request for comment from the author of the article. See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/with-a-3-d-printer-building-a-gun-at-home/
