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The DEFCAD March newsletter

ImmortalRevolt delivers the next stage in the FGC-9 series with his REBEL-9, which is a mostly printed semi-automatic PCC that uses zero firearms parts except for its magazine spring. The REBEL-9 is distinct from the ROGUE-9 (its progenitor) by not relying on a Glock-style magazine, but this experimental choice may limits the gun's reliability.

Chairmanwon cemented himself as the mainstream firearm industry's public enemy by ripping the exposed mesh model of the RXM from Ruger's own website and producing a solid body reverse engineer with his RXM Reference Model. This impressive project includes various niceties for designers, such as a block frame and a frame negative, which allows us to experiment with this modular platform in ways Ruger and Magpul likely did not anticipate. At least the models weren't registered with the Copyright Office.

Stubbs has been spending a significant amount of time with the AR-15 platform, stripping away all that he could while still producing fully functional weapons. His latest adventure is the VolksStubbGewehr, which is a fully functional, printable 5.56 Mauser-style rifle from a bare minimum of AR-15 parts. This is significantly less complicated than the Sturmgewehr 556(S), his loveletter to the STG44 with, but it is incredible to produce a bolt action rifle with this amount of aesthetic care and simplicity.

Unseenkiller has not been resting on his laurels this year. This month he releases The Geneva Breacher, a flip-to-side, shoulder-fired launcher designed for 37mm that takes the best design acumen of the launchers coming out in the DIY Defense space and combines it with the increasingly intricate and professional design techniques that Unseenkiller demonstrates lately. He continues to set a high bar and there's no sign he has any intention of slowing down.

Holding: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives's 2022 Rule interpreting the Gun Control Act of 1968 to cover certain products that can readily be converted into operational firearms or functional frames or receivers is not facially inconsistent with the Act.

Halbrook says it best at Reason: to avoid a difficult merits decision, the Supreme Court invented a cynical "Salerno" test to rescue the regulations from proper APA scrutiny. Gorsuch and the gang didn't want to do any line drawing to police the legal meaning of frame or receiver, so they created a new "artifact noun" heurisitc and acted like the parties and the judges below had all forgotten to properly consider the challenge.

To complement our ongoing educational work concerning the free and open source sofware (FOSS) history of 3D2A, DEFCAD has republished an early paper of Professor Johan Söderberg, who surveys the Marxist dimensions of copyleft.

Professor Söderberg's correspondence with DEFCAD began in 2014, while he was an editor and associate of the P2P foundation Journal of Peer Production. His review of the Rep-rap project (for all its pragmatism, it began with the goal of transcending capitalism), and of the impact of “geek publics” on traditional social movements, influenced the open-source politics and licenses of the first generation of 3D gun files.

We reproduce Söderberg’s 2002 paper on the contradictions in information capitalism because it offers a historical account of the recurring schism between hacktivists and techies, typical of online free software projects, that is now prominent in 3D gun culture.

SpaceBoundTactical is one of the more prolific and established designer's in DIY Defense, and he has a new series of remixes based on the PSA Dagger rail system going by the trade name of SikeArms. These all share the ability to integrate a flared magwell attachment and show off the wide and creative assortment of designs SBT has become known for. The remixes can be found on his main page, and keep an eye for releases all this next month. The illustration includes the original Blank, Spooky, and Brick Sike Arms Frame designs.

The Armourer's Bench has just released a video and companion article on the next development in Drone Combat: 3D Printed Anti-Drone Sabots. The essential design is the conversion of normal 5.45×39mm (though 7.62x54mmR has also been seen in video) bullet geometry to a sabot capable of holding BB pellets. TAB indicates that rapid iteration is occurring on the battlefield with the normal bullet shape being changed to a more flat nose design which is increased in length to carry more payload.

The efficacy of the design is unproven, but it does point to Heraclitus' famous maxim: "War is the Father of All Things."