From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

Today, the Blueprints for Printing a 3D gun were scheduled to be made available for anyone to download on the Internet today.

Who's behind their release and why is the federal government taking his side?

It's Wednesday, August 1st.

So we start with a then 25 year old named Cody Wilson.

Well, the group of friends and I decided to band together under a collective name, defense distributed.

And we want to share with you an idea.

In 2013, he's in law school at the University of Texas.

The defense distributed project has developed an idea that we're calling the WICU app.

It would be the world's first 3D printable personal defense system.

And he 3D prints a pistol and that's supposedly from a printer that he buys on eBay.

Tiffany Shoe covers the gun industry for the times.

Now, before this, very, very few people of any have managed to successfully shoot one of these things without the entire thing just coming apart in their hands.

This is a partially printed AR-15. This is where all the explosive forces of the rifle happen.

Shooting a gun obviously involves a lot of pressure. Most of these guns are made out of plastic.

And this fires?

Cody, however.

Yeah, fire is quite a bit the other day too.

Manages to shoot it successfully.

And what does he decide to do after his version of this 3D gun actually works?

The product is in our emphasis here what we're interested in producing is a digital file.

He decides to share it with everyone.

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