Daniel Southwick has a gun. It looks like a toy. It’s not.

It seems that he’s the first person in Canada to make a gun with a 3D printer. It’s under lock and key at his University of Toronto lab, on the seventh floor of Robarts Library.

The gun can’t shoot bullets — not yet — but only because Southwick doesn’t want it to.

He made changes to its design that disarm it, but he could easily undo them.

Now the questions begin.

Can anyone make a gun whenever they want? Will police be able to trace the bullets fired from a 3D-printed gun? Can a terrorist get on a plane, and into a cockpit, with an all-plastic firearm?

As the technology of 3D printing accelerates at an extraordinary rate, Southwick and his colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Critical Making Lab are abruptly drawing the curtain on a new era for gun control in Canada.

Southwick and his colleagues began discussing 3D-printed guns last fall, when Texas law student and radical libertarian Cody Wilson put the designs for a handgun he called the Liberator online. Matt Ratto, the lab’s director, downloaded Wilson’s files the day they became available.

For months, Ratto, Southwick, and their colleague ginger coons (who spells her name without capitals) talked about the implications of printing the weapon. Finally, in May, TVO’s The Agenda invited Ratto to appear on a segment about 3D printing, and asked him to bring along a homemade version of the Liberator.

More from TheStar.com:

· Doctors save boy by 'printing' an airway tube with 3D printer

· Will 3D printing revolutionize the way we live?

· American makes gun with 3D printer, releases blueprints

His lab got to work. They put Wilson’s digital plans into their 3D printer — a $50,000 machine called an Objet30 Pro — and plugged cartridges of clear plastic resin into a tray, just like you might plug an ink cartridge into your home printer.

Some 26 hours later, after its nozzle had spit out infinitesimal plastic layers about the width of a human hair one on top of another, Ratto’s team had enough parts to make a gun. (3D-printed objects also have to be pressure-washed to remove a waxy coating, then doused in alcohol.)

Just weeks before, Cody Wilson had successfully fired a 3D-printed gun for the first time at a shooting range in Texas. Ratto knew it would be illegal to perform a similar experiment in Canada. After Wilson’s test fire, the RCMP told the CBC that anyone in Canada caught making a 3D-printed gun without the right licences could be charged.

So the U of T lab took precautions, making the springs too weak to fire a bullet and gluing a plastic tube where the firing pin would normally go. Also, the barrel is removable and can only fire one bullet before needing to be replaced.

Still, the participants felt the weight of what they had done. “I remember walking at Spadina and Bloor and thinking, ‘I have a gun, I have a gun, I have a gun,’” said coons.

Before long, the lab reached out to law enforcement to help them get a grip on the implications of the new technology, and to possibly test-fire a working model. Southwick and coons are cagey about the nature of their conversations with police, but say they’ve talked to the Toronto force as well as law-enforcement agencies at other levels of government.

While they acknowledge that 3D printing presents new challenges for gun control regulations, the lab’s members seem just as worried about police overreacting to the gun threat and putting curbs on 3D printing. “We’re not really here to say, ‘Won’t somebody think about the children?’” coons said.

Soon, 3D printers will be so ubiquitous that requiring background checks for the machines will be like requiring them for personal computers, she said.

Though coons estimates there are only about 10,000 3D printers in Canada right now, Staples will soon begin selling a personal 3D printer for just $1,300.

And there is some precedent for homemade guns — criminals have long been able to make “zip guns” from supplies available at the hardware store.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

But questions remain about how guns like the Liberator could be used. Asked whether bullets fired from a 3D-printed gun could be traced by police forensics, Southwick said, “We’re not sure.”

Coons dismissed the possibility that plastic guns — which don’t set off metal detectors — could be used to hijack planes, citing the new barriers in place to entering cockpits.

Toronto Police could not be reached for comment by press time.