Cody Wilson is standing on red Texas dirt jamming ammunition into an M-16 magazine. It’s a cool December evening at an outdoor shooting range about 45 minutes from downtown Austin, and he’s giving me a lesson in Firearms 101. Lying on a wooden table in front of him is the rest of the M-16, a fully automatic weapon, all black save for one component: a reddish-orange lower receiver, one Wilson designed, that is completely plastic.

This particular receiver has had about 1,200 rounds fired through it. The receiver houses the rifle’s trigger assembly, holds the magazine, contains the safety key and connects the stock and barrel. It is what U.S. gun law regulates—which is precisely why Wilson started 3D printing his own receivers through his company, Defense Distributed.

He hands me the M-16 and I fire a round, a noise that sounds like an aluminum baseball bat striking a two-by-four. Wilson picks up the other weapon in tow—his AK-74, the successor to the famous AK-47 rifle—kneels to my right, takes aim at one of two targets down range, and starts shooting. “Now we’re killing them together!” he shouts. An hour later, we’re out of .223 ammo. Dusk has fallen and the range is closing anyway, so we pack up and leave in his BMW coupe with a broken right running light. “Do you smell that?” he asks giddily, cupping his hands to his face, savoring the odor of gunshot residue.

Cody Wilson

For three days I’ve shadowed Wilson, the 27-year-old techno-anarchist known for 3D printing a pistol and posting its design files online. Past news coverage had made his victory over gun control seem imminent. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer had characterized his ideas and company as “stomach churning.” I wanted to know if this vision was really coming to pass.

Wilson is of average height and trim. When I meet him he has close-cropped dark hair and a tidy beard over his cleft chin. His strong jaw line is the sort a ghoulish-chinned Habsburg duke might pine for. Covering his eyes: Tortoise-shell Ray-Ban Wayfarers, prescription shades he wears incessantly because he doesn’t want to buy new eyeglasses.

In person he’s rather mellow, but the shooting range jolted him to life. He’s like an exuberant teen who just found out he was no longer grounded, perhaps because running Defense Distributed, which aims to bring guns and gun components to the masses, has been an altogether adult affair. Insurance snags and shipping headaches—not to mention planning his legal case against the U.S. State Department—occupy the bulk of his days. It seems most reputable companies shy away from his business, throwing up roadblocks he hadn’t anticipated.

Wilson at the shooting range. Credit: Andrew Zaleski

Perhaps his brash speech deters them. Wilson invokes political theory as if it’s second nature, calling forth images of America’s Revolutionary War at regular intervals. “We had a radical republican founding, which was suspicious of a standing army, state control, state garrisons of arms,” he lectures me at one point. “The state would marshal the militia, teach you how to use the guns. But there was a belief it was up to the individual, as a sovereign individual, to have these weapons.”

After the shooting range, we head to a Mexican restaurant where he lays out his philosophy in stark terms: “This is a battle rifle—this is to do battle,” he says, referring to his Kalashnikov. “Don’t mince the words. Your birthright isn’t for the feds to have a gun.”

As I listen to him, I’m trying to reconcile the three Wilsons I’ve encountered on my trip—the political theorist, the smalltime shopkeeper and the would-be destroyer of all we hold dear. And after three days, I think I know what Wilson’s after. In his pitch, he’s just a guy who hopes to change the world by making guns easier than ever to obtain. But what I think he truly wants is a chance to lash out at the system and leave a mark—a digital graffiti artist with national ambitions, who rationalizes it all with a mishmash of political philosophy.

But in order to go big, Wilson first has to go very, very small. During my visit I either watched Wilson as he worked the phone and banged out emails at the factory or accompanied him on dozens of errands around town, a steady stream of anti-government rhetoric spouting from his lips. Here was the anarchist gangster reviewing his shopping list, paying his bills, collecting his mail. He was the model middle manager, properly wrangling with the small realities of dismantling federal gun control. What’s it really like to launch, and then run, the country’s most dangerous, heretical startup? Slogging, dull agony, mostly. But at least there’s the firing range.

When Wilson launched Defense Distributed in July 2012, he said the goal was to design a working gun that could be “printed” in a matter of hours from digital instructions and through a successive layering of thermoplastic resin. His Austin-based company began 3D printing gun components that fall: first the lower receiver for the semiautomatic AR-15 rifle—a variant of which was used in the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting—and then magazines. The radical thing about this was simple. The receiver, being the key to assembling a working rifle, is the only part the government requires to have a serial number. Wilson’s invention meant that anyone could make one, or many, without this detail. It was a recipe for criminals to make untraceable guns.