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"    Photo: Suzanne Duncan   She &amp;quot;hates guns,&amp;quot; yet she has just made a thought-provoking documentary about them. Why? Because these particular guns are not what you might picture: They can be made covertly with revolutionary 3D printing technology, and they might be able to circumvent U.S. gun control laws. With the Undetectable Firearms Act set to expire on December 31, guns made with this 3D technology\u2014that is, out of plastic, in the privacy of one&amp;#039;s own home\u2014might be on an airplane near you next year, with the ability to go through metal detectors undiscovered. Video producer Erin Lee Carr of Vice Media wanted to tell the story. Carr, 24, is a bit of a controversialist; with her propensity for documenting outsiders and creating risk-taking profiles of them, she&amp;#039;s gaining national recognition.   When HBO turned down a proposal about the topic for its new Vice television series (debuting tonight at 11 p.m. EST), the project was handed to Carr, who went to Vice&amp;#039;s YouTube department and got the green light to fly to Texas for an up-close view of how these weapons are made\u2014and the man behind it all, Cody Wilson, who created the 3D printed rifle. Carr&amp;#039;s resulting documentary, Click. Print. Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement, produced for Vice Media&amp;#039;s tech channel, Motherboard, received one million views online within 24 hours and now has more than 4.7 million views. It has become Vice&amp;#039;s second-most-viewed video of all time. After attending last week&amp;#039;s premiere of Click. Print. Gun. at New York&amp;#039;s Soho House, we spoke with Carr about the future of 3D printed firearms and her own feelings about guns. ELLE: What kind of feedback have you received about your film? Erin Lee Carr: It&amp;#039;s been really, really great. We got written up in a ton of places, and it&amp;#039;s been incredibly positive. The thing with 3D printing is that no one really knows it exists, especially in this sort of iteration, and so it feels like we&amp;#039;re starting a dialogue. If this documentary can let people know about it, that&amp;#039;s amazing. ELLE: Are you talking specifically about 3D printing, or about the guns produced with it? ELC: I&amp;#039;m talking about both. I was talking to my friend [with whom I went to school in Wisconsin], and I started telling her about 3D printing and guns, and she was like, &amp;quot;What do you mean\u2014what&amp;#039;s 3D printing?&amp;quot; I feel like in New York and other main hubs, everybody sort of knows; they&amp;#039;ve read the Wired articles; it&amp;#039;s a part of our consciousness. But some people still don&amp;#039;t know\u2014especially as it relates to firearms. ELLE: Are you doing a follow-up to this film? ELC: I think this is a longer story we&amp;#039;re telling. It could have been longer, but it&amp;#039;s the Internet, so you always try to keep it as short as possible\u2014tight, punchy, packed-in. Cody wants to build an entire firearm using a 3D printer. That&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s on the horizon for him. In our doc, it&amp;#039;s the lower receiver, and it&amp;#039;s the magazine. But he believes that he can build an entire firearm. And he wants to do it by the end of April. ELLE: That&amp;#039;s very soon. What does he want to do with that firearm once he&amp;#039;s created it? ELC: I think it&amp;#039;s always about proving the point. With his organization, Defense Distributed, the claim is that this guy is only building the lower receiver; he&amp;#039;s only building the magazine, but whenever I hear people talking about it, they&amp;#039;re like, that&amp;#039;s not really what he&amp;#039;s saying he&amp;#039;s doing. And so he wants to be like, &amp;quot;You know what? Yeah? Maybe I can build an entire gun. Watch me.&amp;quot; So I believe he wants to fire it and make some sort of grand entrance to hell or whatever; I&amp;#039;m not sure. ELLE: What&amp;#039;s the story of the inception of this documentary? ELC: There&amp;#039;s a young woman named Faith Gaskins who&amp;#039;s a field producer for HBO. We were looking for a technology-angle domestic story\u2014just a technology-centric story for HBO, for the new Vice series. The topic of Cody came up, and I was like, &amp;quot;Yeah, this would be great.&amp;quot; At that point in time, the ATF\u2014the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms\u2014had been monitoring Cody. And the printer that he was leasing was being taken away. So it was a big moment in the story\u2014people were really trying to censor him. Faith pitched it to [HBO], and they were like, &amp;quot;No, this isn&amp;#039;t right for the series.&amp;quot; And I was like, &amp;quot;You know what? This is a real story, and I think it deserves to be told.&amp;quot; So what I did is, I pitched it to the YouTube department, and my supervisor at the time said, &amp;quot;Yes. Go do it.&amp;quot; In January, I went down to Texas with a really amazing cinematographer named Chris Gill. We rode in a BMW and hung out with Cody and made a firearm with him. ELLE: You made a firearm with him? Did you witness him doing it, or did he involve you in the process? ELC: I tried to maintain journalistic distance-slash-integrity; I didn&amp;#039;t want to implicate myself. I didn&amp;#039;t want to fire the firearm, because, you know, secretly, I&amp;#039;m very anti-gun. I mean, Cody is hard, because what he&amp;#039;s doing is fairly problematic for our future, but he&amp;#039;s also incredibly charming. He has a way of making you understand his point of view, and so it&amp;#039;s a difficult task to maintain a distance. ELLE: You&amp;#039;ve discussed having a rapport with him; how do you think being female came into the rapport, and do you think he treated you in a way he might not have treated a man who was coming to do the same thing? ELC: I&amp;#039;ve given a lot of thought toward that. What I came to realize is, Cody loves attention. It wasn&amp;#039;t the fact that I was a woman, but the fact that I was the same age as him. At the time, we were both 24. Der Spiegel, Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times\u2014everyone has interviewed him. But it&amp;#039;s really hard to get the non-robot Cody. For me coming from my angle, I think he was caught off-guard. He says that he usually doesn&amp;#039;t talk to women. When reporters have talked to him, they&amp;#039;ve mainly been men. ELLE: Did you ever feel threatened? ELC: I hate guns. Like, I just hate guns. ELLE: What&amp;#039;s next for you? ELC: I&amp;#039;m interested in Bitcoin. It&amp;#039;s untraceable currency. And I&amp;#039;m interested in the forerunners of Bitcoin and about the future of currency, and how it&amp;#039;s going to help or hinder progress. I also make a series called My Life Online, which is all about men and women who are making their money by putting themselves online. It&amp;#039;s what the Internet is turning people into\u2014I&amp;#039;m curious about that. And I&amp;#039;m doing a whole new season of that, I hope. I think my main goal would probably be to do things like what [American documentary film director and producer] Alex Gibney is doing\u2014he releases about four feature documentaries a year, and he aims on disrupting social consciousness\u2014like, entering into the dialogue to change people&amp;#039;s minds. Watch Click. Print. Gun., below.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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