I started this project after buying my daughter a plastic Play-Doh extruder at a thrift store. At the time, I was in grad school, surrounded by 3D printers and the rising heat of the "Liberator" pistol—the first 3D-printed gun. Everyone was talking about the democratization of weaponry, but I was looking at this clunky plastic toy and realizing we’ve been democratizing the mindset of the assembly line for decades.

What the hell is so "fun" about a factory?

By handing a kid a Fun Factory, we aren't encouraging them to create; we’re training them to be productive. We’re teaching them that their imagination should be tethered to an industrial process—that "originality" is just choosing which corporate-sanctioned die-plate to shove their non-toxic sludge through. It’s a mechanism that prepares children to be cogs, convincing them that "making" is just consumption in disguise. The Gun Factory is a hack of that system.
By reverse-engineering the die-plates to extrude handguns and ammo, I wanted to bridge that awkward, ugly gap between childhood "play" and the reality of American gun culture. It’s a "cool maker hack" that lands in a stomach-turning realization: the same culture that sells us the "fun" of the factory is the one that manufactures the violence in our schools.
This isn’t just an art object; it’s a kit for cultural sabotage.
If the factory is where we’re molding our children’s minds, it’s time to break the mold.