This is bad news for the anti-gun crowd (who often have firearms themselves (see Alyssa Milano’s husband) and/or armed protection, at times weapons that the average American is banned from having), but not as bad as being portrayed, except for one thing
A LANDMARK LEGAL SHIFT OPENS PANDORA’S BOX FOR DIY GUNS
FIVE YEARS AGO, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.
He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.
The law caught up. Less than a week later, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun blueprints or face prosecution for violating federal export controls. Under an obscure set of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he’d shipped his plastic gun to Mexico rather than put a digital version of it on the internet. He took Defcad.com offline, but his lawyer warned him that he still potentially faced millions of dollars in fines and years in prison simply for having made the file available to overseas downloaders for a few days. “I thought my life was over,” Wilson says.
Instead, Wilson has spent the last years on an unlikely project for an anarchist: Not simply defying or skirting the law but taking it to court and changing it. In doing so, he has now not only defeated a legal threat to his own highly controversial gunsmithing project. He may have also unlocked a new era of digital DIY gunmaking that further undermines gun control across the United States and the world—another step toward Wilson’s imagined future where anyone can make a deadly weapon at home with no government oversight.
As you can guess, Mr. Wilson won his suit.
Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First.
This has caused the gun grabbers to freak out, because it means anyone can download the “code”, which is considered Free Speech now, and manufacture a firearm using 3D technology. You know, something very few of us have access to. We’d need parts and machinery and stuff, so, it’s not as easy as it is being portrayed.
Furthermore, just because anyone can download the instructions now as free speech, it doesn’t mean that state government cannot pass laws (in some cases, more laws) about these types of firearms to restrict the manufacture of them, require serial numbers, registration, and so forth. And criminals will do what criminals do, so, once the blueprints were out there, nothing was going to stop that. But, the average criminal, gang banger, etc, do not have access to 3D machines, either.
Here’s the really important part of the settlement
As part of the settlement, the government acknowledges that “non-automatic firearms up to .50-caliber†such as the popular AR-15 and other semi-autos, are not “military†in nature, which Alan Gottlieb with the SAF said is a huge win. “For years, anti-gunners have contended that modern semi-automatic sport-utility rifles are so-called ‘weapons of war,’ and with this settlement, the government has acknowledged they are nothing of the sort,†he said in a statement.
The gun grabbers will still try and portray them as “weapons of war”, because they found a talking point, and they rarely give them up. But, per the US Department Of Justice, they aren’t. Not that they ever were. What dummy carries a semi-automatic rifle to war anymore?
