Here’s a way to get around gun control: on the internet show people how to 3D print their own guns. From Brian Doherty at reason.com:
The Justice Department has reached a settlement with the Second Amendment Foundation and Defense Distributed, a collective that organizes, promotes, and distributes technologies to help home gun-makers. Under the agreement, which resolved a suit filed by the two groups in 2015, Americans may “access, discuss, use, reproduce or otherwise benefit from the technical data” that the government had previously ordered Defense Distributed to cease distributing.
Mark McDaniel/Reason
Before this, the feds had insisted that Defense Distributed’s gun-making files violate the munitions export rules embedded in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Defense Distributed’s suit claimed that this was was “censorship of Plaintiffs’ speech,” since the files in question consist of computer code and thus counted as expression. It also argued that “the ad hoc, informal and arbitrary manner in which that scheme is applied, violate the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments.” (The Second because the information in the computer files implicates weapons possession rights.)
That Wired story is mostly devoted to scaring the reader about what a world in which people are freer to use computer files to make weapons at home might mean. Wilson is open that as far as he’s concerned, he’s killed the cause of gun control by popularizing the home construction of weapons via computer instructions.
Wired also speculates that the settlement is some sign of a Trump administration bending over backwards to satisfy a Second Amendment constituency. Alan Gura, one of the lawyers on the plaintiffs’ side—and the attorney who won both 2008’s Heller case and 2010’s McDonald, two major Supreme Court victories for gun rights—disagrees, noting the administration’s record in other ongoing Second Amendment cases.
To continue reading; The Government Will Allow Cody Wilson’s Defense Distributed to Distribute Gun-Making Software
