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Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora's Box for DIY Guns

arthwollipot

Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
arthwollipot
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A LANDMARK LEGAL SHIFT OPENS PANDORA’S BOX FOR DIY GUNS

It's a longish read, but here are some extracts. First, some background:

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.
Click to expand...

The Recent Development:

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.

"If code is speech, the constitutional contradictions are evident," Wilson explained to WIRED when he first launched the lawsuit in 2015. "So what if this code is a gun?”

The Department of Justice's surprising settlement, confirmed in court documents earlier this month, essentially surrenders to that argument.
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And what is to me the most worrying part of this whole story:

Wilson's library will serve a more straightforward purpose, too: In one corner stands a server rack that will host Defcad's website and backend database. He doesn't trust any hosting company to hold his controversial files. And he likes the optics of storing his crown jewels in a library, should any reversal of his legal fortunes result in a raid. "If you want to come get it, you have to attack a library," he says.

On that subject, he has something else to show me. Wilson pulls out a small embroidered badge. It depicts a red, dismembered arm on a white background. The arm's hand grips a curved sword, with blood dripping from it. The symbol, Wilson explains, once flew on a flag above the Goliad Fort in South Texas. In Texas' revolution against Mexico in the 1830s, Goliad's fort was taken by the Mexican government and became the site of a massacre of 400 American prisoners of war, one that's far less widely remembered than the Alamo.

Wilson recently ordered a full-size flag with the sword-wielding bloody arm. He wants to make it a new symbol for his group. His interest in the icon, he explains, dates back to the 2016 election, when he was convinced Hillary Clinton was set to become the president and lead a massive crackdown on firearms.

If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his Defcad repository, regardless of the outcome of his lawsuit, and then defend it in an armed standoff. "I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style," Wilson says calmly, in the first overt mention of planned armed violence I've ever heard him make. "Our only option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal mission, where we dumped everything into the internet," Wilson says. "Goliad became an inspirational thing for me."
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I don't believe that something like this can be suppressed. Ban it from the internet and it'll go to Tor and the dark net. If you can't stop The Pirate Bay, you can't stop this. Pandora's box is already wide open.

But what should we do when this guy has basically decided that American gun rights should apply to the whole world, including - presumably especially - where the people have decided that they aren't appropriate?
 
You're making a bigger deal of this than it is for 3 reasons:

1st, if 3d printer plans for guns weren't already on the dark web, then they inevitably would've been anyways.
2nd anyone with pretty basic machine tools has already been able to make a zip gun.
3rd, ammunition cannot be 3d printed.
 
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This is The End said:
It's so easy to make why would you want to 3d print it even if it were possible?
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There are several levels of components to viable modern ammo, some of it cannot be reproduced in a reloaders garage (primers; cases from unformed slugs of brass, or more likely it would look like a coin). Making powder might be tough as well. ;)
Casting lead and resizing used brass is easy peasy with home equipment though.

With the components at hand (which is what I presume you had in mind)... they might be of similar difficulty. But put it this way... you can craft a hundred variations of a soft metal zip gun in a prison cell (many have done so)... ammunition, not so much. :D
(Lord knows, I'm probably wrong about that and risky but workable rounds have been hand crafted in the worst conditions. Could be, I suppose.)

Right now though, IIUC, few if any home printers are working with metals (right???). By the time that changes, far more robust plans are going to be out in the wild. That's going to get interesting. :(
 
I'd seriously question the actual impact of "3d printed guns". How many people have so far been killed by one? How many robberies? Surely by now anarcho-liberal subversives must just be flooding the black market with these things.
 
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arthwollipot said:
But what should we do when this guy has basically decided that American gun rights should apply to the whole world, including - presumably especially - where the people have decided that they aren't appropriate?
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Isn't this the exact same situation as with anything else that might be online? Laws regulating the publication of porn, let alone it's production, is different between countries.

Or hate speech? Swedish law would make the operator of a BBS (Or equivalent) potentially face criminal charges if its users were to post something that is judged to be incitement to hatred, but what if said BBS is hosted in the US?
 
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lobosrul5 said:
You're making a bigger deal of this than it is for 3 reasons:

1st, if 3d printer plans for guns weren't already on the dark web, then they inevitably would've been anyways.
2nd anyone with pretty basic machine tools has already been able to make a zip gun.
3rd, ammunition cannot be 3d printed.
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Of course these are not zip guns but fully functional weapons, and it isn't like ammunition is regulated.

Background check for ammo now?
 
arthwollipot said:
But what should we do when this guy has basically decided that American gun rights should apply to the whole world, including - presumably especially - where the people have decided that they aren't appropriate?
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If this guy is hosting all this stuff openly, then that actually makes it easier for other countries that want this to be illegal. They know who to block, and since he's open and legal in the US, there won't be demand in the US for black sites that can't be easily blocked elsewhere.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Of course these are not zip guns but fully functional weapons, and it isn't like ammunition is regulated.

Background check for ammo now?
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Did you read the Wired article? Its a single shot gun. It blew up when he put high powered ammo in it. The ability to put multiple kinds of ammo in the same gun means its built with very loose tolerances. That means its extremely inaccurate and leaks gas like a sieve which will greatly reduce muzzle velocity. I doubt this thing is effective at more than 20 or 30 feet. Also it had problems misfiring because the firing pin (a nail) wasn't hitting the primer, or not hitting it hard enough. Maybe some day, an effective 3d printed gun will exist, this aint it. Personally I'd rather be armed with a muzzle loading pistol of 18th century vintage.

And, my point on the ammo was, if a country wants to severely restrict firearms ownership, they can always go that route and it can't be bypassed by 3d printed guns.

ETA: actually the relevant article was linked in the Wired article from the OP: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygr...rlds-first-fully-3d-printed-gun/#7f02909652d7
 
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lobosrul5 said:
Did you read the Wired article? Its a single shot gun. It blew up when he put high powered ammo in it. The ability to put multiple kinds of ammo in the same gun means its built with very loose tolerances. That means its extremely inaccurate and leaks gas like a sieve which will greatly reduce muzzle velocity. I doubt this thing is effective at more than 20 or 30 feet. Also it had problems misfiring because the firing pin (a nail) wasn't hitting the primer, or not hitting it hard enough. Maybe some day, an effective 3d printed gun will exist, this aint it. Personally I'd rather be armed with a muzzle loading pistol of 18th century vintage.

And, my point on the ammo was, if a country wants to severely restrict firearms ownership, they can always go that route and it can't be bypassed by 3d printed guns.
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The liberator pistol is as you say, a fragile single shot pistol as liable to injure the shooter as it is the target. It's a smooth bore snub-nose pistol, so accuracy and efficacy is likely limited to point blank range.

The Ghost Gunner CNC machine is more practical. The way US guns laws work, the lower receiver of an AR-15 is the only part that is legally considered a firearm. The lower is the only part that must bear a serial number. The lower is also fairly uncomplicated, mechanically speaking. Incomplete lowers that aren't legally considered firearms can be bought and completed, either using this ghost gunner CNC machine or manually with a jig and common shop tools (even crude hand drill jobs can function reliably). Lowers can be made from weak materials, including plastic since none of the stress of firing a round is contained by the lower. Barring catastrophic damage, a lower will far outlast the usable lifespan of multiple barrels, receivers, and bolts.

The upper receiver, which contains all the more critical firing components and gas system, can be purchased through the mail and is not considered a firearm. The rifled barrel, firing chamber, bolt assembly, and gas system are all non-controlled parts and readily available through the mail. These are the parts that would also be much more difficult to make at home with any quality.

Basically, all the parts that require specialized tools and higher manufacturing quality can be purchased by anyone through the mail with no screening. The controlled part, the lower receiver, can be homemade from easy to use 80% kits and be very reliable, even with crude workmanship. A person can build an AR-15 without going through an FFL or purchasing any part that is legally considered a firearm.
 
Anybody with a hobbyist level workbench, some basic power tools, and high school shop level skills has been able to build a gun for decades.

Guns just aren't that complicated on a mechanical level.
 
arthwollipot said:
A LANDMARK LEGAL SHIFT OPENS PANDORA’S BOX FOR DIY GUNS

It's a longish read, but here are some extracts. First, some background:



The Recent Development:



And what is to me the most worrying part of this whole story:



I don't believe that something like this can be suppressed. Ban it from the internet and it'll go to Tor and the dark net. If you can't stop The Pirate Bay, you can't stop this. Pandora's box is already wide open.

But what should we do when this guy has basically decided that American gun rights should apply to the whole world, including - presumably especially - where the people have decided that they aren't appropriate?
Click to expand...
Blueprints for a gun are not a gun. Since your concern seems to be predicated on the assumption that they are, your concern can be summarily dismissed.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Anybody with a hobbyist level workbench, some basic power tools, and high school shop level skills has been able to build a gun for decades.

Guns just aren't that complicated on a mechanical level.
Click to expand...

Yeah, same story, different technology. There's an interesting episode of Forgotten Weapons about the British guy in the 90's who invented a submachine gun that could be assembled with common hardware store components. The P.A. Luty SMG:

http://armamentresearch.com/pa-luty-9mm-submachine-guns/

Trying to make a homemade clone of a commercial firearm can be complicated. A design optimized for mass production may call for very specialized tools and techniques. With homemade firearms, you see designs optimized to use generally available parts and unsophisticated techniques.
 
theprestige said:
Blueprints for a gun are not a gun. Since your concern seems to be predicated on the assumption that they are, your concern can be summarily dismissed.
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Here's my 2-second outlandish idea:

In theory any digital picture, video, etc. of a specific format could also represent machine code for a mundane task on a hypothetical machine (one would only need to make the machine)

Does this mean that code (of any kind) could theoretically also be child porn, and thus need to be restricted by those who think "blueprint = gun"?
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Basically, all the parts that require specialized tools and higher manufacturing quality can be purchased by anyone through the mail with no screening. The controlled part, the lower receiver, can be homemade from easy to use 80% kits and be very reliable, even with crude workmanship. A person can build an AR-15 without going through an FFL or purchasing any part that is legally considered a firearm.
Click to expand...

But this can be addressed through improved legislation - selling parts with the intent that the purchaser will finish those parts into an actual receiver can be regulated just as if the lower were complete at sale. Any company that tries to work around that can be prosecuted. Lowers built or finished at home can still be regulated just as if there were purchased that way, including requiring them to be stamped with serial numbers.

Fully 3D printed guns are still very limited in function. That may change over time, but even then, they will be more expensive than mass-produced guns manufactured by the companies that stick with commercial regulation. And it is still possible to pass laws requiring those DIY guns to have serial numbers.

I mean, there will always be refusniks - but for many people, the thought that if they get caught with this, they will go to jail, will dissuade quite a few people. It it trivially easy to craft legislation such these guns are regulated. People who refuse to follow those regulations will have a nice category to fit into: criminals.

What gets me how how excited these people are to find ways to get guns into the hands of criminals. That's really what this is about.
 
pharphis said:
Here's my 2-second outlandish idea:

In theory any digital picture, video, etc. of a specific format could also represent machine code for a mundane task on a hypothetical machine (one would only need to make the machine)

Does this mean that code (of any kind) could theoretically also be child porn, and thus need to be restricted by those who think "blueprint = gun"?
Click to expand...

Interesting question. I think there's a distinction, though. Porn is information, expression, speech. The code for porn is the thing itself. Not so with physical objects.
 
Also, I predict that in the near future, we will be able to measure the draconian nature of a regime, by how strictly they regulate 3-D printers. I suspect that Australia will have no choice but to regulate them the same way they regulate guns. Otherwise any Australian could download a gun from the Internet in their garage.
 
crescent said:
But this can be addressed through improved legislation - selling parts with the intent that the purchaser will finish those parts into an actual receiver can be regulated just as if the lower were complete at sale. Any company that tries to work around that can be prosecuted. Lowers built or finished at home can still be regulated just as if there were purchased that way, including requiring them to be stamped with serial numbers.

Fully 3D printed guns are still very limited in function. That may change over time, but even then, they will be more expensive than mass-produced guns manufactured by the companies that stick with commercial regulation. And it is still possible to pass laws requiring those DIY guns to have serial numbers.

I mean, there will always be refusniks - but for many people, the thought that if they get caught with this, they will go to jail, will dissuade quite a few people. It it trivially easy to craft legislation such these guns are regulated. People who refuse to follow those regulations will have a nice category to fit into: criminals.

What gets me how how excited these people are to find ways to get guns into the hands of criminals. That's really what this is about.
Click to expand...
Of course this sounds more sinister if you don't realize that criminal means "person who breaks any law". Do you believe "these people" want violent people who will use the guns to hurt others to get them? Didn't Cody Wilson explicitly say that wasn't the case in the OP's article?

You've outlined one such law or hypothetical laws that would make people criminals.
 
pharphis said:
You've outlined one such law or hypothetical laws that would make people criminals.
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They would only be criminals if they continued with this course of action AFTER the new laws were enacted.

The law would turn no one into criminals. They would still need to take action that would be against the new law before they would be criminals.
 
And again we need to be very, very careful about legal precedent and again I remind people that legal precedent is one of those places where the "slippery slope" fallacy very rarely applies.

How many "home made" things do you want to be denied because the government decides it's not safe enough?
 
Crescent,
I agree. I see that it was ambiguous whether I did or not in my comment.
 
crescent said:
But this can be addressed through improved legislation - selling parts with the intent that the purchaser will finish those parts into an actual receiver can be regulated just as if the lower were complete at sale. Any company that tries to work around that can be prosecuted. Lowers built or finished at home can still be regulated just as if there were purchased that way, including requiring them to be stamped with serial numbers.

Fully 3D printed guns are still very limited in function. That may change over time, but even then, they will be more expensive than mass-produced guns manufactured by the companies that stick with commercial regulation. And it is still possible to pass laws requiring those DIY guns to have serial numbers.

I mean, there will always be refusniks - but for many people, the thought that if they get caught with this, they will go to jail, will dissuade quite a few people. It it trivially easy to craft legislation such these guns are regulated. People who refuse to follow those regulations will have a nice category to fit into: criminals.

What gets me how how excited these people are to find ways to get guns into the hands of criminals. That's really what this is about.
Click to expand...

The technology will call the question. It's long been legal for people to home manufacture a firearm, but with the high supply of firearms on the legal and black market, there's been little interest outside small-time hobbyists and fringe elements to bother. If 3d printing makes this much, much easier, homemade guns may become the path of least resistance for illegally acquiring a firearm.

I certainly see this as a problem, but criminalizing information makes me very uncomfortable. The act of creating a firearm could easily be considered a criminal act, but I don't see why possessing the knowledge and/or means to do so should be a crime.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
And again we need to be very, very careful about legal precedent and again I remind people that legal precedent is one of those places where the "slippery slope" fallacy very rarely applies.

How many "home made" things do you want to be denied because the government decides it's not safe enough?
Click to expand...

Well, the nuclear boy scout demonstrated that one can't DIY a breeder reactor without consequences.

I might be able to make a homemade car out of parts with no VIN - but I won't be able to drive it on public streets without going through the process of getting it registered - if even then.

It is not so much a ban, as subjecting DIY things of certain types to the same level of regulation as commercially manufactured counterparts.
 
crescent said:
Well, the nuclear boy scout demonstrated that one can't DIY a breeder reactor without consequences.

I might be able to make a homemade car out of parts with no VIN - but I won't be able to drive it on public streets without going through the process of getting it registered - if even then.

It is not so much a ban, as subjecting DIY things of certain types to the same level of regulation as commercially manufactured counterparts.
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I just said careful of, not across the board kneejerk contrarian toward.

I don't think every random yahoo should be able to print of their own Death Star, but laws against it could be worded badly.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
The technology will call the question. It's long been legal for people to home manufacture a firearm, but with the high supply of firearms on the legal and black market, there's been little interest outside small-time hobbyists and fringe elements to bother. If 3d printing makes this much, much easier, homemade guns may become the path of least resistance for illegally acquiring a firearm.

I certainly see this as a problem, but criminalizing information makes me very uncomfortable. The act of creating a firearm could easily be considered a criminal act, but I don't see why possessing the knowledge and/or means to do so should be a crime.
Click to expand...

Yes, its getting into "thought crime" territory. OTOH, I'm willing to bet, without bothering to look it up, that its already illegal in the USA to post detailed plans on how to build a nuclear bomb. If indeed those plans appear to be workable.

ETA: got ninja'd on the nuke stuff.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I certainly see this as a problem, but criminalizing information makes me very uncomfortable. The act of creating a firearm could easily be considered a criminal act, but I don't see why possessing the knowledge and/or means to do so should be a crime.
Click to expand...

I agree with that part.

What I mean is that this is not a death knell for firearms regulation, anymore than good backyard mechanics are a death knell for auto regulation.
 
Information Analyst said:
Yeah, the convicted criminal facing further terrorism charges before he died.
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My post was not meant to be an endorsement of any kind. Just stating that the ghost gunner mentality is nothing new, the technology is just changing the context of the conversation. If 3d printing becomes widely used for ordinary consumer items, printing out a gun could be as easy as downloading the right files.
 
theprestige said:
Also, I predict that in the near future, we will be able to measure the draconian nature of a regime, by how strictly they regulate 3-D printers. I suspect that Australia will have no choice but to regulate them the same way they regulate guns. Otherwise any Australian could download a gun from the Internet in their garage.
Click to expand...

Why? Countries don't regulate colour printers just because they can be used for counterfeiting.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Did you read the Wired article? Its a single shot gun. It blew up when he put high powered ammo in it. The ability to put multiple kinds of ammo in the same gun means its built with very loose tolerances. That means its extremely inaccurate and leaks gas like a sieve which will greatly reduce muzzle velocity. I doubt this thing is effective at more than 20 or 30 feet. Also it had problems misfiring because the firing pin (a nail) wasn't hitting the primer, or not hitting it hard enough. Maybe some day, an effective 3d printed gun will exist, this aint it. Personally I'd rather be armed with a muzzle loading pistol of 18th century vintage.

And, my point on the ammo was, if a country wants to severely restrict firearms ownership, they can always go that route and it can't be bypassed by 3d printed guns.

ETA: actually the relevant article was linked in the Wired article from the OP: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygr...rlds-first-fully-3d-printed-gun/#7f02909652d7
Click to expand...

But the actual prints and things they are pushing isn't that, it is CNC units to turn 70% recievers into fully functional ones, to make lots of ghost guns.

Read more carefully see

"Now Wilson is making up for lost time. Later this month, he and the nonprofit he founded, Defense Distributed, are relaunching their website Defcad.com as a repository of firearm blueprints they've been privately creating and collecting, from the original one-shot 3-D-printable pistol he fired in 2013 to AR-15 frames and more exotic DIY semi-automatic weapons. The relaunched site will be open to user contributions, too; Wilson hopes it will soon serve as a searchable, user-generated database of practically any firearm imaginable."

This is about home made AR15s so anyone can get them with out having to deal with those annoying government rules and laws.

And these have been used in mass shootings see

", an emotionally disturbed 25-year-old who went on a shooting spree in Santa Monica, California, with a homemade AR-15 in 2015, killing five people, or Kevin Neal, a Northern California man who killed five people with AR-15-style rifles—some of which were homemade—last November."

And how about

" Most of the company's operations are now focused on its core business: making and selling a consumer-grade computer-controlled milling machine known as the Ghost Gunner, designed to allow its owner to carve gun parts out of far more durable aluminum. In the largest room of Defense Distributed's headquarters, half a dozen millennial staffers with beards and close-cropped hair—all resembling Cody Wilson, in other words—are busy building those mills in an assembly line, each machine capable of skirting all federal gun control to churn out untraceable metal glocks and semiautomatic rifles en masse."

This is about assault rifles for all, not some zip gun crap.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Anybody with a hobbyist level workbench, some basic power tools, and high school shop level skills has been able to build a gun for decades.

Guns just aren't that complicated on a mechanical level.
Click to expand...

But this is about people batching out numbers of high quality semi or fully automatic weapons not the hand bent and filed pieces you are talking about.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Yeah, same story, different technology. There's an interesting episode of Forgotten Weapons about the British guy in the 90's who invented a submachine gun that could be assembled with common hardware store components. The P.A. Luty SMG:

http://armamentresearch.com/pa-luty-9mm-submachine-guns/

Trying to make a homemade clone of a commercial firearm can be complicated. A design optimized for mass production may call for very specialized tools and techniques. With homemade firearms, you see designs optimized to use generally available parts and unsophisticated techniques.
Click to expand...

But a big difference that was mentioned in that episode is that the UK unlike the US regulates all pressure bearing components of the weapon not just the lower receiver. SO you don't need to work with such crude weapons, you only need to take a 70% receiver and finish it then put in all the legal gun parts to make a gun.
 
Information Analyst said:
Why? Countries don't regulate colour printers just because they can be used for counterfeiting.
Click to expand...

Actually... they do in the USA. Color copiers and scanners are, by law, required to enlarge or shrink currency and checks by a certain amount so that its obviously a copy. I'm taking the word of the copy machine guy who installed our copier a few years ago, that its federal law. The fact that the machine has anti-counterfitting tech in it, was demonstrated.
 
crescent said:
They would only be criminals if they continued with this course of action AFTER the new laws were enacted.

The law would turn no one into criminals. They would still need to take action that would be against the new law before they would be criminals.
Click to expand...

It just gives a good access to ghost guns for criminals. We finally have the illegal gun manufacturers that supposedly existed for so long.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And again we need to be very, very careful about legal precedent and again I remind people that legal precedent is one of those places where the "slippery slope" fallacy very rarely applies.

How many "home made" things do you want to be denied because the government decides it's not safe enough?
Click to expand...

Well first we can get rid of all of those stupid car inspections.
 
crescent said:
I agree with that part.

What I mean is that this is not a death knell for firearms regulation, anymore than good backyard mechanics are a death knell for auto regulation.
Click to expand...

The obvious solution is to treat pressure containing components as firearms and not just receivers. So that they will not be able to buy barrels for these weapons. Making a barrel is a much harder task than finishing a 70% lower.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Actually... they do in the USA. Color copiers and scanners are, by law, required to enlarge or shrink currency and checks by a certain amount so that its obviously a copy. I'm taking the word of the copy machine guy who installed our copier a few years ago, that its federal law. The fact that the machine has anti-counterfitting tech in it, was demonstrated.
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AFAIK all the printer/copier manufacturers have voluntarily done this, there is no legislation mandating it.

A similar voluntary program is the machine identification codes added to color laser prints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
 
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