The era of the 3-D printed gun
Update: Late in the day on July 31, 2018, a United States District Court judge in Seattle issued a temporary nationwide injunction, stopping Cody Wilson from posting the files that would allow downloaders to print 3-D plastic guns. The court will take up the matter again on August 10. Judge Robert S. Lasnik cited First Amendment issues as chief among the considerations that would figure in the upcoming hearing and after. The essay that follows was posted prior to his July 31 ruling. The issues that this piece addresses are still at stake, and the underlying threat continues. This article has been revised to reflect the existence of the injunction.
As a madman in Texas tells us, we stand on the brink of a new era — “the age of the downloadable gun.”
On Aug. 1, 2018, Cody Wilson intended his demented dream of 3-D-printed guns to begin — homemade unregulated, ghost firearms (meaning no registration number and no traceability) that would include working plastic models of the AR-15, the people-slaughtering machine so commonly in the hands of mass shooters. A server was meant to issue the plans, which many would download, and Wilson’s vision would at last be born. A US District Court injunction temporarily stayed that event. Courts were scheduled to resume hearing arguments for Wilson's right to continue, with hearings slated for August 10.
Politicians, most of them on the left of the political spectra, scrambled to do something about the prospect of these functional and undetectable plastic firearms, which Wilson envisions will be soon tucked into windbreaker pockets and pickup trucks across America. Legislators in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and some one dozen other states have sent letters to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, and so on.
None of this will help. Not the letters. Not the temporary injunction.
Due to the nature of the Internet — its endlessly and unstoppably distributable reality — none of this will help. Even if the injunction becomes permanent, even if the complicit actors, Sessions and Pompeo among them, and the outright enablers of Wilson’s toxic plan — see, for example, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, in Austin, Texas, who on July 27 shut down a request to stop Wilson, a request that the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed, while giving no reason for his decision (saying only that he’d get back to the country on that detail) — were to suddenly reverse their stances, more than 100,000 downloads of templates for printable plastic firearms have already slipped out of Wilson’s system. And those downloads will live forever. And they will multiply.
All we can do now is add this advent of new killing devices to the annals of what’s gone bizarrely and lethally wrong with a country gripped by an illness for guns. We are in the hands of madness, seized by a cultural insanity that could erode and, ultimately, if not checked in substantive ways, will consume its host. The gun cancer is metastatic. Our experts look up from their clipboards in the legislative ICU, asking only what about the Second Amendment, asking only, what about the First Amendment and Wilson’s right to publish what he sees fit?
These are the wrong questions, and the wrong arguments — mostly — but we will only breeze through what they entail in the way of understanding just how wan and bloodless and unsolvable they inevitably prove to be, and then we’ll come back to the central point, which is that we are unarguably fucked when we engage in these misdirected debates; they represent the media-fed brand of nonsense that plays directly into the hands of the very individuals who are prone to print guns while editors print think-pieces. And this is all rooted in a decidedly dark version of the nation's future — an imagined and hoped-for apocalypse in which the gun-mad get to use them all the time.
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The problem of printed guns is another symptom of the perversion and pointed cooption of the Second Amendment. It is also, even more problematically, entangled with the First Amendment, which has been, somewhat ironically, a traditional target of the nihilists and anarchists that view the United States as unduly influenced by liberals, by artists, writers, and poets, by scholars, by anyone who is not possessed of reactionary sensibilities (and not surprisingly these sensibilities depend on fresh ranks of the ignorant, miseducated, and uneducated to grow and thrive). None the less, the First Amendment is now one of the tools involved in protecting Wilson’s deeply cynical push to publish printing files for guns that anyone can create — guns that are free of rules, free of the burdens that metal detectors impose upon carrying these mechanisms into places full of people.
The arguments around both amendments are celebrated by organizations that hate the present-day United States while pretending to love its earlier cultural and legislative incarnations — incarnations that they deeply misunderstand because history, for members of groups such as the Federalist Society, has been distorted and mutated under the radioactivity of reactionary, anarchic-libertarian, ultranationalist ideology and lies. It was the Federalist Society, in fact, that recently awarded one Cato Institute academic — who is now Wilson's lawyer — its inaugural Joseph Story award for a record of hard work defending red-blooded Americans’ rights to things such as 3-D printed guns.
Here’s what the recipient, Wilson's attorney Josh Blackman, published about the topic while at the University of Texas, in 2014.
The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms includes a subsidiary right to acquire arms — what else are you going to keep and bear — which covers both the buyer, and seller in the transaction. Further, the seller has to obtain guns, including newly manufactured firearms. Thus, the Second Amendment supply chain protects a right to make arms. These constitutional guarantees preserve the right to acquire and make firearms, by 3D printer or other means.
The Second Amendment is, of course, a rabbit hole down which scholars of the law on both side of the aisle disappear every year — the list of books on how interpret the angles of a well-regulated militia grows and grows. It will likely be that we never come to an agreement about this matter, because we might think we are arguing about rules and political intentions, but we are actually mired in a debate about specific points of lust — lust for sleek black barrels and lust for exploding cartridges and lust for the day, among at least one segment of our citizenry, that they get to fire their way out of bad lives, emptying the magazines of their impoverished imaginations, and shooting clear of their destitute landscapes in which marginal personal accomplishments are the bad guys that they confront at practice ranges on Sunday afternoons. Guns, for these lovers of guns, are an avenue to self-actualization. Pile up all the well-reasoned arguments for a contemporary revisiting of the Second Amendment that you can find, and you still won’t pry a single AR-15 from the fingers of the people who simply feel better about themselves when they hold one.
Here’s what Blackman wrote about the First Amendment and the distribution of programs that allow 3-D printers to create plastic and untraceable guns.
The Department of Homeland Security concluded that “[e]ven if the practice is prohibited by new legislation, online distribution of these digital files will be as difficult to control as any other illegally traded music, movie or software files. In other words, impossible. Therefore, some have proposed stopping 3-D guns by cutting off the problem at the source — banning the sharing, and distribution of the 3-D CAD files … 3-D CAD files of guns are, in truth, nothing more than information — “pictures of guns” defined in lines of source code, rather than graphic visuals. Anyone trained in the language of CAD can understand how this information expresses the ideas. This information explains the shape, size, and dimensions of various types of objects, and offers instructions of how someone can modify or recreate a similar object for their own personal use.
Therein lay the core of the First Amendment argument. The digital files that tell 3-D printers how to print a working pistol are conveying ideas — the idea of the gun — and are arguably no less expressive than a picture of a gun. Source code is expressive, or so goes the argument, and we protect the expression of ideas. Whether we can agree with that, or we reject the notion that plans for a weapon are protected in the same way that the United States guards the sanctity of books, plays, movies, music, and video games, what’s most important is Blackman’s opening note about the impossibility of putting this genie back in the bottle. He quotes the Department of Homeland Security: “[p]roposed legislation to ban 3-D printing of weapons may deter, but cannot completely prevent their production.”
We’re stuck with what he’s done. And when it spreads, like all cancers, it will spread beyond the bounds of any one organ. For example, legislators are already racing to figure out the extra-national destination problem — the prevention of the spread of 3-D printed weapons to foreign powers that can, and will, eventually use them to do harm. Not our problem, people like Blackman and Wilson maintain. Keeping the guns in our garages is the thing.
Except it’s even worse than all these things. The reality of the situation is not that we’re watching holders of opinions on the nature of guns — ones that differ by gradations, perhaps, but are still part of the central artery of reasoned discourse — gain traction when it comes to arguable points of view. We are watching utter madness unfold. Inarguable madness, plain and simple.
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Even academics such as Josh Blackman, regardless of where we position ourselves in response to their writings, are not outwardly engaged in the same kind of thinking, arguing, and doing that Cody Wilson brings to bear.
“I'm just resisting,” Wilson told Glenn Beck, back in 2013. “What am I resisting? I don't know, the collectivization of manufacture? The institutionalization of the human psyche? I'm not sure. But I can tell you one thing: this is a symbol of irreversibility. They can never eradicate the gun from the earth."
Fast forward a few years, and the young man’s mind is more fully formed on the problem: “The closest my politics comes to any traditional school is anarchism,” he told CNN Money, in 2017. “I don’t like the imposition of state controls over human flourishing, creativity, freedom, individuality. So the way to undermine these things is to undermine the power of traditional liberal institutions.”
That all sounds a bit abstract. How about this, the finer point, which Wilson’s organization, Defense Distributed, put out on the whole matter, in 2016, upon the release of the specs for one of its plastic guns — a weapon dubbed the Ghost Gunner 2: “Though we are proud of what we've been able to offer the people in the last two years with [Ghost Gunner], we know we must commit ourselves anew to the defense of our liberties and to offering you a machine that can last through prohibition and even the eventual breakup of this country.”
So, sure, Wilson’s demented mind might intersect with the First and Second amendments when it serves him, yes. He may even need lawyers and legislators and academics to carry his water when it comes to buying the time he needs to pump his death virus out into the world. All of this is bent, however, toward one specific outcome: Cody Wilson and his adherents look forward to world that they specifically envision — one in which law and order are a very, very local factor … local down to the level of survivalists enacting vigilantism, and, ultimately, secession if not revolution. It would be even better, in their estimation, if they get to do this in the wake of some nationwide apocalypse.
“Good, something might happen that I can’t anticipate!” Wilson gushed to The Washington Post, in July 18. “That’s what inspires a bunch of burnouts like me.”
He’s dishonest, of course. What inspires Wilson, and the “red team” among which he counts himself in the same article, is not the unanticipated. It is chaos, wholesale chaos. It is violence and raw power as a replacement of law, politics and discourse. It is his “wiki for guns” supplying even more tools to the bringers of anarchy and believers in a future state of un-rule, one in which the only accountability is to the magnum and the number of barrels in the shed.
The truth about this line of thinking is that the burn-it-all-down future is really possible in the minds of 3-D-gun-printing advocates. The madness of the debate is that we are engaging with the Wilsons of this world as if they are challenging our Constitutional processes and interpretations, when, in fact, they are challenging the very fabric of our society to a duel — one in which they plan to have a ready-to-fire arsenal of manufactured, and now printed, weaponry that they’ll use to destroy us. They do imagine that they’ll win. The United States will be remade under the auspices of Smith & Wesson, under the guidance of the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation, and with the help of Defense Distributed, one manufactured and printed firearm at a time.
They stand to win a hill of ashes, of course, in the future they propose. This is, of course, also beside their point.