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THIS WEEK MARKS the two-year anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.
Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.
Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.
In its 2013 letter to Defense Distributed, the DDTC cited a long-controversial set of regulations known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which controls whether and how Americans can sell weapons beyond U.S. borders. By merely posting a 3-D-printable file to a website, in other words, the DDTC claimed Defense Distributed had potentially violated arms export controls—just as if it had shipped a crate of AR-15s to, say, Mexico. But the group’s lawsuit now argues that whether or not the Liberator is a weapon, its blueprints are “speech,” and that Americans’ freedom of speech is protected online—even when that speech can be used to make a gun with just a few clicks.
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/3-d-printed-gun-lawsuit-starts-war-arms-control-free-speech/
Here’s the full complaint from Defense Distributed: https://www.scribd.com/doc/264435890/Defense-Distributed-et-al-v-U-S-Dept-of-State
(Score: 2) by naubol on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:42AM
'personal' -- if we can make an ergonomic nuclear sidearm, ... ? AMRAM rockets? How many people does it take to drive a tank?
Is a "nuclear football" a personal sidearm of the president?
4th amendment "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Is it infringing to say that some types of arms are not allowed? I don't think so from any method of constitutional interpretation.
However, things become interesting if you examine motive. And, the founding fathers were helpful enough to write some motive into the amendment. In this sense, the security of a free state would definitely seem to be threatened by giving everyone a nuclear bomb. It also now seems to me that domestic terrorism is far more likely than martial law and therefore the security of the free state is more threatened by allowing people to maintain assault rifles.
Did the framers anticipate just how large the disparity would grow between federal military power and individual military power? If anyone was paying attention to Shock and Awe, that is roughly what I imagine it would be like if it became a martial state vs the citizens. Equally amusing is that we have also learned how to be properly annoying with insurgency from Iraq.
Now, I'm sure someone will say, we will want it in the case of martial law enough to deal with the very real threat of citizen-on-citizen gun violence. Okay, I doubt it, because of Shock and Awe. The US military would dramatically crush us in a conventional war. What would likely happen in that scenario, IMO, is that we'd breed a ton of insurgents and home made pipe bombs and things of that ilk will become quite common. The idea that the Brady bill somehow threatens the population's ability to revolt feels silly for these reasons. If we could afford drones, night vision, AEGIS radar, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers.... but we don't so we're screwed in conventional warfare.
Even if you don't agree with this argument, my point is that it is up for debate and it non-trivially impacts the conclusion one can obtain after examining the motive as written in the fourth amendment in the reality of our modern military.
In other words, for very very little gain, slight relational power against a modern military, we lose so much, namely that there's a lot more destructive power in citizen-on-citizen violence, which I interpret as undermining the stated intent.
I've always wanted to deal with the other side's best argument, but I only know of the common sense arguments, like the one you wrote, which very clearly lacks for persuasiveness. Human principles are not a sound basis for observations of reality.