SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday May 08 2015, @04:14PM
Good! Then walk down main street open-carrying your untaxed grenade launcher.
You do know that the government violates the constitution quite often, right? Just saying, "If you do X, you'll probably get in trouble!" has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the government's actions are unconstitutional.
(And I am very pro-gun, BTW, but think that rights - even Bill of Rights guaranteed - are not quite as unlimited as you think they are.)
What specific exceptions are you talking about? The government would need to amend the constitution in order to add them. Right now, they just ignore it as it is convenient, which is intolerable.