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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2015, @02:49AM
But having said that, if he were speaking of generic "gun violence" and I choose instead to speak of "gun deaths" from gun violence, then I would be narrowing the scope not widening it.
I inverted my terms, I apologize for the mis-communication. I'll rewind a bit and clarify: Guns are giving tons of people reason to hate them. It's not limited to deaths, either murder or suicide, it's jail time, long-term injuries, you name it. This number is not small enough to be irrelevant. Even if it was, it grows. Small number today, large number tomorrow.
Nor am I interested in guessing what you mean by your coy, misleading insinuations.
My point is you shouldn't have to guess. You have an opinion on a topic yet you're unaware of years of current events. This isn't coy, this is "ugh I'm not even sure how we're going to have this conversation without giving you a history lesson you're just going to argue with anyway."
My view is that it's going to take a lot more than the rare mass shooting or bombing to convince enough people that there is an actual problem.
Your view fails to take memory into account. Every tragedy that comes by means less people seeing value in allowing gun ownership. That clock is ticking. If you want to keep that right, start finding a solution. Others are, right now, acting on it. They're misguided, but they're doing it. What you want is action that isn't misguided instead of sitting there with your arms crossed complaining about how every solution is wrong.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 13 2015, @11:42PM
You have an opinion on a topic yet you're unaware of years of current events. This isn't coy, this is "ugh I'm not even sure how we're going to have this conversation without giving you a history lesson you're just going to argue with anyway."
I apologize for the late reply. I'm quite aware of current events. For example, most gun control laws get reversed either by voters or by being ruled blatantly unconstitutional in the courts. Gun violence, not just gun deaths is at a near future low. There is slight movement towards gun liberalization and not much going on at the state level. You could give me a history lesson, but reality already doesn't go your way. The precondition of giving me an erroneous history lesson results in the consequence of me correcting those errors to the best of my ability. It's not due to some mental problem on my part, it's just a simple matter of bad priors leading to bad conclusions.
What you want is action that isn't misguided instead of sitting there with your arms crossed complaining about how every solution is wrong.
Let us keep in mind that my alleged non-solution is better than most of the proposed solutions! You haven't even established that there is a gun problem which warrants such restrictions.
But since we have sort of transitions into speaking about actual solutions rather than merely dwell on my shortcomings, I'll propose a couple of solutions: 1) legalize all recreational drugs, and 2) enforce the Second Amendment rather than repeatedly try to undermine it.