Defense Distributed Versus the States: Losing the Battle but Winning the War?

On Wednesday, Jan. 30, a federal judge in Austin threw out a suit filed by the 3D-printed-gun firm Defense Distributed against the attorneys general of Los Angeles, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and for good measure the governors of New York and Pennsylvania as well.  Defense Distributed was trying to get the federal court to overrule state and city laws that prohibit the sale of 3D-printed gun plans.  It's an interesting study in how the much-abused principle of federalism has been turned backwards by a libertarian-style organization to overrule states' rights—unsuccessfully so far, at least on the surface.

First, the backstory.  In 2013, a 25-year-old libertarian and University of Texas law student named Cody Wilson made the news by using a 3D printer to print a working gun.  Not only did he print and fire the thing, but he made sure the news media knew about it.  Not satisfied with just showing it could be done, Wilson forged ahead to found a company called Defense Distributed, which tried to sell plans online so that anybody could print 3D guns out of plastic in the comfort of one's own domicile. 

The U. S. State Department then intervened, saying this was against export regulations, and because the Internet has no borders, Defense Distributed had to take the plans down.  They did so, but sued to get the right to put them back up, and in the summer of 2018, the State Department settled with the company and withdrew its objection.

As soon as the company tried to put the plans up again, here came a gang of attorneys general from twelve states where gun control is popular:  New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, among others.  They sued to stop Defense Distributed, and won an injunction in Federal court to stop them.

In the meantime, Wilson himself was arrested for sexual assault on a minor, and resigned from the company he founded.  But Defense Distributed is still with us, and currently sells inexpensive milling machines that people can use to make guns at home.  Milling machines aren't illegal—not yet, anyway.  And in the meantime, news reports show that private websites have plenty of 3D-gun plans available, and nobody much is going after them to shut them down.

Any time technology advances to a point unanticipated by the legal system, trouble can arise, and that seems to be what's happened here.  When guns were considered so hard to make that no legislator bothered to make home gun manufacturing illegal, it was thought sufficient to regulate the sale and manufacture of firearms by large industrial firms.  The history of how private ownership of guns in the U. S. has evolved to the present day is much too long to summarize here, but a thumbnail sketch of the current debate is as follows. 

On one side there are those who hope for an ideal civilization where nobody but a few idle policemen carry firearms, and maybe not even them.  Everyone is so enlightened that armed conflict is inconceivable, and anyway, even if somebody did want to start a fight, there's no guns around to use, so nobody gets shot—accidentally or otherwise.  These folks see increasing restrictions on private ownership of guns as the right side of history, and view 3D-printed guns as a step backward in our progress toward a gun-free future.

On the other side, you have rugged individualists who believe it's every person's right to defend him- or herself with any means necessary.  And since there are a lot of bad hombres out there, it's your right to own and carry a gun.  If the laws in your locality don't allow you to obtain one legally, then go home, download the plans from Defense Distributed, and make your own. 

I exaggerate on both sides for clarity, but the libertarian position of minimal government clearly comes down on the side of gun ownership and makership.  It's ironic, then, that Defense Distributed finds itself calling on that bete noir of libertarianism, the behemoth called the federal government, to squash the states' rights to suppress gun making at home.  But at least it's consistent with the philosophy behind the firm, which is basically that anybody should be able to have a gun, and if you're competent enough to run a 3D printer, you're competent enough to handle a gun.

A further likely irony is that in a few years, this whole kerfuffle will probably look as outmoded as when record companies went around in the 1980s trying to get a royalty assessed on blank tape and tape recorders, because they were worried about the revenue they were losing when people copied vinyl records instead of buying new ones.  When digital recording came along, and then the Internet, the bomb really went off under the recording industry.  And now such efforts look merely quaint.  YouTube is now on track to harbor every audio and video recording ever made, copyrighted or otherwise, and the idea of stopping them is like trying to convince a stampeding elephant not to trample your daisies.

In other words, the attorneys general may have won this battle, but it looks like in their fight against the spread of digital firearms, they're already losing the war. 

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on which side you favor in the conflict.  Personally, I do not own any firearms and I'm not fond of hunting, but some of the nicest people I know do and are.  As for Defense Distributed, without its colorful leader Wilson and in view of the fact that a lot of what it was trying to sell is online already, its days may be numbered.  But the time when anybody can 3D print a whole lot of things that other folks don't want them to print is coming fast, and we might as well be ready for it when it gets here.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the article "Judge rejects lawsuit by 3D-printed gun company Defense Distributed against states" at https://www.statesman.com/news/20190131/judge-rejects-lawsuit-by-3d-printed-gun-company-defense-distributed-against-states.  I also referred to articles by Vox at https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17880202/cody-wilson-3d-printed-gun-taiwan

and Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/cody-wilson-3d-printed-guns-resigns-defense-distributed/.  An archival New York Times article about the record companies' efforts to extract royalties from the consumer recording business in 1985 is at https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/21/arts/issue-and-debate-royalties-on-recorders-and-blank-audio-tapes.html.  I first blogged about Cody Wilson and his guns on May 13, 2013 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/printing-guns.html.

Printing Guns, Again

Back in May of 2013, I blogged in this space about Cody Wilson, then a law student at the University of Texas at Austin, who had gotten in hot water with the U. S. State Department for posting plans online for using 3-D printers to make guns.  At that time, the Obama administration’s State Department took a dim view of anybody encouraging the production of non-registered plastic guns with no serial numbers.  The uses of such things for terrorism and other purposes was obvious, and while at least 100,000 people downloaded the plans before Wilson was forced to take them down, he said at the time he wasn’t abandoning plans for his company Defense Distributed to make such plans more widely available.

A lot of things have changed since 2013.  Donald Trump is in the White House, 3-D printers have been getting cheaper, better, and more available, but Cody Wilson hasn’t given up his efforts.  And last month they paid off, at least to the extent that the State Department notified him it was going to let him go online with his plans again after July 31.  Other than issuing a brief victory cry on Twitter, Wilson and his company have kept silent about the ruling, but a coalition of gun-control organizations filed suit in Federal court to block the ruling and keep Wilson from going public with his plans again.  On Friday July 27, a Federal judge in Austin denied the coalition’s request, saying they were attempting to “litigate a political dispute in court.” 

Lisa Marie Pane, a crime and justice reporter for the Associated Press, quoted gun-control advocate Nick Suplina, who said "There is a market for these guns and it's not just among enthusiasts and hobbyists. . . There's a real desire and profit mode in the criminal underworld as well.”  But a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation discounted the notion that the availability of such plans will lead to a significant increase in gun-related crime, pointing out that 3-D printers are expensive, the plastic guns work poorly (if at all) and usually come apart after a round or two, and a criminal is more likely just to steal a weapon than to go to the trouble of 3-D printing. 

My own take on this matter is that 3-D-printed guns are both inevitable and unlikely to change the situation in the U. S. regarding gun safety.  The inevitability comes from the rapid pace of advances in both performance and price of 3-D printers.  In 2013, most people had not seen a 3-D printer in the flesh, so to speak, and they were still specialty items found mostly in universities and industrial research labs.  But today, you can buy them online for less than $200 (although the cheapest ones will make only toy guns, not real ones), and the technical skills needed to run such printers are being mastered by elementary-school children. 

That being said, if Cody Wilson and others like him make 3-D-printed gun plans easily available, will that lead to a flood of firearms that can pass through security checks and show up in the hands of terrorists and other criminals?  Somehow I don’t think so.

The availability of guns is only one term in the equation that equals gun violence.  As gun-control advocates never cease to remind us, it is very easy to obtain a gun in the U. S, both legally and illegally.  And criminals, being criminals, are not fastidious about using only legitimate means to get their weapons.  The many channels through which the huge inventory of existing weaponry moves in this country means that most efforts to lower gun violence by cutting off the supply of guns are doomed to failure. 

That doesn’t mean we should hand out derringers as door prizes.  Reasonable restrictions on the purchase and use of guns to prevent spur-of-the-moment bad choices by people who are likely to misuse a gun are justifiable.  But the other term in the gun-violence equation is the person holding the gun.  And that is where the problem gets complicated.

Ever since Cain did in Abel, murder has been a part of human existence.  Some cultures tend to be more violent than others, and one measure of the degree of civilization a culture possesses is how violent it is.  For complicated reasons having to do with the way the nation was settled and the kinds of people who settled it, the United States is both a place where gun ownership is a lot more common than in many other countries, and also a place where guns are used fairly frequently in violent crimes. 

I know people who both own guns and pose virtually no threat whatsoever to any law-abiding citizen with respect to gun violence.  They have guns solely for means of self-protection or sports such as hunting, and if every gun owner were like these people, the rate of violent gun-related crime in the U. S. would be zero. 

But even one of these people could end up shooting somebody if the gun owner felt threatened.  And aside from the rare psychopath who literally shoots people for fun, most gun-related deaths that are not accidental have some justification in the mind of the shooter.  The best way to reduce gun violence is to create a culture in which no one, or almost no one, feels threatened enough to shoot their way out of the situation. 

That’s a hard, long, complicated task—the work of generations, really.  And it requires a kind of unity of purpose that is presently largely lacking in this country.  It’s much easier to spot changes that threaten to increase the availability of guns and try to stop them, as gun-control advocates are doing to Cody Wilson.  But I think we should spend at least as much energy on studying the cultural and spiritual conditions that lead to gun violence, and at a grass-roots level try to do something about them as well.

Sources:  Lisa Marie Pane’s article entitled “Texas company cleared to put 3D-printed gun designs online” appeared on July 26, 2018 in the Chicago Tribune at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-texas-3d-printed-gun-20180726-story.html, and in other media outlets as well.   Reuters reported on the decision to deny the gun-control coalition’s attempt to block the release at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-guns/us-judge-denies-gun-control-groups-attempt-to-block-3-d-gun-blueprints-idUSKBN1KH2I2.  My previous blog on Cody Wilson’s 3-D-printed gun plans appeared on May 13, 2013, at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/printing-guns.html.

Printing Guns

Somebody was going to do it sooner or later.  And we have Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin, to thank for the fact that, when it was finally done for the first time, the news media learned about it right away.  All the same, now that somebody has used a 3-D printer to make a functional gun, we face a whole array of questions that up till now were hypothetical ones.  But technology has a way of turning hypotheticals into facts.

What are the facts?  For some years now, systems called “rapid prototype fabrication” or “3-D printing” have been available in various forms.  People at my own university, Texas State University, have been active in this area for over a decade.  When I arrived in 2000, I saw one such machine here in operation.  It worked this way:  a roll of sticky paper would feed into an area where a computer-guided laser beam cut out a shape that was a thin cross-section of the object to be made, and position the cutout on top of the previous layer, affixing it with the sticky side down.  Then the cycle would repeat with the next layer.  In this way, shapes of arbitrary complexity could be gradually built up, although there were practical problems such as how to get rid of the excess paper, the many hours it took to construct even one small object, and the fact that when you were finished all you had was a “dummy” model made out of paper, instead of anything mechanically strong like plastic or metal.  Still, the ability to realize a 3-D prototype shape was useful for design purposes, and many miles of paper went through the unit before it was superseded by later models that use more substantial materials.  In fact, the field is still a subject of active research both at my school and elsewhere.

As often happens, technology that was initially so expensive that only giant firms like Boeing could afford it has now gotten cheap enough that impecunious law students such as Cody Wilson can rent or buy 3-D printing devices.  Mr. Wilson is a member of an increasing cadre of young dedicated libertarians tending toward anarchy.  It seems to me that libertarianism is a self-limiting phenomenon, in that while a functioning society can tolerate a certain number of individual libertarians, if everyone in a state followed libertarian principles there would be no state.  And we’ve seen how bad life can get in states such as Somalia that effectively have no government. 

Whatever the philosophy’s limitations as a principle of government are, individual libertarians are always fighting battles for various freedoms that they perceive have been infringed, and Mr. Wilson’s beef was that the government has unfairly restricted the access of the individual to guns.  There are apparently two goals in Mr. Wilson’s mind:  an idealistic long-term goal and a more realistic near-term goal.  The long-term goal appears to be the notion that if a person wants a gun (or anything else that is hard to buy legally but can be made with a 3-D printer), he or she can simply look up the plans on the Internet and print one in the privacy of home.  Even during Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, when the U. S. Constitution forbade the manufacture of intoxicating liquors, it was practically impossible to prevent homebrewers from making their own beer or wine in their basements, and many people did so.  Perhaps Mr. Wilson is envisioning something of this kind with respect to guns.

His near-term goal was more realistic:  to draw attention to the fact that 3-D printing technology has now become cheap enough and precise enough to allow even a student (though one who raised $20,000 for the project online) to design, make, and successfully fire a working firearm with it.  Reportedly, during the few days that Defense Distributed, Mr. Wilson’s website, displayed the plans, the plans were downloaded over 100,000 times, so the gat is out of the bag, so to speak. 

Now that we know it can be done, what should we do about it?  Those of a libertarian persuasion would say, “Nothing,” and it’s possible that no new laws or regulations will result from what some would consider a stunt.  Someone at the State Department did take it seriously enough to send Mr. Wilson a letter warning him that he had better take the plans off his website, and he did.  It seems there are restrictions on transferring technical data to “a foreign person” which of course might include many of those 100,000 who downloaded the gun plans before the information was taken off the website.  Mr. Wilson’s libertarianism does not extend to the limit of civil disobedience, but he has been working on this project for over a year and he says he intends to find a lawyer to help him further his cause.

The dismal imagination of an engineer can extend this quandary in other directions.   Suppose we develop cheap and inexpensive ways to synthesize complex chemicals in a table-top unit?  How popular would the downloadable instructions for LSD or cocaine turn out to be?  Fortunately, I’m not aware that the chemical engineers have anything like this up their sleeve, but stay tuned.

In the meantime, let’s be glad that nobody (to my knowledge) has invented all-plastic bullets yet, so even if someone manages to sneak a plastic pistol from a 3-D printer on an airplane, they’ll have to use metal bullets, and maybe those will be discovered by the eagle-eyed inspectors of the Transportation Safety Administration.  And those folks are now using the latest millimeter-wave technology to see just such objects.  So if working plastic guns start showing up all over the place, we at least have some technology that may be able to catch them before they do any real harm.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman has published at least three stories about Cody Wilson’s doings online:  back in October 2012 at http://www.statesman.com/news/news/crime-law/online-collective-aims-to-print-plastic-guns/nSSqt/ when he was in the news as the 3-D printing company he rented his equipment from had come to confiscate it back when they found out what he was doing, earlier this month at http://www.statesman.com/news/news/crime-law/student-test-fire-of-3d-printed-handgun-successful/nXhs7/ when he successfully fired his plastic weapon in front of news representatives, and on May 12 at http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/national-govt-politics/feds-demand-ut-student-pull-3-d-gun-blueprints-fro/nXnwP/ when a State Department letter persuaded him to take down his online gun plans.  I also referred to the website operated by Mr. Wilson and his friends, Defense Distributed, at http://defdist.org.