Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora's Box for DIY Guns

A LANDMARK LEGAL SHIFT OPENS PANDORA’S BOX FOR DIY GUNS

It's a longish read, but here are some extracts. First, some background:

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FIVE YEARS AGO, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com. He'd launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.

The Recent Development:

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Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First. "If code is speech, the constitutional contradictions are evident," Wilson explained to WIRED when he first launched the lawsuit in 2015. "So what if this code is a gun?” The Department of Justice's surprising settlement, confirmed in court documents earlier this month, essentially surrenders to that argument.

And what is to me the most worrying part of this whole story:

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Wilson's library will serve a more straightforward purpose, too: In one corner stands a server rack that will host Defcad's website and backend database. He doesn't trust any hosting company to hold his controversial files. And he likes the optics of storing his crown jewels in a library, should any reversal of his legal fortunes result in a raid. "If you want to come get it, you have to attack a library," he says. On that subject, he has something else to show me. Wilson pulls out a small embroidered badge. It depicts a red, dismembered arm on a white background. The arm's hand grips a curved sword, with blood dripping from it. The symbol, Wilson explains, once flew on a flag above the Goliad Fort in South Texas. In Texas' revolution against Mexico in the 1830s, Goliad's fort was taken by the Mexican government and became the site of a massacre of 400 American prisoners of war, one that's far less widely remembered than the Alamo. Wilson recently ordered a full-size flag with the sword-wielding bloody arm. He wants to make it a new symbol for his group. His interest in the icon, he explains, dates back to the 2016 election, when he was convinced Hillary Clinton was set to become the president and lead a massive crackdown on firearms. If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his Defcad repository, regardless of the outcome of his lawsuit, and then defend it in an armed standoff. "I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style," Wilson says calmly, in the first overt mention of planned armed violence I've ever heard him make. "Our only option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal mission, where we dumped everything into the internet," Wilson says. "Goliad became an inspirational thing for me."

I don't believe that something like this can be suppressed. Ban it from the internet and it'll go to Tor and the dark net. If you can't stop The Pirate Bay, you can't stop this. Pandora's box is already wide open.

But what should we do when this guy has basically decided that American gun rights should apply to the whole world, including - presumably especially - where the people have decided that they aren't appropriate?

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2uoCX88