By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
One can only wonder sometimes if the anti-gun crowd gets any sleep at night. For them, it seems, there is always the prospect of personal danger when any law-abiding citizen has access to a firearm. They apparently cannot sleep worrying about the guns out there—pistols, revolvers, rifles or shotguns. The guns in America, by best estimates, total over 300 million—about one for every man, woman and child. That’s not to say that everyone actually has a gun, but it’s a number that adds to the antis’ psychosis.
Curiously, many of the most active leaders in the anti-gun movement—politicians, media and billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates—seem to have no problem being escorted everywhere by people carrying guns. I suppose it’s a trust thing!
Some gun news stories really freak them out more than others. A good example of this was public knowledge that the Defense Distributed-Second Amendment Foundation suit against the federal government had been settled in favor of the gun guys.
Within almost hours of the announcement of the settlement (discussed elsewhere in this issue), The New York Times featured an article headlined “Downloadable gun clears a legal obstacle, and activists are alarmed.”
The emphasis was on why The Times reader should also be alarmed.
The Times’ lead in the July 13, 2018 report was that “Learning to make a so-called ghost gun” — an un-serialized, untraceable, unregistered firearm— “could soon become much easier.”
This was not so much a Second Amendment suit as it was a First Amendment suit. But there is no question that the suit involved many aspects of the Constitution.
The US agreed in a late June settlement that Cody Wilson, president of Defense Distributed, headquartered in Texas, could distribute online free instructions for the manufacture of guns by anyone with access to a 3-D printer, and the mechanical skills for assembling the high tech parts.
Wilson, with Second Amendment Foundation support, had sued the government in 2015 after the State Department forced him to remove from the Internet the instructions for a single-shot pistol called “The Liberator” because they claimed he had violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) as well as US export laws.
That’s sort of the bare bones of the story, with the exception of the fact that the plans which were downloaded several years ago by tens of thousands of people before the government shut Wilson down. The plans will be available to millions after August 1 of this year.
The Times referred to Mr. Wilson as being “well known in anarchist and gun-rights communities” as a way of slanting their report for the further horror of hoplophobes everywhere. Other journalists have characterized Wilson as a “libertarian.”
But The Times was not finished in its efforts to frighten anti-gunners and the public at large.
“The willingness to resolve the case,” The Times continued, “— after the government had won some lower court judgments—has raised alarms among gun-control advocates, who said it would make it easier for felons and others to get firearms. Some critics said it suggested close ties between the Trump administration and gun-ownership advocates, this week filing requests for documents that might explain why the government agreed to settle.”
To quote The Times further:
“The administration ‘capitulated in a case it had won at every step of the way,’ said J. Adam Skaggs, the chief counsel for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. ‘This isn’t a case where the underlying facts of the law changed. The only thing that changed was the administration.”
The Times also reported that the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence had filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for any documents showing how the government decided on the settlement over printable firearms, and whether organizations like the National Rifle Association or the National Shooting Sports Foundation were involved.
As might be expected, neither group commented for The Times article, but the newspaper clinging to another part of the anti-gun catechism, referred to both as “trade groups” while the NRA is not, nor ever has been a “trade association, like NSSF.
The Times article did not quote any neutral or pro-gun sources but it found other critics.
In its lengthy hit piece on the settlement, the newspaper also said, “But as the ‘landmark settlement brings ghost gun instructions out into the open, it could also give felons and domestic abusers access to firearms that background checks would otherwise block them from owning, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“The current laws are already difficult to enforce—they’re historically not especially powerful, and they’re riddled with loopholes—and this will just make those laws easier to evade,” Mr. Winkler told The Times. “It not only allows this tech to flourish out of the underground but gives it legal sanction.”
And then, it had a chance to blame the whole thing on a president and an administration that it has never liked, by saying “Some saw the settlement as proof that the Trump administration wanted to further deregulate the gun industry and increase access to firearms. This year, the administration proposed a rule change that would revise and streamline the process for exporting consumer firearms and related technical information, including tutorials for 3-D printed designs.”
The change in export controls has indeed been long sought by firearms manufacturers because it would shift jurisdiction of certain items from the State Department to the Commerce Department, which uses a simpler licensing procedure for exports. But that has only incidental linkage to the Defense Distributed settlement and everything to do with the export of non-military arms to other countries for the benefit of American companies and laborers as well as overseas civilians gunowners.
In announcing that Defense Distributed will repost its online free firearms-making instructions on Aug. 1, Wilson referred to it as when “the age of the downloadable gun formally begins.” According to the company’s website the files will include plans to make a variety of firearms using 3-D printers, including for AR-15-style rifles.
The settlement is much more than a First and Second Amendment rights victory; it may be the beginning of a new technological and philosophical era.
