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After Court Order, 3D-Printed Gun Pioneer Now Sells Pay-What-You-Want CAD Files (arstechnica.com)
CaptainDork writes: In a surprising announcement, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson announced Tuesday that while he would continue to comply with a federal court order forbidding him from internationally publishing CAD files of firearms, he would also begin selling copies of his 3D-printed gun files for a "suggested price" of $10 each. The files, crucially, will be transmitted to customers "on a DD-branded flash drive" in the United States and won't be available as downloads.
The next step, if any, will be for the Feds and/or states to address the legality of shipping firearms without a license.
A firearm schematic is no more a firearm than the photo on my driving license is a person.
I know that doesn't make any sense, but neither did, "Cody is violating firearm export ..."
The government used a law on the export of militarily valuable information to prevent these files from being posted on the internet. While there are bits of data with significant value for national security this is not one of those bits. They didn't call the schematics a "firearm" but they certainly tried to create some kind of equivalence between a representation of the thing and the thing itself.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The last example I can think of is the Battle of Athens.
1946 wasn't that long ago. It took an attempt to steal the election and shooting a black man in the back for voting before veterans raided an armory and seiged a prison to steal back the ballot boxes.
I don't know when the next example of tyranny will present itself and hopefully I never do see it. But it's not a question of if but when. Unless you can find a way to change human nature or remove humans from the governance process then I don't expect that question to change.
It must say something about the nation we live in that the very idea of tyranny and freedom (freeze peach) is a joke these days. I don't whether that is a good or bad thing.
Well the knowledge on how to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is restricted, but still available if you have enough time and energy to figure it out. How often do we see people go on rampages with those things compared to guns?
The point here is that restrictions on the knowledge as how to make certain dangerous things is there to set up barriers most people with the will to actually misuse said things can't or won't get over. Today, barring loopholes with practically finished components, you're going to need a skilled machinist to manufacture the complex components required to build a gun more usable than a simple zip gun. What this means is that unregistered and very hard to trace home-made AR15s and other highly dangerous firearms are not really an issue.
While the 3D printed guns of today are pretty much just fancy zip guns, that's obviously not going to be the case in the future as 3D printing using metal becomes cheaper and more commonplace. 3D-printing the critical (and thus controlled) components of an AR15 using the printers we'll have 10 years (or less) down the line will still require some skill, but it's going to be way less than the skill required to be able to manufacture the same components the old fashion way.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."