In a statement, Mr Ferguson said: "These downloadable guns are unregistered and very difficult to detect, even with metal detectors, and will be available to anyone regardless of age, mental health or criminal history."<doc-sep>With 3D printers, getting a gun could be as easy as downloading it. A person could find a schematic for a firearm online, plug it into a 3D printer with the right materials, and boom — a gun is created on the spot. No background check required, no serial number to trace the gun if it’s used in a crime. Some policymakers are trying to prevent this method of getting firearms from going mainstream. In July, they landed a big victory: US District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle issued a restraining order that halted an activist’s plans to release 3D-printed gun designs online, arguing, “There is a possibility of irreparable harm because of the way these guns can be made.” Lasnik effectively extended that order on Monday. After Monday’s order, though, the blueprints’ owner, libertarian activist Cody Wilson, found a workaround: Instead of publishing the blueprints for free on the internet, he’s selling them (for a price people can pick on their own) and distributing the blueprints via a mailed flash drive or, potentially, email or secure download links. While Lasnik forced the State Department to continue blocking Wilson from publishing his 3D-printed gun blueprints, Lasnik also wrote that the blueprint files “can be emailed, mailed, securely transmitted, or otherwise published within the United States.” The idea is that the regulation used to block Wilson only stops an international transfer, while these other means of distribution can be solely domestic. The wide release of the 3D-printed gun blueprints has become an issue now in large part due to President Donald Trump’s administration. The previous administration, under President Barack Obama, had forced Wilson to stop publishing these blueprints on his website, Defcad.com. Wilson sued the administration in hopes of republishing his schematics. The case seemed like a win for the government, with multiple courts initially ruling in the government’s favor. But once the Trump administration came in with its gun-friendly politics, the Justice Department abruptly agreed to a settlement — giving Wilson and his nonprofit, Defense Distributed, “essentially everything they wanted,” Andy Greenberg reported for Wired. The deal allowed Wilson to publish his blueprints starting in August, and paid him $40,000 for his legal costs. A court, however, put Wilson’s plans on hold — at least until he found the latest workaround. Regardless of how this shakes out, there’s a question of just how much this is delaying the inevitable. As 3D printing technology improves, experts are worried that these guns will become cheap, accessible, and, crucially for would-be criminals, untraceable. And as much as any government may try, it’s very hard to stop the flow of information on the internet — and, in fact, some of these 3D-printed gun designs are already available online right now. Why 3D-printed guns are getting attention now Concerns about 3D-printed guns have been around since the dawn of 3D printing, which essentially lets anyone plug in a blueprint and, with the right materials, the product is, well, printed out. (Mashable has a good explainer on 3D printers.) But a few things have held back the fears from becoming widespread reality. For one, 3D printing is fairly expensive. The most robust printers, which would likely be required for a demanding product like a gun, can cost thousands of dollars. And even if someone has a 3D printer, the quality of the printed product can be shoddy, and that person may not have the knowhow or blueprints to actually design and print out a functioning gun. Some of those problems — cost and quality — will be solved over time, as 3D printing technology inevitably becomes cheaper and better. The remaining problem is what Cody Wilson was interested in solving on his own: In 2013, Wilson created what, according to Wired, is believed to be the first fully 3D-printed gun. Once Wilson successfully tested it, he uploaded the blueprint to his website. That’s when the Obama administration stepped in. Leveraging rules in the International Trade in Arms Regulations, the State Department essentially accused Wilson of exporting weapons without a license. This forced Wilson to take Defcad offline, and he faced the possibility of fines and jail time. Wilson, however, did not give up. He sued the Obama administration, arguing that barring him from publishing the blueprints inhibited his First Amendment rights. Many outside observers believed Wilson would lose, with courts in preliminary rulings coming out against him. For Wilson, this was not just a business opportunity — it was a political crusade. To get an idea of Wilson’s politics here, consider that he expected Hillary Clinton would win the White House in 2016 and, when she did, she would begin a mass-scale crackdown on firearms in the US. That would force Wilson, in his view, to take a stand, Wired reported: 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. But Wilson never had to make his stand. Clinton did not win the presidency. And, in fact, the new administration, led by Trump, backed off its legal threats to Wilson entirely — letting him move forward with publishing his 3D-printed gun blueprints on August 1. The upcoming publication terrified lawmakers around the country. Trump himself seemed concerned, tweeting on July 31, “I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!” State attorneys general across the country pushed for courts to block the release of the blueprints. They succeeded, at least temporarily, hours before the designs’ release. It’s unclear what comes next. Will the court order hold up through appeals? Will Wilson’s way around the order — of selling the blueprints and distributing them directly to buyers — withstand potential new legal challenges? Will the Trump administration take any action on its own? We just don’t know yet. Experts are seriously worried about 3D-printed guns So how worried should people be? To answer this, I asked four gun policy experts about 3D-printed guns. All of them said they are seriously concerned about these firearms’ potential. Cassandra Crifasi, from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, captured the general sentiment: “It’s bad enough that in the majority of states you can purchase a traditional firearm without undergoing a background check to ensure you are not prohibited. The availability of 3D-printed guns creates yet another loophole through which prohibited individuals could more easily obtain firearms.” In short, 3D-printed guns make it easy to bypass a host of state and federal laws. Printing a gun doesn’t require a background check or any documentation, offering a workaround for people who are legally prohibited from buying a gun now due to, say, a criminal record or history of mental illness. A 3D-printed gun can also be easily made without a serial number or anything that would make these firearms easily traceable if they’re used in a crime. This, experts predict, will make the guns very attractive to criminals. “My guess is that the first movers will be terrorists and insurrectionists who are determined to destroy our current system of government,” Philip Cook, a gun policy expert at Duke University, told me. “Over the longer term, if this form of manufacturing becomes cheap enough, it may become a major source of supply for street gangs and other criminals.” Guns are already pretty available in the US, with estimates suggesting that there are more firearms in America than there are people. And the country has much looser gun laws than comparable nations like the UK, Canada, and Japan. The concern is that 3D-printed guns will make firearms even more available by creating a means to bypass the US’s already weak gun laws with little effort. There’s good reason to believe that will lead to more gun deaths: A broad body of research has found that where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime: Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns. ”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.” This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry during an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone. The mass availability of 3D-printed guns would only exacerbate this problem by making it easier for someone to have a firearm to pull out in the first place, whether in the course of an argument or the commission of a crime. Wilson, for his part, said his intent is not to make it easier for criminals to get guns or to enable more gun violence. But he sees 3D-printed guns as a means to counter the movement, particularly after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, to enact stricter gun laws in the US. As Wilson told Wired, “All this Parkland stuff, the students, all these dreams of ‘common sense gun reforms’? No. The internet will serve guns, the gun is downloadable. No amount of petitions or die-ins or anything else can change that.” Stopping 3D-printed guns in the long term will be very hard, if not impossible For all the worry about 3D-printed guns, it’s not clear how much good any of the worrying will do. The reality is that 3D printers are becoming better and cheaper over time. A few years back, 3D printers were inaccessible for the typical consumer. Nowadays, people can buy them for hundreds of dollars. These printers often aren’t very good — not good enough to build a gun, anyway — but the increasing availability shows where this is all going. Meanwhile, the government can try as hard as it wants to stop 3D-printed gun schematics from ending up on the internet, but the reality is these blueprints will likely become public on a large scale at some point. Think about how much governments have struggled to stop websites like Pirate Bay, which make it easy to illegally download music, movies, video games, books, and much more. It’s just extremely easy to share information and data on the internet. In fact, there already are websites hosting 3D printer designs for guns, and sites dedicated to hosting Wilson’s files, despite court battles holding up Wilson’s own ability to republish the documents. And Wilson, of course, found his own loophole by selling the blueprints and distributing them directly to buyers. That doesn’t mean governments are totally helpless here. One federal law already addresses some of the concerns: The Undetectable Firearms Act bans guns that can’t be spotted by walk-through metal detectors. This means all-plastic 3D-printed guns are technically illegal, although there are workarounds, such as adding a metal piece to the firearm. The government could take further steps. Chelsea Parsons, the vice president of gun violence prevention policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, drew a comparison to counterfeit currency: “I think the next step is to work with the technology industry to find solutions to deter promulgation of these blueprints. An analogy is the approach taken by software programs like Adobe Photoshop to prevent people from creating counterfeit currency.<doc-sep>
A legal agreement between the U.S. government and a gun rights organization is setting the stage for the latest skirmish in the wars over gun rights and gun control. The agreement allows the group Defense Distributed to host a collection of files online that can be downloaded and, with the help of a 3D printer, can print the necessary parts to build working firearms. Numerous states are now rushing to ban their residents from downloading the files. Even the President of the United States weighed in. But the truth here is a little murkier than the headlines. What a Gun Is Here's the first thing you need to know: These files are the instructions sets for 3D printing items that are legally considered firearms. But in reality, what they add up to falls far short of an actual, workable gun. When most people think of the word "firearms," they picture complete rifles, shotguns, pistols, and revolvers. Load them with ammunition, pull the trigger, and they fire. But there’s another definition of "firearm." Rather than just buying a whole weapon at a gun store, many gun enthusiasts like to build their guns from the ground up from a collection of parts. Of course, the government must regulate these homemade guns, which is why it classifies their receivers—basically the frame that holds the key parts—as a type of firearm. After all, without the frame you can’t build your firearm. Defense Distributed’s controversial files are designed to 3D-print receivers. What comes out of the 3D printer isn't a working weapon, but something that still must be mated to bolts, barrels, trigger groups, stocks, and other necessary parts before it ever fires a bullet. Defense Distributed’s Liberator pistol design is perhaps the closest thing to a complete printable firearm, but the enthusiast must still source a nail for a firing pin. The First Amendment vs. the Second The U.S. government recognizes the right of citizens to build their own firearms, and all of these parts are readily available in gun shops or online, as they always have been. So all of this is perfectly legal. Where Defense Distributed and the government clashed is over the ability of people in foreign countries to download the files. For example, the government’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) statute prohibits the transfer of weapons technology abroad without express permission. Hosting the files online allows anyone around the world to download them—a no-no under ITAR. Defense Distributed, on the other hand, claimed that the government violated the First Amendment by preventing them from uploading the files. The State Department, which oversees arms exports, has now decided that the files are exempt from ITAR. Defense Distributed is free to share the files online. The agreement has gun control groups and state and local officials up in arms. “The federal government is trying to allow access to online plans that will allow anyone to anonymously build their own downloadable, untraceable, and undetectable gun,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The state of Pennsylvania won a temporary agreement from Defense Distributed to prevent its citizens from downloading the files. The head of the Brady Campaign called the State Department’s decision “bitterly disappointing.” President Trump himself entered the fray, muddying the waters with his own misunderstanding of the issue. (The receivers are neither for sale nor are the resulting guns entirely made of plastic.) The Fourth-Easiest Way To Get a Gun? The 3D printing method isn't even the easiest way to build a firearm--that's accomplished with so-called “80 percent receivers.” That is to say they are about 80 percent of a working receiever, requiring a person to have only a drill press or hand tools, and the requisite DIY skills, to finish the remaining 20 percent. Building a gun this way from parts already on the market is much easier and cheaper than the new and controversial 3D printing method. I once did it in my own kitchen, and the result is a much more reliable, durable firearm than you'd get from 3D-printed parts. Frankly, 3D printing gun parts is the most complicated way for a criminal to get his hands on a firearm, after stealing a gun from a legal gun owner, buying a gun on the black market, and finishing an 80 percent receiver. We should absolutely be careful about anything that makes it easier and quicker for people to get their hands on guns.