Gun control advocates firmly believe that the first amendment does not protect the right to share 3D gun designs online. So, I decided to publish one as a book on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace.
In its latest court filing, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office tells the court that it is “highly questionable whether files that instruct a 3D printer to produce a gun at the push of a button are protected ‘speech’ at all.”
The motion claims that the files at issue “induce action without the intercession of the mind or the will of any human participant” and that “all one has to do is open the file and click ‘Print’ and the file communicate[s] directly with the 3D printer to produce a weapon.”
Factually, this is incorrect. Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed have shared digital renderings of firearms and firearm parts. In the case of their all-plastic Liberator pistol design, the designs are shared as .STL files. Other guns have been shared as SolidWorks CAD renderings
If you put either of these file types into a 3D printer or CNC machine, nothing would happen. That is because these files are simply renderings of objects. Similar to what you would find in the source code of a video game, these files tell you what a firearm looks like. They take the two-dimensional specifications that have been publicly available for decades and render them in three dimensions for computer-assisted rendering. The files, quite simply, contain information that tells you what a gun looks like. They do not tell a 3D printer how hot the plastic needs to be or how thick each layer should be. They do not tell a CNC how deep to make its cuts and what size bit the router is using.
Anyone who believes that 3D printers or CNC machines are turnkey has obviously never tried to use one.
Gun control advocates believe that this type of information — a firearm’s design specifications — should not be protected by the first amendment. They believe that Americans do not have a right to teach one another what firearms look like. If taken to the extreme, their logic dictates that I be arrested for telling you online that an AR-15’s takedown pins are situated 6.375 inches apart.
All of this information is freely and publicly available in Eugene Stoner’s 1959 patents. Right now, you can freely access the design specifications for an AR-15 on any number of websites or in thousands of published books. No one has ever tried to ban “How to Build an AR-15” books because they are so clearly protected by the first amendment.
As radically anti-free speech as liberal have become, they’ve yet to reach the säuberung (Nazi book burning) stage in their fascistic development. I want to help them along in that evolutionary path or get them to admit that all of this is protected under the first amendment.
So, I just published a book on Amazon containing the code to render the frame of Defense Distributed’s Liberator pistol. The book is titled The Liberator: An .STL File Published As A Book and is currently for sale on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace.
I took the .STL file published by Defense Distributed, rewrote it in a more standard and re-printable format, and then published it as text in an e-book on amazon.com. It has been assigned an ASIN and is now available for sale in the United States.
All in all, the book includes more than 2,500 pages listing out the coordinates of all of the design’s vertices. The text is unintelligible and painstakingly plots every single point in the three-dimensional rendering.
When codeisfreespeech.com published this design file, Amazon Web Services shut down their site. The irony is that the very code they deemed too dangerous to be published on the web is now for sale as a text file in their Kindle marketplace. I read their terms and conditions. Nothing in this book violates Amazon's terms. At this very moment, you can purchase the Anarchist Cookbook, the U.S. Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook, and a host of other diy weapon books on Amazon. If I can buy a book that teaches me how to build a homemade bomb, this unintelligible text file should certainly fall under first amendment protection.
Gun control advocates want you to believe that simply rendering a 3D image of a gun is akin to arming a dangerous criminal or terrorist. But for all of their fear mongering, no one is going to shoot up a school or hijack a plane simply by shouting “vertex 52.608036041259766” and the thousands of other plot points.
We’ve listened to the Left’s argument. They claim that sharing 3D firearm designs online is not protected by the first amendment. Now, I want to see them claim that I don’t have a right to publish a book.
Am I in breach of Judge Robert Lasnik's nationwide injunction? I don't think so. I don't think any judge has a right to tell 320+ million Americans that they cannot publish a string of letters, numbers, and symbols as a book. I don't think a judge has a right to ban this information from being shared in any form.
But if this lone Clinton appointee believes he has that right, this will be one hell of a fight...
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