This is a fascinating issue, but I hope we can all agree that it is something that should be decided by our elected officials through legislation and not by some State Department bureaucrat or lone judge in Seattle.
A federal judge on Tuesday stopped the release of blueprints to make untraceable and undetectable 3D-printed plastic guns as President Donald Trump questioned whether his administration should have agreed to allow the plans to be posted online.
The company behind the plans, Austin, Texas-based Defense Distributed, had reached a settlement with the federal government in June allowing it to make the plans for the guns available for download on Wednesday.
The restraining order from U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle puts that plan on hold for now. “There is a possibility of irreparable harm because of the way these guns can be made,” he said.
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson called the ruling “a complete, total victory.”
On the issue itself, in a free society, everything should be legal for citizens to do until the government has a justifiable reason to prohibit it – assuming that any such prohibition doesn’t violate the citizens’ civil rights. In this case, homemade weapons have been around since time immemorial. And in a nation of 300 million or so legal guns, I can’t imagine that a few hobbyist guns made with a 3D printer will have any measurable impact on anything. Leave it alone.
I agree with you on this concept. There’s plans all over the world on how to make weapons of various deadly range… a 3D gun is probably in the middle of the spectrum. Our PC culture and MSM hyperfocus on guns is why this is an issue today.