PA Bill Number: HB829
Title: In preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Description: An Act amending the act of April 12, 1951 (P.L.90, No.21), known as the Liquor Code, in preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Last Action: Signed in House
Last Action Date: Jul 3, 2024
Democrats Go Crazy Over 3D Printed Guns :: 08/02/2018
The controversy Tuesday over 3D printable plastic guns was in some ways a perfect microcosm of the gun debate in America—a few points of concern requiring clarity and rational discussion, all overwhelmed by absurd allegations and idiotic rhetoric.
Cody Wilson, founder of a Texas-based nonprofit called Defense Distributed, wants to post online blueprints for the home-manufacture of plastic guns via 3D printers—devices that fabricate a 3-dimensional object based on a downloadable file. The Obama State Department, fearing the circulation of these non-metallic and thus supposedly undetectable “ghost guns,” used a law regulating the overseas sale of firearms to ban the online gun blueprints. The Trump State Department lifted that ban beginning August 1.
On Tuesday a federal judge in Seattle, responding to a suit brought by several states to block Wilson from posting the files, agreed with the plaintiffs and placed a temporary ban on the posting of web files to produce guns with 3D printers. Another hearing is scheduled for August 10. Court decisions affecting internet users in New Jersey and Pennsylvania banned the download of these files. It’s not clear if the judges in these cases, or indeed the Obama State Department officials who imposed the ban in the first place, understood that web files for 3D printable guns have long been available online to those who know where to look.
Concerns about 3D printable firearms are not irrational. Unlike ordinary guns, these would have no serial number, cutting off one means by which criminal investigators trace guns to their users. But the downloads necessary for 3D printing plastic guns are traceable, probably more so than firearm serial numbers; and in any case a criminal wishing to use a gun that’s not traceable to him is infinitely more likely to steal one or remove the serial number than to undergo the expensive, complicated, and unreliable process of fabricating a plastic gun via download.
Another concern is metal detection. Terrorists bearing 3D-printable plastic guns, it’s feared, may board planes undetected. Maybe. But plastic guns have enough metal components to signal a sensitive detector, and security personnel can be trained to spot plastic firearms the way they’re trained to look for unconventional weapons already.
While these and related concerns aren’t irrational, they aren’t persuasive—and they certainly don’t justify the lunatic rhetoric of Democratic politicos. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said that unless the State Department reverse its policy, “Donald Trump will be totally responsible for every downloadable, plastic AR-15 that will be roaming the streets of our country if he does not act today.” (There’s nothing even remotely close to a “downloadable, plastic AR-15.”) Bob Ferguson, Washington State’s attorney general, called the decision to allow the posting of 3D printable guns “a giveaway for terrorists.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said “blood is going to be on [the president’s] hands.” Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), as usual outdoing her colleagues in disingenuous partisan bombast, said the State Department’s decision was “a death warrant for countless innocent men, women, and children . . . The Trump Administration’s sickening NRA giveaway undermines the very foundations of public safety. Metal detectors and other security measures will be completely useless against the flood of undetectable and untraceable ‘ghost guns’ that the GOP is inviting into our schools, workplaces, airports and public buildings.”
It’s almost as if Democrats want to make reasonable debate impossible.
Cody Wilson’s attorney, the dizzyingly industrious Josh Blackman, argues that his client has a First Amendment right to post blueprints for 3D printable plastic guns online. We have our doubts about that reasoning, believing as we do that the constitutional right to free speech has to do with the expression of ideas and opinion, not the communication of technical instructions. Yet the panic over plastic guns has more to do with Democrats sensing a political opportunity than reason or sensible policy.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/the-editors/democrats-go-crazy-over-3d-printed-guns
