I’m ‘Looking Into’ 3D-Printed Plastic Guns

The company behind the plans, Defense Distributed, reached an agreement with the federal government in June allowing it to make the plans for the guns available for download, starting this week. Gun control activists say people banned from buying guns, such as felons and domestic abusers, also would be able to cheat the law by printing weapons at home. The multistate lawsuit was supported by eight Democratic attorneys general.

It led to a backlash from lawmakers and, on Monday, Washington State attorney general Bob Ferguson announced that it would be suing the State Department “to stop the illegal distribution of 3D printed guns” on behalf of eight USA states. OR is joining a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State to prevent a Texas company from posting designs for guns that can be made on 3-D printers.

He said people are sending him new designs.

In a ruling last week, a federal judge in Texas allowed Defense Distributed to publish the technical specifications online – despite appeals from many opponents, including former Rep. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Ed Markey of MA and Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

“It just defies common sense and yet this is what the Trump administration has done”, said Nelson, who is the lead sponsor of legislation to prohibit blueprints from being posted online.

States are free to enact gun control measures, but ‘what they can’t do is censor the speech of another citizen in another state, and they can’t regulate the commerce of another citizen in another state when that commerce is authorized by a federal government license, ‘ Blackman said in an interview Monday. “We go back to the status quo, before the federal government made the disastrous decision to undo these protections for public safety”.

The State Department told CBS News that “the decision to settle the case was made in the interest of the security and foreign policy of the United States”.

Defense Distributed now aims to create a repository of gun designs and to relaunch Defcad.com, according to a recent profile of the company and Wilson in the magazine Wired. The move “will protect lives across the world”, tweeted the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

One website, CodeIsFreeSpeech.com, posted eight sets of files and reported more than 100,000 hits and almost 1.5 terabytes of data downloaded by 6 a.m. Wednesday.

Speaking to CNN’s “New Day” shortly before Trump’s tweet, Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in February, said the ability to download blueprints for the firearms doesn’t make sense.

The election-year headache is a problem of the administration’s own making.

“There is simply no way of telling how much damage has already been done by Cody Wilson’s unsafe and reckless actions”, Brady Campaign co-president Kris Brown said in a statement. “This has nothing to do with President Trump”, Gottlieb said.

At least one Republican also expressed concern.

“Many antigun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms”, said Chris Cox, the NRA’s executive director for legislative action.

The lawsuit argued that the untraceable and undetected 3D-printable guns were a danger to the public.