Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.
In fact, that legal team is attacking the State Department with more than just the first amendment: Its complaint also cites the second amendment, arguing that by restricting Defense Distributed’s sharing of printable gun files the government denied the group’s members and followers the right to bear—and acquire—arms. And it questions the authority of the State Department to regulate the publication of technical data, a power it’s long assumed it had been granted by Congress under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976.
Of course, the State Department’s two years of invoking ITAR against Defense Distributed haven’t prevented its 3-D printable gun files from spreading across the web. Instead, a Streisand-Effect-like fear of government censorship helped spur more than 100,000 downloads of the Liberator blueprint in two days. By the time the file was removed from Defense Distributed’s websites, it had already appeared on the Pirate Bay and other bittorrent sites, where it’s become nearly impossible to erase. And in the years since, amateur gunsmiths on sites like FOSSCad and GrabCAD have continued to evolve the Liberator’s design and share their own blueprints for 3-D printable revolvers and rifles.
Comment