Defense Distributed and Citizens United: From Banning Guns to Banning Books

by Steve Klein

Defense Distributed has a mission to design and share open-source projects for personal manufacture of firearms, including the use of 3D printing. Its first big success, the Liberator, was, indeed, a shot heard around the world. After settling with the State Department in June and ending a case in which the Obama administration argued that distributing gun designs for free online violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), gun control groups attempted to derail the dismissal of the case. After that failed, certain attorneys general stepped in and are attempting another go at it.

Defense Distributed, as well as the Trump administration (which settled the case), now face a litany of new lawsuits nationwide, from New Jersey to Washington State. The AGs behind these cases have either seriously underworked offices or a seriously misplaced sense of priorities: the gun control movement has taken so many desperate potshots at the Second Amendment that their aims are infringing on the First.

A breath of free speech reality is in order. Though a Washington federal court blocked Defense Distributed from releasing its schematics, The Liberator is still available online, and it is questionable whether any state or the federal government could actually remove it absent setting up an internet regime like China's (which is, itself, mercifully far from perfect at accomplishing its dastardly suppression). I easily located a copy the schematics of The Liberator just the other day:

I don't have a 3D printer or know anyone who does, so I'm limited to the information. But that is literally all the cases against Defense Distributed are about. A group of attorneys general across America believe it is appropriate to suppress the mere idea of a simple firearm. This makes the case more about free speech under the First Amendment than bearing arms under the Second.

I also purchased a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, which is still available from a fairly popular website:

For those not familiar with this book, it contains material on narcotics production, surveillance equipment and, for purposes of this post, weapons. Although much of the advice in the book is notably third-rate, it was nevertheless a seminal piece of '70s counter-culture and remains in circulation. Even the frequent terrorist bombings that plagued American cities throughout the 1970s and into the '80s did not lead to such a concerted effort at censorship as the legal onslaught faced by Defense Distributed.

Of course, these AGs are no strangers to censorship. AG Bob Ferguson of Washington State has a record on campaign finance regulation that is a leading example of how such regimes can suppress political participation. Now, instead of "dark money," he cries "ghost gun" and expects courts to be blind to the end game. When it comes to justifications that would support banning books, however, meaningless distinctions usually get a chilly reception at the Supreme Court, as they did in Citizens United v. FEC. The conclusion here should be no different.

Turning back to the Second Amendment, it is notable that the federal firearms regime has always recognized the right of citizens to build and bear their own arms. There are a few exceptions—machine guns and the like—but homemade weapons can go far beyond the capabilities of the single-shot Liberator. This has never proven to be a problem, but now we're expected to entertain the idea that terrorists would turn to a single-shot plastic gun as their weapon of choice. "Stupid but constitutional" was one of the late Justice Scalia's best quips; the arguments of gun control advocates all too often add up to unconstitutional and stupid.