The Daily - The Fight Over 3-D-Printed Guns

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

Blueprints for making a variety of plastic guns, including AR-15-style rifles, on 3-D printers were scheduled to be posted online today. Who is the man behind their planned release, and why is the federal government taking his side? Guest: Tiffany Hsu, a business reporter for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the blueprints for printing a 3D gun were scheduled to be made available for anyone to download on the internet today. Who's behind their release? And why is the federal government taking his side? It's Wednesday, August 1st.

So we start with a then 25-year-old named Cody Wilson. Well, a group of friends and I decided to band together under a collective name, Defense Distributed. And we want to share with you an idea. In 2013, he's in law school at the University of Texas. The Defense Distributed Project has developed an idea that we're calling the WikiWeb. It would be the world's first 3D-printable

personal defense system. And he 3D prints a pistol, and that's supposedly from a printer that he buys on eBay. Tiffany Hsu covers the gun industry for The Times. Now, before this, very, very few people, if any, have managed to successfully shoot one of these things without the entire thing just coming apart in their hands. This is a partially printed AR-15. This is where all the explosive forces of the rifle happen. Shooting a gun obviously involves a lot of pressure.

Most of these guns are made out of plastic. And this fires? Cody, however... Yeah, I fired this quite a bit the other day, too. ...manages to shoot it successfully. And what does he decide to do after his version of this 3D gun actually works? The product isn't our emphasis here. What we're interested in producing is a digital file.

He decides to share it with everyone. To be shared across the internet. Let me explain. He calls the gun the Liberator and he posts the blueprints on his website, which is called Defense Distributed. And it turns out that he's onto something because within days, these blueprints get downloaded 100,000 times. And why does he want to share it with the world? We're trying to push through facts on the ground that change what the political reality is

independent of our institutions and our processes, okay? So Cody is what he calls a crypto-anarchist. And what does that mean? Crypto-anarchists in the Cody Wilson vein basically believe that information shouldn't be consolidated in the hands of a few people. He is fully on board with the idea that information, blueprints, data, money, should be a decentralized situation. Hopefully one day it won't matter what these men and women in black robes say, because you just know that you can download the AR-15 from the internet,

crank one out in your garage, crank two out in your garage if you're having a bored Saturday, okay? Hmm. So in this case, everybody ought to be able to make a gun, not just gun manufacturers. If they want to, yes. And how exactly would they do that? What you see here is an SLA 3D printer. So what they do is download the blueprint onto their computer. They go out, they get the material that they needed to create the gun. The most common example that people are using now is plastic.

Inside this build area is a bunch of resin. We use a laser. Feed those materials into the machine. They'd hook up the machine to the computer. It cures the top layer of this resin layer by layer. The machine would read those blueprints, and in a given amount of time, it would produce the components of the gun. And then you would fit those pieces together,

and in theory, you would fit those pieces together. And in theory, you would have a firearm. And what kind of guns are we talking about here? You have AR-15 files. You also have things like Beretta M9 handguns, 1911 pistols. There's a range. So guns that sophisticated with that many parts can be successfully manufactured using a 3D printer. That's right. I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do. So you have to keep in mind that this is happening right around the time that the nation is processing Sandy Hook. Their children's innocence has been torn away from them too early,

and there are no words that will ease their pain. Everyone is very, very sensitive about guns at this point. These are magazines, and once Sandy Hook happened, we realized, hey, it's pretty easy to print a box and put a spring in it. And then you have Cody Wilson coming in and printing and shooting a gun that's made mostly from plastic. Pretty delusional to think you could ban it. And so again, this serves the purposes of the project, which is, look, you can make something for yourself. The federal government hears about it and tells him, you got to take these plans down. And what's their rationale for that? So they then cite a very obscure set of export rules that governs the export of sensitive military hardware and weapons technology. And the idea there is that if you have

blueprints of how to make a gun and they're readily available and someone abroad gets a hold of them, you're in essence exporting a gun. And Cody, in uploading the information of how to make a 3D gun, was circumventing those export rules. Yes. And what does Cody Wilson decide to do in the face of this crackdown by the federal government? So at that point in 2015, he hooks up with a group that's known for defending gun rights in lawsuits. Attention, President Obama is exercising another executive power grab. And this time he is going directly after your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Second Amendment Foundation has a plan to stand up to Obama. And it starts with your call.

And that's the Second Amendment Foundation. They create a legal argument that's based not on the Second Amendment, but on the First Amendment. And what exactly is the argument? That this is a free speech issue, that Cody Wilson has a right to disseminate information, not guns, that these blueprints represent data that he should be allowed to share. And this, of course, stems from a long history of legal precedent involving cases like the Anarchist Cookbook, which was essentially a how-to manual on how to create explosives. And ultimately, it was decided that the authors of that book weren't liable for whatever stemmed from the products that were created from people who read it.

And this is the kind of argument that Cody Wilson and his legal support are now making. So the argument is that the instructions for making a weapon, whether it's a gun or a bomb, are speech and have almost nothing to do with the Second Amendment protections for guns. Right. That it's immaterial that the end product is a gun. For guns. Right. That it's immaterial that the end product is a gun. That what's important here is that he just wants to spread information that happens to involve the manufacture of a gun.

And they're saying this code that it's like speech. You can't control the distribution of speech. Right. And you can't control what ultimately comes of the speech necessarily. There's that popular case that gets brought up in law school about yelling fire in a crowded theater. But in this particular case, the argument is that Cody just wants to spread the data, to spread the how-to manual. And what happens from there, the fire, isn't necessarily his responsibility, that he's not actively telling people create a gun and then use it to commit a crime. But that seems like it gets complicated because even if speech can't be regulated, guns are regulated. If the code can make something that is supposed to be regulated, a gun, is it really like free speech? So guns have actually been made at home for years. The culture of DIY gun making has a long, long history. You can easily buy a kit

that allows you to put various parts of a gun together in your garage if you wanted to. And that's legal and it's not really regulated. Now, if you wanted to sell that gun, that's a different story. Generally speaking, if you're selling guns commercially, you need a license. You need to run a background check. That gun needs to have a serial number on it.

So most guns, you're right, are regulated. That said, you can easily make a gun at home from parts that doesn't really have any oversight. And that's where Cody Wilson comes in. He's saying, I'm not a seller. I'm not even really a manufacturer. I'm just the next high-tech step in this legacy of handmade guns. The one who finally put it online and shared it with millions of people.

Exactly. I'm making it available to the masses. So what happens in this showdown between Cody Wilson and the federal government? So it goes to court, but for a few years, it seems like he's the underdog. Like he loses a couple of lower court judgments. The Supreme Court says, you know, we don't really want to hear your case. So it's pretty surprising to basically everyone when in June, the State Department does an about face and settles. It says, go ahead, go post those blueprints.

By the way, the government's going to cover $40,000 of your legal fees. Wow. And Cody Wilson says, I think I will. I'm going to publish these online plans for a 3D printed gun on August 1st. So today? Yes. We'll be right back. So clearly the federal government has had a serious change of heart here since they first came down on Cody under President Obama. What's made the government change its mind, as best you can tell? Coming to a theater near you, coming to a school near you, coming to a sports stadium, to any public place. If you listen to the many, many Democrats who have spoken out about this in recent days. If you listen to the many, many Democrats who have spoken out about this in recent days.

These ghost guns are the new wave of American gun violence. Blumenthal, Schumer. The idea of these print on command ghost guns is every bit as scary as it sounds. They are undetectable, untraceable. Forget about the TSA. These downloadable firearms are available even to those who could not pass a background check. It's the ultimate gun loophole. They believe that this case and the settlement that came from it is a sure sign of the Trump administration's deep support of the NRA and the Second Amendment and the gun industry as a whole.

Democrats in Congress and the liberals who hate guns are all about using 3D printing as a tactic to scare you. Actually talking about what Democrats call, quote unquote, ghost guns. And the rest of us simply call freedom and innovation. The Trump administration, pushed by the gun activists, did this. Some have called it a sign of favoritism that gun control doesn't really stand a chance in this administration. And this is an example of why that is. Now, President Trump tweeted about this this morning. The president weighed in on it this morning, saying, I'm looking into 3D plastic guns being sold to the public.

Already spoke to the NRA. Doesn't seem to make much sense. And what's the federal government's argument under President Trump for why it changed positions on this? The government's stance is basically that the expert rules that were used to tell Cody Wilson to take those blueprints down in the first place, that those rules don't really make sense. There's something called the Walmart rule where any product that's readily commercially available shouldn't be included on that export list. And in the administration's eyes, Cody Wilson's blueprints fall under that category. So in essence, the federal government decides between the transition from President Obama to President Trump that what Cody Wilson is uploading is not such a specialized, complicated, secret military product.

It's actually something you could probably go buy in any old store, and therefore it should be excluded from those rules. go by in any old store, and therefore it should be excluded from those rules. Or it should be subject to lighter restrictions, that the process of oversight should be a little more lax. And theoretically, people can start printing these guns immediately. If they have access to a 3D printer, most people don't. Right. And at the moment, hobbyists who like to create 3D printed jewelry or other products, for example, are going to places where they can have access to a shared machine. So these are places like public libraries that sometimes will have a 3D printing machine available for a member in like a back room.

Now, the question is whether these sorts of organizations want to be put in the kind of position where they're monitoring whether their members are using their printers to create essentially weapons. It's also difficult to regulate guns, generally speaking. Gun regulations in the U.S. are notoriously opaque. There's a patchwork of them. They're hard to keep track of. And many of the rules are made state to state. They're locally created rules, which is why you see many of the voices in this debate about 3D printed guns coming from state officials. But it also just frankly skirts our state gun laws

and our federal laws, which is why attorneys general, myself included, across this country have stepped up as a matter of public safety as the law enforcement leaders within our respective states to stop this code from being published. Actually, a group of attorneys general from mostly coastal states have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration trying to get Defense Distributed. Cody's company. Cody's company pulled down for the moment. Eight states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block 3D printed gun designs from being available online. California Attorney General Javier Becerra joined a coalition of 20 attorneys general

urging the State Department and the Department of Justice not to allow these guns. They filed a lawsuit with a hearing scheduled in Seattle on Tuesday to prevent those blueprints from going online. And their rationale is that if those plans are available in one state because of their digital nature and the fact that they can be shared very, very easily, if one state has them, every state has them. I wonder, Tiffany, if despite the current state of the lawsuits, if Cody Wilson has already won this case, in a sense, because his original goal was to allow as many people as possible to

get access to the information required to make these 3D printed guns, to take that information out of the hands of a few manufacturers and kind of democratize it. And he seems to have successfully done that already. And the debate now is just how the world will regulate and deal with that reality. So Cody Wilson's website at the moment says that August 1st is the age of the downloadable gun. This is when it formally begins. And I think in some ways that's right because everyone is talking about this. Everyone is interested now in a gun that can be 3D printed. I think he's gotten the attention that he was looking for for this kind of technology.

And from here on out, I think he'll have plenty of people trying to help him make it happen, even though there are roadblocks being thrown up in his way. Tiffany, thank you very much. Thank you. On Tuesday evening, in response to the lawsuit from state attorneys general, a federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order blocking Cody Wilson from uploading his blueprints for 3D guns. For now. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Facebook said it has identified a coordinated online campaign to influence the midterm elections, including dozens of fake accounts and pages seeking to promote divisive social issues like abolishing ICE.

The company has already removed 32 accounts from Facebook and Instagram associated with the influence campaign, which it suspects may be linked to Russia. And... Senator Blumenthal. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your patience in being here, and thank you for the service of the many men and women who diligently seek to enforce our laws. Let me ask this panel, who here thinks that zero tolerance has been a success? You can just raise your hand if you think it's been a success. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump administration officials responsible for carrying out the president's immigration policies of zero tolerance and family separation were asked if the policies have been successful.

None said they were. Who thinks that the family separation policy has been a success? Raise your hand. One of the officials, Commander Jonathan White of the Health and Human Services Department, acknowledged that he had warned the White House beforehand about the psychological risks of separating children from their parents. Separation of children from their parents entails significant risk of harm to children. Well, it's traumatic for any child separated from his or her parents. Am I correct? I say that as a parent of four children. Well, it's traumatic for any child separated from his or her parents. Am I correct?

I say that as a parent of four children. There's no question. There's no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child. The White House ignored those warnings. So there was awareness that it would be the consequence, correct? You raised it. I did raise it. And I'm asking again, what was the answer? The answer received is that family separation was not a policy. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.