Today, Explained - Ready, print, fire

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

Today was supposed to be a big day for people who wanted to make their own guns with 3D printers. But last night, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily banned a man named Cody Wilson from sharing blueprints for his weapons online. WIRED’s Andy Greenberg makes his own AR-15 and explains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options. Hey, Summer Intern Bree, it's me, it's Sean, the host of Today Explained. I think you're just outside at the desk, son. I'm here in the studio, and I wanted to call you just maybe one last time to tell you that Uber is moving forward. They've got a bunch of new

features in their app to prove it. And you can learn more about them at uber.com slash moving forward. I hope I can catch you by the middle of the show. Andy Greenberg from Wired knows a lot about 3D guns. I started writing about 3D printed guns in 2012 before they even existed. I'm told that you have a 3D gun. Is that true? No, I don't have one. I did, I made a,

I wouldn't say it's a 3D printed gun. Some people call it a ghost gun. I made the lower receiver of an AR-15, which is the only part of an AR-15 that's regulated. And then you buy all the other parts and you have essentially an AR-15, which is the only part of an AR-15 that's regulated. And then you buy all the other parts, and you have essentially an unregulated, untraceable, semi-automatic, fully metal firearm. It is a weird feeling to build a semi-automatic rifle

in the back room of Wired's office. And nobody really knows what I'm doing. I'm not interacting with any government or regulatory people at all. I'm not showing ID to anyone. There are no background checks, nothing. And then I end up with this very lethal and powerful rifle. It's, you know, kind of a finicky process if you've never done it before, but it's not that hard to figure out. And you've got a, you know, a ghost gun, as they call it. Did you shoot your ghost gun?

Sure. You know, we had to test it, and I think we put, I don't know, at least 100 rounds through it just to test if, and I think we put, I don't know, at least 100 rounds through it just to test it and it worked fine. I'm not like a technically skilled person. I'm not like a shop class kind of guy at all. And I, you know, I don't know if a 10-year-old could do it, but certainly somebody who's as unskilled as me can. And probably there are minors who are fully capable of this kind of thing. Today was supposed to be a big day for people who want to print their own guns. But last night, a federal judge in Seattle blocked a guy named Cody Wilson from sharing his 3D gun blueprints with the world.

But to be clear, we were asking for a nationwide temporary restraining order putting a halt to this outrageous decision by the federal government to allow these 3D downloadable guns to be available around our country and around the world. But this one guy, Cody Wilson, is fighting for the right to print guns. He's fighting for it in courts all across the country right now. Andy, how did the whole 3D gun thing start? So in 2012, I saw that this guy named Cody Wilson had declared that

his group, which he called Defense Distributed, was going to make the world's first fully 3D printed gun. I expected when we started what we did that everything that could be said would be said about us from, you know, sociopathic, dangerous, you know, homicidal maniacs. But we thought, well, there's just enough of a chance that it is possible and worth doing and that it could really be some game-changing level stuff that I went for it. And that struck me as like a kind of brilliantly devious idea, like this idea that if you can make anything, what if you can make a lethal weapon? I'm a security writer, so I thought about the dangerous implications of that and followed that project until May of 2013 when Defense Distributed succeeded at creating the world's first fully 3D printed gun.

And I was there when they test fired it in Texas. We've come to this firing range in a rural backwater just south of Austin. And the gun is over here. It's been assembled now and is going to be tested for the first time. And what did it look like? Well, it's this little one-shot pistol called the Liberator. I'm sure most listeners have actually seen it by now. It's become almost kind of iconic, and it's been in museums. It's been downloaded more than 100,000 times in just its first days online.

It's kind of this blocky, plastic, one-shot pistol. And were people immediately being able to print this thing everywhere? If you had a 3D printer, you could essentially download this file. Actually, it's a collection of files for every part of the gun, from the barrel to the handle to the frame and the hammer and trigger and everything. And then bit by bit, create this gun and assemble it at home with no oversight or regulation at all. Did people see these first 3D plastic guns as a toy or a joke? There were a lot of people who dismissed the Liberator, the first fully 3D printed gun, because it was made of plastic. And that scares some people because it's untraceable,

but other people kind of laughed it off because a plastic gun isn't very durable. They did sometimes explode, and police in several instances released videos of 3D printed plastic guns exploding when you fire them, in part, I think, to scare people off from trying very reasonably. The catastrophic failure of that firearm comes about because there are no standards around the manufacture of these weapons. So Cody, you've been described as a troll, as a genius, as a provocateur, as a champion of the Second Amendment, and as one of the 15 deadliest people on the face of the earth. Tell me a bit more about Cody Wilson.

Who is he? Cody Wilson is the founder of this group, Defense Distributed, which is a kind of gun access advocacy group. Cody is a former law student at the University of Texas in Austin, and he's really devoted to this cause of trying to allow anyone anywhere to have access to a gun or to make their own gun even. He would call himself a, I don't know, a radical libertarian or even an anarchist. He doesn't hide the fact that he is an extremist on these issues. So this is the firearm in commerce. None of this is serialized. You can order this right through the mail.

If you're 12 years old, you can buy it online, which I think is a thing of beauty. At a time where the United States government was thinking about banning assault weapons and further restricting the ownership of firearms in society, we thought, you know what, we can be more effective than politicians in a certain degree. We can even blunt the paradigm by publishing the plans to an infinitely replicable gun on the internet. And so we thought, okay, instead of becoming a politician or voting or doing the traditional forms of political action,

we could just attack. He does absolutely see crippling gun control as an end in itself. That's one of his big goals. But he also sees it, I think, as a kind of important demonstration of a new era where technology trumps law and politics and the government becomes kind of obsolete.

That's kind of just one demonstration of the anarchist utopia or dystopia that he's trying to usher in. Is it the end of gun control? Like, I think it is in an essential sense. And how's that going, this crusade he's on to get everyone a gun, to get everyone the liberator. So when he posted the file for the first 3D printable gun that he invented in 2013, the State Department very soon after sent him a letter threatening him with prosecution for violating export control laws. They were saying it was as if he had shipped his gun physically to another country by putting the digital files for it on the internet, which reaches all over the world. And because he had ostensibly violated export controls,

he faced big fines and even maybe jail time. And he complied with their order to take down the gun files. But then he quickly, a couple of years later, answered with his own lawsuits against the State Department and the federal government. Claiming a violation of his right of free expression and saying that similar plans have long been available on the web. As long as you have the right to keep and bear arms, you have the right to make them. And arguing that they had violated his First Amendment's right to share whatever code essentially he wants to share.

So he took what seemed like a Second Amendment issue and made it a First Amendment issue. Right, and I think that's what they essentially argued in their lawsuit, was that by trying to control people's access to these files, it wasn't just a violation of Americans' right to bear arms, but a violation of their free speech that they should be allowed to share this data because, as they say, code is speech. So when he had to take his blueprints down for the Liberator, did that actually do anything? When someone tries to pull a YouTube video down, it just echoes and pops up in 50 different places, right? I think that probably did happen to some degree with the Liberator, but it also

really did function as a blockade of defense distributed projects because they wanted to create and post other gun files and actually build a whole library of other printable and gun files that you could download and fabricate at home. And they were not able to because they were being threatened with these export control violations. So Cody Wilson files this countersuit. What happens next? The lawsuit started under the Obama State Department,

and this was now the Trump State Department. The State Department gave up and settled the case, paid back even $40,000 of defense distributors' legal fees and gave them pretty much everything they wanted. Allowing the company to publish digital schematics for 3D printed guns. His website promises instructions by Wednesday, but some are up already for all kinds of firearms, from handguns to assault-style rifles. So why did the government capitulate to Cody and his lawyers?

You know, we don't really know. I asked them for a comment, in fact, in 2013, when they first threatened defense distributed with export controls. And they've never wanted to talk about this. And then I asked the Trump State Department why they capitulated just in the last couple of months, and they also didn't want to talk about it. The State Department doesn't want to talk about printing 3D guns, and Cody Wilson doesn't really want to talk about it either. I reached out and asked him for an interview last night.

He wrote back and said, you'd railroad me, not a chance. Bad news for Cody, the courts do want to talk about this. I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's next on Today Explained. Blank. The call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording, you may hang up or press one for more options. Bree, what's the deal? I wanted to call you again

to see if you'd maybe pick up your phone this time so I could tell you that Uber is moving forward. They've got a bunch of new features on their app so you can take the stress out of your pickup situations. One of them is called Pickup Notes. You could be like, hey, I'm the person on the sidewalk who never picks up her phone. And you can learn more at uber.com slash moving forward. And I also wanted to ask you if you had any tattoos. And I don't know what you were going to say, but I would volunteer that like I have two and I don't really know why I have them other than like the people closest to me in my life have a habit of peer pressuring me into things that I don't want to do.

But that the latest episode of Vox's new Netflix show Explained is all about tattoos and the rich history of them and how all of these different cultures and and traditions are sort of merging right now and the whole world is just covering itself in tattoos and i can't wait to watch it and i hope i hope you enjoy it too anyway i'll try again at the end of the show bye today was supposed to be a big day for people who wanted to print their own guns. Today was supposed to be a big day for Cody Wilson and his company Defense Distributed. They were going to be able to start freely sharing all sorts of different 3D gun blueprints with the world again. But a federal judge in Seattle blocked them late last night and a bunch of states are fighting them too. Yeah, just in the last few days, New Jersey and Pennsylvania did sue Defense Distributed with the intent of blocking the website with this library of digital gun files. And I'm not sure how effective

that is, you know, just to block the website in a state or two when anyone can use a VPN to get around those blocks. But it is, I think, these sort of state level lawmakers and attorney generals last attempts to block this change from happening. So where does this stand now? I mean, Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed can't share a bunch of 3D gun blueprint files on their site. But if you really wanted to find the files to print his original gun, the Liberator, it probably wouldn't be that hard, right? Because courts and lawmakers who worry about this can't keep up with the Internet. Well, there's no question that lawmakers were way behind on this issue. And then, you know, even in 2013, when they did exist, it was really hard to find any lawmakers who really knew what to do about this or took it seriously.

Chuck Schumer and Steve Israel in New York did talk about trying to control 3D printed guns. A terrorist, someone who's mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage. And eventually they renewed the Undetectable Firearms Act. But that was not really the issue. It's true that fully 3D printed guns are made of plastic and thus undetectable. But it's more about the fact that you can make them in the privacy of your garage and that they're unregulated entirely and untraceable, that is the issue. And the fact that they can go through a metal detector is just one aspect of them.

And the fact that AR-15s, the only part of them that's regulated is this lower receiver that can easily be 3D printed, that's something that only a few lawmakers have started to really think about when you make that lower receiver and then just assemble the rest of the gun from other sources and have this untraceable weapon. People call that a ghost gun. And there are ghost gun control laws in California. People are talking about one in Connecticut, in New Jersey, that would make it illegal to own essentially a gun without a serial number. And that seems like more of a threat to the 3D printing gun crowd.

How isn't this a bigger deal right now that a kid at a school with a 3D printer could potentially make a gun in the library or make one at home and bring it in? Well, certainly. I mean, I do think that, you know, minors are one group that we should think about in terms of the danger of home fabrication of guns, but also the mentally ill and felons and essentially everyone who can't buy a gun. I mean, to be clear, it's pretty easy to buy a gun in America unless you're in one of those categories. So those are the categories for which this matters most for gun control advocates,

those exact categories of people who can't easily just go out and buy a gun today. What do people like Cody Wilson say about those issues, about people who aren't allowed to buy guns legally now having access to them? Cody Wilson, when you ask him about that, he basically says if it does happen, it just doesn't bother him enough to stop him from this project of trying to cripple all gun control

and win this battle against gun control advocates if we make a second amendment argument it's all the way it's to the limit but i don't like to make it about the second amendment or gun control at all it's more radical for us like there are people from all over the world downloading our files and we say good there have been mass shootings with homemade weapons now in some cases by emotionally disturbed people in california last year kevin Jansen Neal used a homemade metal assault rifle to kill his wife and four others, getting around a court order meant to block his access to a firearm. So it's not, you know, an entirely hypothetical or, you know, zero probability

or even low probability thing that these homemade weapons could be used for awful kinds of violence. People have been able to make weapons forever. That's a dumb way of saying that. No, that's true. But you know, but it's true, right? So I mean, people can make pipe bombs, they can make Molotov cocktails, they can make all sorts of destructive things. What makes this different? Well, I think that it's not fundamentally different. People have made guns at home for a long time. People have made ghost guns. They've made their own lower receivers of AR-15s at home

for a long time. It's just getting easier and the process is getting cheaper. We're moving in this direction where, you know, this kind of science fictional and rather scary future where anyone can make a gun at home. Andy Greenberg is a reporter for Wired. I'm Sean Ramos for MTHIS Is Today Explained. Moment of truth, Brie. All has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system at the tone please record your message when you've finished recording you may hang up or press one for more options brie i i hope you don't listen to your voicemails because they're all going to say the same thing and that is that uber is moving forward and you can find out more at uber.com slash moving forward.

And, you know, I'll just leave it there. You're a heck of an intern. Thanks for all you do. Bye.