Are 3D-printable guns a burning issue or a sideshow?

In 2013, when Cody Wilson’s Defense Distributed organization published open-source plans for a 3D-printable handgun that could be made entirely out of plastic, we were promised a science-fiction dystopia of irresponsible, deadly urban gunplay by maniacs. This vision has, of course, been successfully realized in Toronto this summer. But so far 3D-printable weapons have had nothing to do with it.

Despite some progress in home-scale automated manufacturing, criminals continue to depend on traditional mass production for instruments of random violence. It turns out to be inherently difficult for in- dividuals or small groups to compete with factories and specialists at fabricating complicated mechanical items. In retrospect, this should not have been too surprising — if, indeed, anyone is surprised.

Last month, Wilson and Defense Distributed returned to headlines in the U.S. after it reached a remarkable legal settlement with the federal Department of Justice. Defense Distributed, despite the fancy-sounding name, is essentially a website: it exists largely to distribute various computer design files for homemade guns and gun parts. Many of these items would be illegal to sell in the U.S. and elsewhere, but are not necessarily unlawful for personal private fabrication.

Incidentally, the all-plastic “Liberator” handgun, which is risky to fire and which even Wilson admits is of limited practicality, would be inherently illegal to possess in the United States as well as in Canada, since weapons capable of eluding a metal detector are outlawed. (The plans for the gun came with a manual that advises U.S. builders to attach a piece of steel to the weapon with epoxy in order to comply with the law.)

The Justice Department contended that Wilson’s distribution of gun schematics to anybody with a computer — wherever they happened to live — violated gun export rules under the government’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Gun advocates pointed out that this looked a lot like prior restraint on expression in the form of computer code, and Defense Distributed organized a lawsuit — an interesting linking-up of the U.S. Constitution’s First and Second Amendments.

Under the settlement, the federal government seems to have backed down precipitously, agreeing to permit the publishing of Defense Distributed’s plans and even contributing a mite to its legal costs. This does not mean that the gates to this machine-readable technical information are wide open — yet. Some state governments are moving to oppose the feds’ ITAR surrender, and a temporary injunction against Defense Distributed has been handed down in a

CRIMINALS CONTINUE TO DEPEND ON TRADITIONAL MASS PRODUCTION.

federal court.

Nonetheless, the hubbub brought out Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Ralph Goodale, who told reporters Tuesday that 3D-printed guns are a “critical issue” for law-enforcement worldwide. and who wondered, in a nervous-grandpa way, how soon individuals would be able to “photocopy a weapon.” It is surely a little early to be imagining a day when any householder can saunter up to the kitchen replicator and say “A cup of Earl Grey, hot, and one Barrett M82 with bipod, please” — much less speculating on how the level of violence might be different, if it is, in such a world. As a federal minister, Goodale arguably has a myriad of “critical issues” higher in urgency than this.

The truth is that Canada and the U.S. alike have had gun hobbyists, amateur and professional, messing around in basements for a good long time. It is perfectly legal in Canada to make a non-restricted firearm for your own use, assuming you have a licence to possess it once you are finished making it, and 3D printing might make this more convenient and less expensive.

If you wanted to make a firearm in the restricted category, such as a handgun, you would need a possession licence, a governmentissued serial number, and a firearms business licence, whether you intended to sell the gun or not. If the gun was of no recognized make — i.e., if it were some fantasy weapon you had downloaded the plans for — this would also involve submitting the receiver for a pretty fussy physical inspection. But there are gunsmiths with legitimate manufacturing licences who will help hobbyists with the scratch-building of customized, appropriately registered restricted weapons.

And there is, obviously, some purely illegal manufacture of prohibited guns in ordinary machine shops — which are perfectly capable of building clones of glamorous automatic weapons for gangsters at a low price, and without 3D printing equipment. The truth is that Defense Distributed is famous only because Wilson, its moving spirit, is an American trying to establish the fundamental legality of spreading gun knowledge and sharing manufacturing plans in an above-board way. When it comes to specs, blueprints, and CAD documents for potentially unlawful guns, Wilson’s site is not even the tip of the iceberg — much less some sort of threat to smash the bulkheads of our peaceable social order and personal safety.