The law can address this situation properly given a wary enough Supreme Court, where this will end up, but it’s not likely to matter anymore than the laws already against illegal gun ownership. The real issue, and cause, for gun violence past, present, and still to come, through DIY means, is what it’s also been. The proclivity of certain human beings, mostly men, and mostly mentally damaged from childhood, violent influences, warped localized cultures, and preexisting derangement, is the root of violence and paranoia towards our fellow man. Cody Wilson, followed by his enabling lawyers and founders, is a poster child example of how disturbed a person can be to take his poisonous vision to an endpoint of such nihilistic proportions.
Cody Wilson makes digital files that let anyone 3-D print untraceable guns. The government tried to stop him. He sued—and won.
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.
He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.