U.S. officials have agreed to an “exceptionally dangerous” settlement of a lawsuit involving the release of 3-D gun printing software, according to a top Democratic lawmaker.
“[I]t will promote global availability of such technical information and the consequent unrestricted manufacture of firearms,” Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs panel, wrote in a Friday letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
State Department officials agreed to ease restrictions on the blueprints for certain kinds of 3-D printable plastic firearms. The agreement settles a three-year long legal battle with gun rights activists and Defense Distributed, a company that develops 3-D printable firearms schematics. Engel worries that the spread of primarily plastic weapons will undermine security.
“With these stealthy weapons in the hands of terrorists, lone wolf terrorists, or mentally unstable individuals, it will become virtually impossible to protect anyone from gun violence,” he wrote to Pompeo.
State Department officials made the settlement in light of pending regulations, currently being reviewed in the Commerce Department, that would eliminate the restrictions that U.S. officials previously used to bar Defense Distributed from publishing the 3-D printing information.
“[T]hese proposed regulations would eliminate the . . . requirement to obtain U.S. Government authorization to post to the Internet technical data related to certain firearms and related items that are commercially available, such as those at issue in this case,” a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
The settlement covers the schematics for semi-automatic firearms that are “widely-available” in stores around the country.
“It was determined that certain firearms and related items that are widely available for commercial sale, and technical data related to those items, is of a type that does not offer a critical military or intelligence advantage to the United States,” the spokesperson said.
That decision drew applause from gun rights activists who helped Defense Distributed sue the U.S. government. “For years, anti-gunners have contended that modern semi-automatic sport-utility rifles are so-called ‘weapons of war,’ and with this settlement, the government has acknowledged they are nothing of the sort,” the Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb said in a July 10 statement published by an attorney on the case.
Engel maintained that the State Department had short-circuited the process for adopting new regulations and urged Pompeo to suspend the implementation of the settlement. “It stretches credulity to believe that release of this information is in the U.S. interest,” he wrote.
