It’s entirely fair to claim or insist that 3D printing of guns is going to lead to more than the occasional problems of untraceability. That is indeed the claim being made by various gun control groups. Depending upon your Second Amendment views, you can view the ability to download plans and instructions as a good or a bad thing. But it was always obvious to me that courts would rule only one way – it’s legal, entirely so.
Americans are pretty much allowed to say what they like without prior restraint. Sure, there are laws about what you cannot say (libel, incitement to immediate violence, and the like), but they’re always applied afterwards. Anyone wanting to attribute blame or responsibility to those who post gun designs online will be equally able to do so. So, people can post such designs, and people can download them. What happens next, well, free speech is part of that tree of liberty that must occasionally be watered with blood.
The case against people being able to do so was never actually, in law at least, about Americans being able to do that in America. It was about the export of such designs, and here, the law is more than a little hinky. I’m surprised Snopes hasn’t quite got it right, to be honest. But maybe that’s my own life experience talking: I’ve had a uranium export license for a while, even one for the special type of computer chips you put into space rockets (the Russian one that went up to the space station with Pizza Hut emblazoned on the side contained some I’d dealt with).
As I say, the field can be more than a little odd. Pretty Good Privacy, PGP, could be downloaded from a U.S. server until the export control people got involved. That was an encryption program being exported, and it was too good to be allowed for export without being festooned with licenses. We couldn’t allow just anyone to have that. But exporting a book is just fine. So, the code was printed as a book, exported, retyped into a computer, and then people could download it from a server outside the U.S. That was all fine and legal. So, yes, it’s all a little odd.
There are also various levels and types of licenses, from the Commerce and State departments and then one level that requires pretty much every friendly government to agree before you can ship (yep, had one of them). But there’s also one saving grace in the whole system, one that simplifies and reduces the mockery we might make of the system.
Anything that’s generally-available retail doesn’t need a license. Because to insist upon requiring government permission to export something anyone can buy at Walmart is just being stupid, right? So, in the cases I listed above (industrial quantities of uranium, radiation-hardened chips), a license is still needed. Fast computers, which a few years back would need that super-difficult license, now need none at all, thanks to the electronics aisle at Best Buy. PGP and similar encryption are just fine to export today because that level of encryption is everywhere.
The legal argument against 3D gun designs being posted on the Internet has nothing at all to do with domestic U.S. availability; it was about export. Since it is now obvious that such designs, and the ability to 3D print, are going to become commonplace, there’s no reason to restrict export ability — just as with the more general retail availability argument.
It’s true that this could change the availability of guns and law enforcement’s ability to trace them and so on. We may or may not like this new world being ushered in. But there’s no point in trying to restrict it, because doing so just won’t work. So, we’ll not.
Gun control is an attempt to impose a monopoly on the ownership of certain types of weapons, and it’s a basic truism (Robert Bork was correct here) that every monopoly is eventually undermined by advancing technology. Which is exactly what is happening here.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
