AUSTIN (Nexstar) — A federal judge in Austin has denied two emergency motions that aimed to block the release of a blueprint for 3D-printed guns.
Cody Wilson, through a private technology development nonprofit called Defense Distributed, originally released the plan in 2013. He said at the time that after 100,000 downloads, the U.S. State Department went to court to stop it.
Last month, the feds reached a settlement to allow Wilson to re-publish the digital documents, which his website indicated he planned to do on Aug. 1.
Three gun safety groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, Inc., and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed two restraining orders this week in a last-ditch effort to prevent the files from being posted. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman denied both emergency motions on Friday afternoon.
Congressman Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, said allowing anyone to access the necessary information to print a weapon is not an accomplishment that tech-savvy Austin should be proud of.
“No one contemplated this, certainly not the authors of the Second Amendment in the musket era,” he said Friday, calling the day’s developments “truly alarming.”
The head of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT, said the group supports the Second Amendment but has more questions he wants answered before law enforcement officers come across this newer kind of weapon more often.
“Many crimes have been solved through the serial number of a gun and by the gun changing hands and going through the different phases of its life,” CLEAT executive director Charley Wilkison said.
“Ballistics will still tell you and play a role but at the same time, we don’t know what ballistics will be like on these new weapons,” he added. “So it brings in too many questions to just say, ‘Yes, start wholesale manufacturing weapons in your garage and sell them to folks,’ and put no kind of registration or acknowledgment.”
“Basically you wouldn’t even need a receipt,” Wilkison continued.
Austin police said the department approaches traditional guns the same as it does 3D-printed guns.
“I don’t see that there’s any difference for the Austin Police Department in any enforcement capacity. We’re going to treat 3D-printed firearms the same as any firearm,” Lt. Lee Rogers said.
Police said they were not worried about more weapons in the community as a result of more people having access to 3D-printed guns.
“The cost of a 3D printer is so much higher than the cost of a conventionally manufactured firearm,” Rogers explained.
Wilson did not respond to an interview request on Friday. An attorney for Wilson and Defense Distributed declined to comment. In a 2013 interview, Wilson said he thought 3D printing was going to be instructive in helping change attitudes about intellectual property.
“Let’s have the battle of what the internet means and what the future of technology means. I’m interested in having that conversation right now,” he said in 2013.
That conversation is bubbling back to the surface now.
Kay Bell and Brittany Glas contributed to this report.