Court: ‘ghost gun’ plans can be posted online without State Department approval
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This reasoning is completely irrelevant as the law in question concerns international arms trafficking, not availability of guns to domestic criminals.
Nor did this ruling have anything to do with the Second Amendment or its interpretation. The question was whether or not guns could be exported from the country via the Internet. The State Department exercised its unilateral foreign policy prerogative to remove these prints from the US Munitions List as part of its role in implementing arms treaties. Other state and federal laws regulate who can actually make these guns and what they can do with them.
As an aside, it is already legal in the US to manufacture your own gun at home. There are countless sources of information in printed form that show you how to do that -- gun manufacture for personal use is 100% unregulated by any existing federal law and, as of 2018, in states other than California (Updated - see https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/homemade-gun....). It is the sale and distribution of guns that is regulated at the Federal level, and in states other than California.
The issue here is whether the state department can take down websites that show instructions for gun manufacturing, whereas no one is arguing that printed books with the same information would be subject to similar bans. But something about the internet makes a lot of regulatory bodies think that freedom of publication and prohibitions on prior restraint just don't apply there, and this ruling is one small step to setting that straight.
You also only have to apply for anything unless you become a manufacturer.
This is incorrect and is itself "bad advice". You do not need a serial number from the DOJ if you are not selling. But as has been stated in the comments, CA does have more stringent local rules and I'll update my comment to reflect that. I also added a link that explains the situation.
"Because the Undetectable Firearms Act makes illegal any firearm that cannot be detected by a metal detector, every firearm must contain some amount of metal. This means that a plastic 3D printed firearm must have a metal plate inserted into the printed body"
Um what? A plastic 3D printed gun has been used in a mass shooting? When?
A neutral term would be "blueprints for 3d printable firearms".
> It's built on the premise that authorities should approve and track firearm ownership
Assuming the definition would be "A gun without serial numbers, that cannot be easily tracked", as Wiktionary tells me, I don't see how that supposed premise is connected to it. To my knowledge, historically, weapons manufacturers marked their products regardless of the involvement of the authorities.
From the article:
* In 2015, federal courts stated that plans for weapons posted online needed State Department approval (I assume this is referred to as "export controlled weapons"?).
* In 2018, the State Department settled a lawsuit by ordering the removal of these plans from the list of export-controlled weapons?
* Directly after this settlement, 22 states (and D.C.) sued to keep those plans on the list of export-controlled weapons.
* In 2021, the State Department upheld their decision to remove the plans from the "export-controlled weapons" list.
Is that... mostly right?
>the appellate panel found 2-1 that a 1989 federal law prohibits courts from overruling the State Department’s decision to add or remove a weapon from the Munitions List
nit: As I understand it, they didn't uphold the decision, they decided the courts had no say in the matter, and could not overrule even if they wanted to.
Which makes the dissenting judge's opinion a little concerning, because he seems to have been trying a different decision making process -- the courts should have a say, because he wanted to have a say in the matter.
but I'm basing this on the one quote from the article.
Despite all the fight over distributing models for this junk, Defense Distributed also currently sells a genuinely dangerous CNC product[0] that is designed to automatically mill out so-called 80% receivers.
If you're not familiar with U.S. firearm law, the part of a gun that's legally considered a "firearm" is the frame or "receiver" that houses the other components. If you sell or produce one of these frames, you are selling or producing a firearm, whether it's made of plastic or metal. Companies get around this by selling incomplete receivers that still require machining, and Defense Distributed sells everything you need to finish the receiver and commit the felony yourself.
I don't actually know if there's actually any evidence of crimes (beyond production) committed with completed receivers but what I do know is that it has much more potential to create an actually reliable and dangerous firearm than 3D printing.
But as another poster pointed out, ammunition is a completely different matter and is really the gating factor in all of this.
> Nearly 300 children were shot and killed in 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shooti...
Then there's stuff like the FGC-9, with it's home made ECM barrel. Which was designed primarily for areas like europe where other firearm precursor parts are hard to get a hold of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Z9DpoGW7Y
However, it is possible to manufacture these parts yourself - look up the FGC-9.
Nice solution, thanks for the effort.
> Our European visitors are important to us.
So important that they'd rather not have me see anything than to ask if they can track me.
Do you still support these policy changes?
Not so much the first, though...
I live in California, why don't the folks who want guns GTFO themselves, instead of trying to change our laws through activist judges?
Hell, it's even an INTERNATIONAL thing - US guns end up enabling violence in Mexico, too!
Neither do criminals, drugs or marriages, however I don't propose giving people in the next state over control of those things.
I thought activist judges were bad?
2) Following the trail of sources from the link you provide eventually gets you to https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3?term=defen#15 which repeatedly states "the exact number remains disputed" and "is a controversy in the field." The document does not endorse ANY particular figure, and provides 108k, 500k, and 3M as estimates produced by surveys. There is no discussion of the validity or reliability of these surveys in this cursory overview; given that the numbers remain controversial and disputed I expect that both these properties are wanting. All the estimates come from academic sources, not governmental entities.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-...
The TL;DR is that we don't have reliable data.
Forget what he does. In this scenario, do you still support expanding the Supreme Court?
Either you see them, or you don't. If you don't see them, explaining why is an exercise in futility.
So I guess that solves it. We can have all the guns we want because God said so.
It's historically important, but not legally meaningful when talking about the later US Constitution of 1789.
I believe they are something you have to continually fight for, and that can only be secured by a functional government (which itself is something that requires constant maintenance), vs something you can truly secure for yourself.
And in the particular case of the second amendment, I believe we are in a situation where a "right" granted by our constitution impairs on a right to live freely, free from interference and harm from others, that I personally consider more basic and more essential. The Constitution doesn't have an amendment discussing a right to not get shot, but I don't think that makes it less important.
How is the latter "inalienable" and the former is just wishful thinking? The only answer I can find is "because some people in the 18th century wrote one of them down, but not the other."
The right to bear arms does not negate whatever right to safety you think you have. There are 300 million privately owned firearms in the US. Yet the odds of dying from a firearm homicide are quite small.
You are endorsing human rights abuses by oppressive governments like the Khmer Rouge because that government didn't extend the right to freedom from persecution to their subjects. You are suggesting that it was the Cambodian people's fault for not having a better government that granted them more rights.
"The government didn't extend the right to freedom from persecution" could be worded in any number of ways, such as "the government infringed on the inalienable rights of the people" but the fact that such an atrocity was committed says, to me, that claiming such rights are inherent, natural, or inalienable is rather useless. They clearly can be very easily violated. God or nature is not going to stop the violators, at least not during this life. So what good to the victims is a claim that the rights are inherent and a natural result of being born as a human?
Let's ask a different question: if there are inalienable rights, what is the complete set? Do you expect everyone to agree on what that set of rights is? If one person doesn't believe that guns are one of those, and another does, how do you break that tie? If there is truly a certain set of rights that's a law of nature, should everyone converge on the same set?
Each person has their belief of what they hold to be human rights. As human beings, it is the duty of each of us to protect what we respectively believe to be the rights of our fellow human beings.
A natural rights framework has the thumbprint of a lawyer along with outmodedly telological way of thinking that can only see a wrong as a "crime" but is willing to construct justifications for what they already believe.
But mixed in the principles isn't just accepting "is wrong because I said so" as a proof. Thus it has contrived post hoc cruft to achieve consistency with assumptions but also underlying ethical principles.
How does your theory account for the empirical observation that those rights are largely absent in much of the world?
So here's a question: has the absolutist interpretation of free speech and gun rights currently applied in the USA led to better outcomes than a more restricted interpretation? Well, let's see. We can compare the USA to other liberal democracies which do not acknowledge a near-absolute right to free speech, and have very strict gun laws -- like Germany, Canada, and New Zealand just to pick three. And if we do we find the USA is a dumpster fire compared to those countries, a place where white supremacism has run amok and schools must have active-shooter drills because of the ease with which nuts can get their hands on firearms.
So yeah, I'd say the more restrictive interpretation of human rights has, empirically, won out.
There are countless dictators and tyrants who agree with you on that.
Do you think you could pass an amendment expanding the second amendment had the court ruled more narrowly on it? I don't.
It's a thin line of interpretation currently, so we shouldn't pretend that there's overwhelming support for the status quo either. The reason these court challenges happen in the first place has been because large groups of Americans have chosen to try to restrict guns.
So let's keep having the conversation until we decide to fix the constitution.
THAT would have nuked the drug war from orbit, along with every other instance of modern federal over reach.
As far as I’m concerned the ruling was stupidly ruled, and very carefully crafted to not upset any apple carts.
ETA: reread your statement above, it was very easy for me to misconstrue “narrow” as in the vote tally.
> so we shouldn't pretend that there's overwhelming support for the status quo either.
I never said there was overwhelming support, I just said that there was a process in place to change if we want to. I don't like underhandedness, if enough people want to "fix" or eliminate the 2A, then someone one ought to propose a new amendment plainly stating as such and see how well that goes.
Depends on how narrowly. Overall I would consider an amendment strengthening the 2A more likely than removing the 2A.
There are relatively few states with strict gun laws and more constitutional carry states every year.
We're living in an era where foreign states are running disinformation campaigns that swing elections. I think it's time we start thinking about putting the Brandenburg v. Ohio genie back in the bottle.
The Alien and Sedition Acts outright caused an election of somebody in jail whose defense can be paraphrased as "yeah I wrote it but this law is clearly unconstitutional bullshit". It wasn't fit for its stated purpose.
We probably will never get there without having to play stupid political games in the meantime, given the state of our political parties.
Two more are ... questionable....
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/22/989119412/house-democrats-pas...
> Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
As well as:
> We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” ... We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
Are you seriously claiming that this is an "absolutist" interpretation?
I truly wonder what you suppose the marginal odds are that you or someone you love is killed in an event that your proposed action would prevent, vs the marginal odds that you or someone you love is killed as a somewhere-down-the-line butterfly effect of your trying to take that action?