Originally Posted by
DigitalChaos
I’ve been extremely close to this whole thing for the last 5 years. I’ve invested time and resources into helping the foundation of the “digital firearm”. I’ll tell you whatever you want.
The first thing to know is that almost 100% of the last week or two of news coverage is saturated with factually incorrect info, including everything politicians are saying. This is about any digital file that can tell a machine how to produce a firearm. 3D printers, milking machines, CNC machines, etc. There was only one 3D file on DefDist’s site, but politicians want it ALL censored.
Specifications on firearms have always been available to the public. Hell the AR-15 specs were put into the public domain by our own military. This is just like how the Anarchist Cookbook was primarily built from public info, like Army manuals. The info isn’t illegal, the act of producing things with the info is.
We already know that code qualifies as speech. It’s been through court. We know that machine instructions are nothing more than a digital representation of the specifications that are public. It’s more speech. This is why the federal govt decided to settle they 5yr legal situation. They couldn’t win it, and it would have turned into a SCOTUS ruling that wasn’t in their favor.
But now state govts are acting like China and trying to block a single website. It’s ridiculous. Especially when you realize that those files are all over the internet. With any luck, these idiots will produce the SCOTUS rulings that, once again, says code is speech.
And to touch on your original question: yes the one 3D file that DefDist has, the Liberator, is a single shot novelty. All the panic over it is uninformed and intentional marketing. Even the “omg can’t be detected by metal detectors” bullshit is dumb because A: the design includes a huge chunk of metal for legal compliance, and B: ammunition shows up very clearly on metal detectors.