Here I reiterate and discuss in further detail the line for "Making" of firearms and restricted weapons that I began talking about in "Weapons Control". If knives or other hand weapons should be restricted in manufacture, the same concepts would apply there as well.
Is an object you create "Speech" as defined by the 1st Amendment? Are some objects speech and some objects not? Is distributing objects you create the same as distributing newspapers or magazines? Do objects have to be art to be protected? Who decides if something is art or not? Political speech is typically said to be especially protected under the 1st Amendment, a significant number of people would argue that a rifle engraved with "Ultima Ratio Populus" is pretty political speech.
Relatedly, how far back should guns be regulated in the production stream? Where is the line between a block of metal (or plastic) and a firearm? When does a person's 1st amendment right to make get overruled by the safety requirements of regulating firearms?
If I create a plan drawing for a firearm receiver, can we agree that would be protected speech? Now let's say I digitize the drawing, just as I'm digitizing this writing. Now I have a 3d digital representation of my drawing. Lets say I send that file to you, Sill equal to speech, right? I could publish it on the internet and it's really no different then a DeviantArt post. Should 3D drawings or plans be more regulated then any other digital object? For example a blog post about incredibly dangerous chemicals. Let's say someone downloads my 3d drawing and feeds it into a capable 3D printer or CNC milling machine capable of making it a functional gun part. When does their print become a firearm that needs to be regulated? 1%, 50%, 80% (the legal limit at the moment) 100%?
Now let's go back a step or two and say that I print out a book with blueprints on how to make a receiver. I publish the book and sell it by mail. Someone follows my directions and using hand tools and a block of metal/plastic/whatever. Let's say it takes 100 cuts co create a functional receiver (the component that is legally a firearm). At which cut does the block of metal become a gun? The current BATFE standard is cut 81 or 81%. Who is responsible for the firearm created? The people who made the plans or the people who cut the metal? Is there a difference between these two examples?
My argument is that while we should prohibit and punish prohibited persons from owning guns, even homemade ones; that it's pretty difficult to prevent people from making guns. Search forLuty sub-machinegun for an example. My partner argument is that if you restrict precursor parts, like California is probably going to do, you aren't going to prevent the determined from getting a gun, you are going to prevent the law-abiding from getting a gun part for a gun they probably have already bought legally. Further you need to define where a precursor part or making begins and understand that the line could be used to punish people for simple lengths of pipe.
If I was creating the laws, I'd allow people to create non-NFA firearms without other restriction, but require them to be serialized and registered if they are transferred from the original maker. I'd also be OK with restrictions on the number you can transfer to others in a year (something like one a month) before you have to abide by the laws and regulations for gun manufacturers. Of course I'd subject these to the same rules I think we should have for other firearms transfers, specifically background checks and registration.
I would not restrict plans or 3D print files or other information on making guns or other weapons as freedom of expression is more important then trying to hold back the tide of information when we are already a meter underwater. This information exists. People can intuit and create firearms from the basic concept. Even if we removed firearms from the public, the information would exist. We live in a world where people grew up freezeframing VHS movies to copy details of props because they want to make their own. If firearms exist anywhere in media, people will reinvent the wheel to create them. Not to mention the oral history of how they work. The genie is out of the bottle, all that is being done is refining the process.
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