ALBANY – A federal judge has issued a restraining order, temporarily stopping the on-line sharing of blueprints for 3D printed firearms and handguns, but the manufacturing or distribution of untraceable guns is already illegal and has been for 30 years.
New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood issued a statement regarding the court order, saying the ruling is “a major victory for common sense and public safety.”
However, it seems Underwood and other Attorneys General are trying to ban that which is already banned.
Chris W. Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, said the ban is already in place and has been since Ronald Reagan was President.
“Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years,” Cox said. “Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRA’s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.”
The controversy began in 2015 when a lawsuit was filed between Defense Distributed, an organization that specializes in open-source, downloadable 3D printed guns and the U.S. Government, in response to the U.S. State Department coming down on a ruling that successfully removed instruction manuals for building 3D printed guns from the web, arguing the manuals violate firearm export laws. The government also stated during the hearing they were “particularly concerned” these guns could be used on a global scale to cause harm to the American people.
The case was finally settled on June 29, 2018, in which the federal government reversed its ruling and made downloadable guns available for public distribution in any form, giving the general public with 3D printers access to build 3-D printed guns.
“As we argued in the suit we filed yesterday, it is – simply – crazy to give criminals the tools to build untraceable, undetectable 3D printed guns at the touch of a button. Yet that’s exactly what the Trump administration decided to allow,” Underwood said previously.