Cody Wilson’s War [+ Interview]

On YouTube, Defense Distributed (DD) can seem like a troop of disgruntled teenagers. Their first uploaded video features the heavy, grungy metal of Unsane, and a sinister album cover—a limp hand drenched in thick, crimson blood—for a background.  In another video they sound like 14-year olds coming out to their parents as anarcho-syndicalists, calling their political opponents “international kleptocrats.”

And while DD is a much more serious political force than radical middle-school students, the cyber-gun-rights advocacy group is very young. Cody Wilson, a self-described anarchist considered the group’s leader, is 25 and already over a year into the project. Most other members’ physical appearances put them below 30, and some are still in college.

In a way, though, their roots are old. Though the non-profit organization’s focus is the proliferation of the materials and knowledge required to create firearms with 3D printers – a Star Trek-meets-black bloc expression of new age technology – the link on their site to their ‘Manifesto’ brings us to John Milton’s speech ‘For the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, dated 1644. In an interview I had with Wilson, he discussed how his ideas on revolution are Jeffersonian by nature, and some of his political inspiration comes from Proudhon’s letters to (our main-man) Bastiat in the mid 1800’s.  He often says that he is trying to bring back into vogue pre-20^th Century anarchism.

For a young law student whose focus is computer-aided digital manufacture, the nods to dusted philosophers almost seem out of place. He’s got a younger man’s sarcastic wit: the names of DD’s 3D-printable gun parts are often derived from famous gun control advocates, such as the Cuomo and Feinstein extended magazines. But though he speaks with a serious ‘F the system’ vibe – and gets really excited when he talks about how big of a finger his work is flipping to the ‘kleptocrats’ – he doesn’t come off ravenous or impatient, but manages to keep the cool of an older man who believes that his ideas will come to fruition in time.

Talking recently about the rise of Islamic Extremism since the Cold War, John Kerry bemoaned the difficulties presented to politicians by “this little thing called the Internet” and how its information-spreading powers make the world infinitely trickier to regulate. Wilson simply aims to realize that fear. In fact, his goal is to make it “actually harder to govern.”  It’s a pretty ingenious cat-and-mouse style fight, reliant on the fact that you can’t stop information on the Internet.

For example, when the State Department ordered him to take down his blueprints for a fully printable e-handgun, his initial response was: “We win.” Wilson doesn’t believe he violated the law when he uploaded the files for the one-shot, plastic Liberator pistol, but it doesn’t matter if he did or not, because 100,000 people downloaded his file. The information is out there now, and dozens of obscure file-sharing websites already carry his designs. Since his gun files cannot be erased forever from the Internet, Wilson has, in a sense, won.

This presents a conundrum for liberals, who often carry pro-free speech, pro-privacy and anti-gun opinions all at once. A few have responded in their traditional way: regulation. Legislators in California had plans to license 3D printers in order to curb their use for the manufacture of firearms. Steve Israel wants to ban the use of these machines to produce many gun parts. But this makes many progressives seem, well, anti-progress. Like Wilson was wont to point out in his interview, you can already make guns at home, 3D printers or no. The instructions are legally online. The only difference is the type of machinery you use to do so: hammers and fire, or plastic and electricity.

On the other hand, Wilson and his group have received accolades from such disparate groups as pacifist left-anarchists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, the liberals of Reddit and the Open Source Movement. Though some of these are encouraged by gun-freedom ideology, many are traditionally advocates for gun-control, but wary of giving the government the ability to regulate the uploading of internet files or the use of computer-aided manufacturing, even for the sake of limiting firearms. This power, they realize, could easily be used to stifle speech and production in the future.

But expanded, unregulated access to guns is a hard pill to swallow. When confronted with the possible consequences of his advancements – terrorists and criminals with easier access to guns – Wilson stressed that the infamous Liberator pistol that he created was a one-shot gun and impractical for school shootings. He pointed out that though the technology and know-how to mill even semi-automatics at home has existed for decades, the home-manufactured gun has not been the scourge of civilized society. And like any good anarchist, he didn’t fail to point out that our government is “literally arming terrorists” in the Syrian rebellion, is running one of the “greatest terrorist operation[s] in history” with the drone program and was founded in 1776 through gun-centric violent revolution.

Ironically enough, the entire concept for Wilson’s Liberator pistol came from a US Army proposal during WWII to drop one-shot ‘FP-45 Liberator’ pistols (this version was made of metal) into occupied Europe. The goal was not to arm a Polish or French rebellion, but to instill fear into the Nazi government’s heart that any civilian could be carrying a firearm. And they wouldn’t know who, since there would be too many possible civilian gun owners to keep track of all at once. Since the FP-45’s were never dispersed and were destroyed after the war, Wilson views himself as the logical culmination of this propaganda project. He loves the puzzle of issues that would be presented to bureaucrats and regulators everywhere if every citizen with a 3D printer (which are predicted to be relatively ubiquitous within decades) is a potential, unlicensed, unregistered gun owner. You can’t mentally screen or background check every civilian. His future for guns would be anarchic and uncontrolled, and that’s just how he likes it.

We have every right to be scared. The sense of powerlessness is overwhelming. But if we like free speech, what is there we can do? Many of free information’s most vociferous advocates have already jumped on Wilson’s wagon, and stated their hopes that regulators’ heavy hands stay away from projects like DefCad, a for-profit subsidiary of DD, which will use First Amendment loopholes and some techniques publicized by Google to work around State Department bans and serve as a search engine for 3D firearm files. Perhaps in several years the main tenets of gun debates – background checks, magazine sizes, semi-auto bans – will be things of the past not because they are settled (and if Congress is as useful as ever, they probably won’t be), but because they are irrelevant in a world where the government no longer has the power to meaningfully regulate civilian gun ownership.

Some of us perceive that future to be dystopian. Wilson frames it as a gain not only for freedom, but as a gain for equality. Instead of an elite class of people called the government monopolizing gun ownership, civilians will be equal in their capacity for violence and self-defense. In a throwback to pre-20^th century anarchist minds, he chalks it up as a victory for the ‘subjects’ in their long battle against their ‘sovereigns’.

As subjects, our future with the wide-spread, downloadable gun is unquestionably and quickly arriving. In a world with a 3D-printer in the average American household, regulations against owning anything will be hard to enforce. Biological printers are churning out blood vessels and ears. As the technology improves individuals will have the capability to make things only factories can now. The issues with how the creative destruction of 3D printing will effect manufacturing, medicine and regulations illustrate the general troubles that officials will face in the 21^st Century. To some, the bad thing about this development is the lack of governmental control over individual actions. To others, the good thing is the lack of governmental control over individual actions. Freedom has the possibility to be violent and damaging – and this experiment acknowledges that. But control and state intervention have demonstrated their destructive capacities throughout history as well. Nothing exemplifies this polarizing divide more than the gun. Firearms lead to ‘needless death’ but also ‘prevent tyranny’, depending on who you ask. They kill and save lives. And now, thanks to Cody Wilson, we can print them. How our sovereigns prepare for this technological revolution may define how they treat speech, information, expression and digital manufacturing for generations to come.

Read the condensed interview here and Read the full interview here