The battle to stop 3D-printed guns, explained---By German Lopez

The battle to stop 3D-printed guns, explained
Policymakers are trying to stop the spread of firearms that could bypass federal and state laws.
By German Lopez
With 3D printers, getting a gun could be as easy as downloading it. A person could find a schematic for a firearm online, plug it into a 3D printer with the right materials, and boom — a gun is created on the spot. No background check required, no serial number to trace the gun if it’s used in a crime.
Some policymakers, however, are trying to prevent 3D-printed guns from going mainstream. On Tuesday, they landed a big victory: US District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle issued a restraining order that effectively halted a company’s plans to release 3D-printed gun designs online, arguing, “There is a possibility of irreparable harm because of the way these guns can be made.”
The order followed President Donald Trump’s comments raising concerns about 3D-printed guns. Trump had tweeted on Tuesday morning, “I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!”
The wide release of the 3D-printed gun blueprints, however, has only become an issue now in large part due to the Trump administration.
The previous administration, under President Barack Obama, had forced libertarian Cody Wilson to stop publishing these blueprints on his website, Defcad.com. Wilson sued the administration in hopes of republishing his schematics. The case seemed like an easy win for the government, with multiple courts initially ruling in the government’s favor.
But once the Trump administration came in, with its gun-friendly politics, the Justice Department abruptly agreed to a settlement — giving Wilson and his nonprofit, Defense Distributed, “essentially everything they wanted,” Andy Greenberg reported for Wired. The deal allowed Wilson to publish his blueprints starting in August, and paid him $40,000 for his legal costs.
A court, however, put Wilson’s plans on hold.
Yet even if the court order holds up, there’s a question of just how much this is delaying the inevitable. As 3D printing technology improves, experts are worried that these guns will become cheap, accessible, and, crucially for would-be criminals, untraceable. And as much as any government may try, it’s very hard to stop the flow of information on the internet — and, in fact, some of these 3D-printed gun designs are already available online right now.
Why 3D-printed guns are getting attention now
Concerns about 3D-printed guns have been around since the dawn of 3D printing, which essentially lets anyone plug in a blueprint and, with the right materials, the product is, well, printed out. (Mashable has a good explainer on 3D printers.)
But a few things have held back the fears from becoming reality. For one, 3D printing is fairly expensive. The most robust printers, which would likely be required for a demanding product like a gun, can cost thousands of dollars. And even if someone has a 3D printer, the quality of the printed product can be shoddy, and that person may not have the knowhow or blueprints to actually design and print out a functioning gun.
Some of those problems — cost and quality — will be solved over time, as 3D printing technology inevitably becomes cheaper and better.
The remaining problem is what Cody Wilson was interested in solving on his own: In 2013, Wilson created what, according to Wired, is believed to be the first fully 3D-printed gun. Once Wilson successfully tested it, he uploaded the blueprint to his website.
That’s when the Obama administration stepped in. Leveraging rules in the International Trade in Arms Regulations, the State Department essentially accused Wilson of exporting weapons without a license. This forced Wilson to take Defcad offline, and he faced the possibility of fines and jail time.
Wilson, however, did not give up. He sued the Obama administration, arguing that barring him from publishing the blueprints inhibited his First Amendment rights. Many outside observers believed Wilson would lose, with courts in preliminary rulings coming out against him.
For Wilson, this was not just a business opportunity — it was a political crusade. To get an idea of Wilson’s politics here, consider that he expected Hillary Clinton would win the White House in 2016 and, when she did, she would begin a mass-scale crackdown on firearms in the US. That would force Wilson, in his view, to take a stand, Wired reported:
If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his Defcad repository, regardless of the outcome of his lawsuit, and then defend it in an armed standoff. “I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style,” Wilson says calmly, in the first overt mention of planned armed violence I’ve ever heard him make. “Our only option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal mission, where we dumped everything into the internet,” Wilson says.
But Wilson never had to make 
his stand. Clinton did not win the presidency. And, in fact, the new administration, led by Trump, backed off its legal threats to Wilson entirely — letting him move forward with publishing his 3D-printed gun blueprints on Wednesday, August 1. The upcoming publication terrified lawmakers around the country. State attorneys general across the country pushed for courts to block the release of the blueprints. They succeeded, at least temporarily, on Tuesday, hours before the designs’ release. It’s unclear what comes next. Will the restraining order hold upon appeals? Will the Trump administration take any action on its own? Experts are seriously worried about 3D-printed guns So how worried should people be? To answer this, I asked four gun policy experts about 3D-printed guns. All of them said they are seriously concerned about these firearms’ potential. Cassandra Crifasi, from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, captured the general sentiment: “It’s bad enough that in the majority of states you can purchase a traditional firearm without undergoing a background check to ensure you are not prohibited. The availability of 3D-printed guns creates yet another loophole through which prohibited individuals could more easily obtain firearms.” In short, 3D-printed guns make it easy to bypass a host of state and federal laws. Printing a gun doesn’t require a background check or any documentation, offering a workaround for people who are legally prohibited from buying a gun now due to, say, a criminal record or history of mental illness. A 3D-printed gun can also be easily made without a serial number or anything that would make these firearms easily traceable if they’re used in a crime. This, experts predict, will make the guns very attractive to criminals. “My guess is that the first movers will be terrorists and insurrectionists who are determined to destroy our current system of government,” Philip Cook, a gun policy expert at Duke University, told me. “Over the longer term, if this form of manufacturing becomes cheap enough, it may become a major source of supply for street gangs and other criminals.” Guns are already pretty available in the US, with estimates suggesting that there are more firearms in America than there are people. And the country has much looser gun laws than comparable nations like the UK, Canada, and Japan. The concern is that 3D-printed guns will make firearms even more available by creating a means to bypass the US’s already weak gun laws with little effort. There’s good reason to believe that will lead to more gun deaths: A broad body of research has found that where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime: