By Matt Agorist
For generations, advocates of private gun ownership have been fighting exhaustively through political channels to protect their right to keep and bear arms. Gun owners even have one of the strongest lobby groups in Washington, the highly disappointing NRA. Yet over the years, gun rights continue to diminish in America, despite the constant political campaigns by the NRA and politicians who claim to support gun rights.
On Tuesday, a small victory was had in the Ninth Circuit as the court overturned Trump’s ban on 3D-printed gun blueprints. The appeals court’s ruling effectively lifts the Trump-era restrictions on exporting specs for 3D-printed guns.
As Courthouse news reports, the Ninth Circuit’s decision Tuesday overturned an injunction issued by a federal judge in Seattle in March 2020. U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik had blocked two rules that transferred regulatory control of 3D-printed gun files from the State Department to the Commerce Department. The rules also removed ghost gun blueprints from a State Department list of munitions that require a license to export.
The lifting of the ban on 3D-printed gun blueprints comes at a time when tyrannical gun control is at the forefront of the federal mission. Since before he was elected, president Joe Biden has promised more gun control, and he is doing everything in his power to keep this one promise — up to and including executive action — specifically targeting 3D-printing of guns. Or, as Biden refers to them, Ghost Guns.
The term “ghost gun” is meant to incite fear and is used by the anti-gun crowd as a slogan to sway the ignorant away from the fact that law-abiding citizens often customize their legal weapons with parts obtained online or manufactured in their homes. Some of the parts are drilled with machine tools or 3D printed and therefore do not have a serial number so it is harder for government to track weapons. Biden will make this legal activity for law-abiding gun owners — illegal.
However, as the Fast and Furious scandal — which happened under Biden’s tenure as VP — shows us, serial numbers on guns don’t stop anyone from committing crimes. The US gave serialized weapons to cartels, who in turn used them on Americans.
While alarmists claim that 3D-printed guns will be the end of humanity, the fact is that these plans have been online on torrent and dark web sites for years and we’ve yet to see a single person killed with one.
What’s more, as the gruesome murder-suicide on a college campus in Walnut Creek, California illustrates is that people don’t even need these plans if they want to make their own untraceable gun. Scott Bertics built the gun he used to shoot himself and Clare Orton without anyone knowing and entirely through legal measures.
Psychopaths who want to cause harm to others will cause harm to others using any means necessary. Limiting the ability for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves will never change this.
Limiting a population’s ability to own guns does nothing but shifts the balance of power away from the people and toward the ones with guns — government and criminals.
From the Armenian Genocide to the Nazi Holocaust to “Black Gun Codes” in America: throughout history, societies who have been disarmed by their governments have given way to massive bloodshed. This is still the case today in countries who’ve turned in their guns.
Depending on the current government, life in disarmed societies can go on peacefully for a while. However, in some cases, citizens — men women and children — are slaughtered by the millions.
Even when gun control seems to work in the short term, the scapegoatists are never satisfied. As we witnessed in the United Kingdom, politicians began going after knives as the “evil weapon” that no law-abiding citizen should ever need.
For those who don’t recall, the disarming of citizens took place in the US and was used as a means to slaughter blacks and Native Americans.
Upon the defeat of the confederacy in the Civil War, many southern states enacted “Black Codes” that barred the newly freed slaves from exercising their basic civil rights. One such example of these new laws was an act passed in the state of Mississippi that stated:
no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife, and on conviction thereof in the county court shall be punished by fine
After the passage of these laws, numerous studies concluded that the newly freed slaves had essentially been rendered defenseless against groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Disarming them, essentially made them slaves once again.
Guns — in the hands of good people — level the playing field against guns in the hands of bad people. It is this simple. Just imagine the power a 3D-printed gun would give a mother in an African village as warlords come through with machetes hacking off the limbs of children. With enough of the villagers having these guns, they could effectively defend themselves against large groups of tyrants even if they had automatic weapons.
