Regulating the Guns of the Future

The man who founded Defense Distributed, the Texas-based nonprofit that planned to legally release plans for downloadable guns this Wednesday, is not your average Second Amendment bro. Cody Wilson is more of a post-libertarian-crypto-techno-anarchist, whose mission is to bring knowledge—and the means to produce weapons—into the hands of the people.

To do that, Defense Distributed published blueprints for a plastic gun that anyone could download and build with a consumer-grade 3-D printer. But in 2013, the Obama-led State Department sued, citing this as a violation of regulations against international arms distribution. Last month, Wilson’s group won a settlement by successfully arguing that posting instructions on the internet is protected under the First Amendment’s safeguards on free speech. The company announced plans to release the info online this week.