As legislation struggles to keep pace with technology, the Internet is the modern Wild West. For the past two years, Defense Distributed has been embroiled in a legal showdown at the intersection of the growth of the 3-D printed weapons industry and Internet free speech.
“Let’s be honest, there are so many CAD [computer-aided design] websites online, people have been sharing their gun culture online for a long time,” Cody Wilson, director and co-founder of Defense Distributed, told MintPress News.
“Even if there was an ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] for the Internet, a regulatory agency tasked with only policing the gun culture on the Internet, you could still see how that agency could not keep up with the spread and the speed of human thought.”
The former University of Texas School of Law student has gained notoriety in the tech world for his involvement in a series of controversial digital projects, including Dark Wallet, an application to make bitcoin transactions anonymous and untraceable, and his efforts to spread firearms blueprints to the public via downloadable files. In January, Wired named Wilson one of the “most dangerous people on the Internet right now,” putting him in league with Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
To say he’s a gun rights advocate may be an understatement. But that, mixed with an affinity for anarchist philosophy and technology, informs his “goal,” as described by Wired, “to let anyone create a lethal plastic weapon with a click anywhere in the world, and in doing so demonstrate how new technologies can render the entire notion of regulation obsolete.”
Wilson has his hands in open-source firearms plans which would allow anyone from India to Indianapolis to “print” a gun as long as he or she has access to the Internet and a 3-D printer. He’s designing programs to make cryptocurrency transactions untraceable, ungovernable and untaxable. And, through all of this, he’s found himself at the eye of a legal storm that’s perhaps less about the Second Amendment and untraceable weapons, and more about the First Amendment, digital rights and the public domain.
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http://www.mintpressnews.com/212386-2/212386/
In the world envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, Wilson would be a hero, not a villain.
But somehow, our world has become something else entirely:
I watched for a while, and then slowly walked back toward my car. As I did, it occurred to me there were factors in play here other than just guns and militia per se. For some reason the whole event reminded me of the following observation made by Audre Lorde many years ago:
"The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
The legend of the Minutemen implied that guns were tools of liberation, and as a nation we had previously promoted the private ownership of firearms partly because, in the words of the Second Amendment, they were “necessary to the security of a free State”.
But in reality guns are tools of subjugation, oppression, regime change, and counterinsurgency. They can never “dismantle the master’s house” because as one of the master’s chief tools, they are essential to the very building and maintenance of that house.
The proof of this is writ large in America’s history. How did our ancestors clear North America of its original inhabitants? By giving them guns, liquor, and blankets contaminated with smallpox or the measles. And how do we continue to subjugate the peoples around the world whose natural resources and/or land we covet? By giving them guns, drugs, and HIV/AIDS. Would we have given them guns if firearms were tools of liberation? Of course not.
Every instance in which we gave guns to so-called “freedom fighters” was motivated by a desire for regime change and subjugation. And the result nearly every time was a new regime which oppressed its own people so that our extractive businesses could siphon off the wealth of that nation while its American-armed new rulers kept the local population under control. It was a well-honed strategy which worked everywhere, including right here in the good ol’ U S of A.
[From my novella No More Patriots @ http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Patriots-Howard-Uhal-ebook/dp/B00X2SU5Q6/]
Texans now can "open carry", but I doubt it will make us any safer.
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