Zé Carioca has been arrested in Rio das Pedras, a municipality in São Paulo, Brazil. His investigators, part of an operation called “Shadowgun,” said Zé was an engineer who used a false name on an online forum that disclosed tests and guidelines for how to manufacture ghost guns at home.
According to these investigators, Zé was part of an online gang that observed a certain division of labor among its members. Some worked on the technical development of their projects, while others were responsible for dispensing, advertising, and, most interestingly, “contact with buyers.”
GunCAD’s mortal sin.
In the last ten years it’s become necessary to adopt a posthumous attitude when doing 3D gun work. Even in the United States our designers and engineers are threatened with innumerable censorship schemes and law enforcement investigations. Zé’s own lawyer is being sued in California by the City Attorney of San Francisco. Our attempts at legal breakouts have so far met with failure. This has been underscored most vividly by the Third Circuit’s precedential opinion in Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey (No. 23-3058), which we have now appealed.
Mostly recently, CtrlPew made his own attempt to break through enemy lines before an Obama judge in Florida. Knowing he was before an Obama judge, the results were predictable.
But knowing he was before an Obama judge, and with the benefit of ten years of 3D gun litigation, we could still have hoped for more than the fully half-assed record put before the court.
CtrlPew reminds us, however, that he will never surrender:
If the files themselves are specifically ordered to be taken down, we do have backups of those files and a repository will appear after that’s happened, because it doesn’t make any sense to have a secondary repository if the first one is in any danger of being litigated out of existence. You know what I mean?
So, if a government stepped in and said, “You can’t host gun files on Odysee anymore… we also have redundant backups that will go live in the event that happens, but it doesn’t make any sense to make that public. If this is a governmental action and they’re going to be litigated and removed, it wouldn’t make any sense to publish that before that happens…
You’re right, Pew. It wouldn’t make any sense to publicize that.
But it’s easy to FuddBust in gun rights advocacy. What’s harder is to aestheticize this long defeat. So I offer GunCAD: 3D2A History and Value. A fuller record of our losses, poetic misreadings, and mortal truths.
If you would like to support our legal actions, please join LEGIO.