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Defense Distributed v. Bondi
July 14, 2025
On Friday Defense Distributed filed our reply to the ATF’s objection to our motion for an injunction against the Biden/Trump “frame or receiver” rule. It’s a Trump rule now not just because his DOJ defends it, but because it gives the rule novel interpretations never attempted in the Biden years.
This filing was more enjoyable to prepare than usual because of the excuse to engage with the “history and tradition” of privately made arms demanded by Bruen. We work into the record two surveys of industrial history that became my favorites after Defense Distributed’s failed effort to sue California back in 2022. They are provided below.
This reply was also enjoyable for the chance to respond to ATF’s candid admission that their rule “modestly impinges” Second Amendment rights. The Bondi DOJ may soon realize this statement was worse than an infelicity.
Those two industrial histories for you. David Hounshell’s From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 and Conservative Innovators and Military Small Arms: an Industrial History of the Springfield Armory, 1794-1968. You can’t find an historical, industrial analogue for the regulation of the private production of small arms in America because it was that very history of private production that built the American System in the first place.
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Independence Day SITREP
July 3, 2025
Just in time to celebrate that civil war we won in the 1770s to reject Hanoverian imperialism, NPR warns us that ghost guns may not be so dead. They may even be doing that whole revenant thing which, in fairness, ghosts are known to do.
Just a word about the two legal strategies reported above. SAF and Gottlieb have elected to take Trump and Bondi at their word that the administration will most likely eliminate the Biden “frame or receiver” rule with which we’ve contended since 2021. This is not an insane strategy.
But the Defense Distributed strategy was and is to see what the Trump DOJ would do about this rule in federal court, since actions are much stronger signals than task forces and talk. And what the Trump DOJ has signaled to O’Connor about the frame and receiver rule is not good:
Did you catch that? In Bondiland, the Second Amendment isn’t infringed if it’s impinged. Read it yourself.
In my experience, such outrageous trash can only be compared to Judge Lasnick’s 2018 declaration that any First Amendment right of 3D gun printers “is currently abridged, but has not been abrogated.”
A reminder this Fourth that gun violence trumps verbalism. The Second Amendment enshrines this political recourse.
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DD-Day
June 9, 2025
Last Friday Defense Distributed made its first filings in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s VanDerStok decision. Unlike the case’s other plaintiffs, we’ve maintained fully briefed Second and Fifth Amendment arguments that can now have their day. AG Bondi and the Trump DOJ asked for a sixty (60) day stay to evaluate their (love for the) ATF receiver rule. Sixty days to determine the meaning of “shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t work like that, guys. We’re going to need a decision that the Second Amendment includes the necessary right to make firearms.
This new front in an old action may be restyled as Defense Distributed v. Bondi. You can read our brief and exhibits here:
Another consequence of VanDerStok is the accelerated censorship of online speech concerning firearms. Though state laws like Texas’ HB20 have afforded firearms “influencers” years of opportunities to combat the rampant censorship and de-platforming on social media sites like YouTube, it’s telling that they’ve all so far remained asleep in their symbolic bedrooms. On Friday we filed another action in a Texas state court named Defense Distributed v. YouTube.
Why do this? Isn’t YouTube just emotional theater for “Guntubers” and gear queers? Wouldn’t it rather advance the fight for the Second Amendment to let Google crush these people’s fragile imaginary (over)identifications?
I agree these sites are places to flee from The Real. Only on YouTube might a doomstruck “rat” and his Samoan attorney, for example, nurse along the fiction that they’re sophisticated litigators. In the dream logic of YouTube, if you post a long enough string of trivial shotgun content, the earth stays solid and JStark buried in it. Myanmar and Mangione remain phantasmatic images from *out there* that can never enter to shatter your reality. As your attorney, I advise you to post more tedious AR-15 videos.
But what if in our video dreams, which we construct as an escape, we encounter a trauma more horrifying than any reality? Could the real trauma be from the excess of our dreams? Could our fictions become so traumatic that they awaken us into reality?
This is the bet I’m willing to make by suing YouTube. Now here’s a video of a general wandering the Desert of The Real.
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Trump’s DOJ and G80 Receivers
May 20, 2025
On Friday the Trump DOJ announced a settlement with Rare Breed Triggers, which in a significant way ends the public battle over Forced Reset Triggers (FRTs). This was broadcast by our government as a win for the Second Amendment:
My opinion of this outcome is biased by our own (ongoing) DOJ settlement conversations in what’s left of the “frame and receiver” case before Judge O’Connor in Texas. Readers will note O’Connor was also the presiding judge in the FRT case.
The sticking point in our conversations has been the G80 System, which represents the fulfillment of Justice Gorsuch’s brave new vision and, therefore, the next generation of 80 percent firearms. Trump’s DOJ disfavors a G80 settlement because the system is, unlike FRTs, emphatically open source. Without enforceable IP, these government lawyers will have no way of pointing to our settlement’s simultaneous enhancement of “pubic safety” (read: gun control). In summary, a G80 settlement would require team Trump to admit the true consequences of a Supreme Court decision that they had plenty of time to avoid.
I make this post to announce to LEGIO members the next leg of Defense Distributed’s public development of ghost gun technology. We are now in our third run of production, which is exclusively reserved for supporting members of Defense Distributed. Your membership brought us to, and now through, the United States Supreme Court. LEGIO members are also welcome to contact our sales team regarding dealer opportunities.
It goes without saying, but G80 sales will fund our renewed litigation against AG Bondi, who for whatever reason insists upon limiting The People’s right to keep and bear arms.
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On Raids and Raiding
April 22, 2025
Last week ATF raided and arrested the moderators of a Discord server connected to the interstate development and sale of 3D NFA items. Though one of these moderators may have been a confidential informant, word is the raids were simply the result of an(other) anonymous tip.
When a journalist asked me if this is the first major raid of a 3D gun community, I said I could understand why he’d believe it was. Guncad’s folkways privilege repeated forgetting, denial, and perverse disavowal.
As if this is the first time this guy has written this. So Steven is leaving, just not really leaving, because of recent events, but not because of those events, and on the best of terms, though he’s “hurt deeply.”
We’re dealing with a mode of knowledge and its deployment that de-realizes. Just last year The Gatalog suffered a sensational raid so complete and compromising that Alex Holladay employs his knowledge of it to, paradoxically, disavow its entire reality. Biannually.
Sage counsel from the space’s most prodigious poster of felonies, offered in that spirit of detachment and courtesy for which The Gatalog has become so known. It’s as if simple kennings like “felony-poster” or “fudd-buster” alone could protect the gang from the much larger ATF investigation of their own server.
Reading Holladay, we see the knowledge of his trauma isn’t something to be disavowed. He instead recruits it to help him publicly disavow the real of that same knowledge. The structure works something like this: “We know very well that The Gatalog’s beta rooms have been dumped, and that users like UberClay are identified, and that’s why we can forget about it.”
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All Fools’ Day
April 1, 2025
Reason has two excellent pieces on the takeaways from Bondi v. VanDerStok. Today’s is a survey of the judicial cowardice of the Court’s “Salerno rule” by professor Josh Blackman, a Defense Distributed attorney.
The Salerno rule was how Judge Sutton of the Sixth Circuit saved Obamacare’s individual mandate back in 2011. It featured in Justice Breyer’s dissent in McDonald as his preferred method to deny gun rights in the name of safety. “The Court may have overruled Chevron, but it has just inadvertently created a far more powerful deference doctrine with Salerno, all in service of narrowly reversing the Fifth Circuit.” Thus Blackman.
Journalists point out this was a 7-2 decision, but if you read Alito closely he’s not disagreeing with the result. The Supreme Court is 8-1 against DIY guns. Gorsuch expects the plaintiffs and the public to swallow this nonsense “artifact noun” discussion, and to accept his glib assessment that we were unprepared to properly challenge the Biden ghost gun rule. I refuse.
Court decisions are also artifacts made by all-too-human hands. In my judgment, the Supreme Court was the only party ill-prepared to make its case. See the metadata in Gorsuch’s “I know it when I see it” Polymer80 photos:
You think any Gorsuch clerks might have the initials ELP? It will be a fools’ errand cleaning that off the Internet.
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Bondi v. VanDerStok
March 26, 2025
Repeat Supreme Court losers Defense Distributed and Ghost Gunner are proud to present the death of the 80% and kit gun markets, compliments of the Trump administration and AG Bondi, whose name should be on this opinion.
The frame and receiver case is at long last decided, and since some of the plaintiffs (RIP Polymer80) sold kits and components that could be finished within twenty minutes, and with common tools, the rule is not facially invalid.
Onward, to hours of finishing and un-common tools! Onward, to the as-applied challenge!
Gorsuch says: Buy a Ghost Gunner.
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Benchy, IP, and 3D Guns
January 23, 2025
After remixes of the famous 3DBenchy model started being pulled from Printables, LEGIO members wrote in asking if this kind of IP war is possible in 3D guns. The answer is no, thankfully.
The 3DBenchy model, “a popular benchmark for desktop FDM 3D printers,” has always been offered under a Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0 license, which forbids the redistribution of remixes. Since 2015, the license was never enforced by the work’s original “owner,” Creative Tools, but in March of 2024, Creative Tools was acquired by NTI Group. Now the license suddenly matters.
Though no one agrees with restricting open source remixes and republication of Benchy models, we can at least use this moment to explain American copyright doctrine. Unlike most open hardware projects, Benchy could be, within the meaning of the Copyright Act, a purely creative sculptural “work,” and therefore copyrightable subject matter. Let’s examine the technicalities of that simple conclusion.
Under the Copyright Act, the intangible idea of a whimsical, cartoon, nearly-personified boat created according to non-functional, aesthetic considerations is copyrightable. If this boat is given any tangible form, whether in plastic, marble, or even computer memory, we’ve made a “copy” of the work. By the text of the Copyright Act, even the original Benchy 3D model is still just a copy of the intangible Benchy “work.” Doctrinally, therefore, asking if Benchy’s 3D models are copyrighted isn’t quite the right question. Benchy is protected because it is a purely creative, 3D sculptural “work,” and 3D models of this work are protected because they are copies of the same.
If this sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is, and I’m a critic of copyright’s gross intrusion into digital media. But we should still try to understand and follow the law.
Another way to teach the Benchy controversy is to invert the facts. Say a creator named “Ivan Patrol (Boat)” designs a remote-controlled, 3D-printable boat in Fusion. He invites his friends and his employer, a small-time lawyer in Florida, to test prints of the design and make modifications so that the printable boat steers and floats as well as possible, and is successfully reproducible for a wide sample of people and 3D printers. Even if Ivan names his boat “Swifty,” sells it to his lawyer, and they both agree to call it “art,” their work is not copyrightable subject matter.
How can this be so?
As I patiently explain in my Black Flag White Paper, the Copyright Act excludes from its scope industrial works and the designs of useful articles. And what is a useful article? Congress’ definition is “an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information.”
Should Ivan or his employer ever license “Swifty” under Creative Commons, or try to register it with the U.S. Copyright Office, they would learn that their underlying work, no matter how much labor and money they sank into it, was a utilitarian object designed according to functional considerations. They would learn that copies of their work, as fixed in 3D files, are outside the scope of copyright.
This is the secret of most open source hardware projects. Though it’s nice to broadcast our digital work as within a libertarian or hacker tradition, our chosen licenses are usually unenforceable commemorative statements because our work is not sufficiently “creative” according to the Copyright Act.
And this is a good thing! The Benchy war teaches us that trying to create or enforce legal boundaries between the worlds of the artist and engineer will only result in censorship and signal destruction. It teaches us that anyone who tries to copyright a 3D gun model is merely looking for a backdoor patent, and has confused freedom with power.
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The Fuddness unto Death
November 20, 2024
There are many ways to characterize the internal division of 3D2A. Yesterday I spoke of ontologization and how “the community” chose to cope with federal and state controls.
As they began to accumulate indictable felonies, The Gatalog’s means simply became its ends: Disavowal of the law, of property, of Anarchy and even Open Source software. The grift became an intentional scam, which became an organized racket. Which became a thirst for annihilation.
Over the last three years we’ve been accused of a fraud on the public. Turns out The Gatalog was advertising its own bad conscience. Whether this bad conscience was pawned off as based socialism or social anarchism, it was always a scam, and it was always gun control.
The Fuddbuster’s internal reading of 3D2A politics led to a dual game and reversible positions. “Decentralized” meant bureaucracy. “Gunsmith” was a term of instrumental discourse borrowed from managers and white-collar engineers. “License” meant protecting the creator instead of protecting the file. This tactical ambiguity allowed profile-neurotics to make common cause with a typical Young Republican whose only “intellectual property” is his violent self-pity.
And DEFCAD paid for it. The good news is Open Source software will survive The Gatalog. But the bad news is 3D2A suffers from a psychological problem, not a political one.
A common enemy supports a common identity. The Gatalog’s anxious retreat to statist metaphysics has solidified my image as 3D2A’s primal father; a too-powerful and capricious Other beyond the ambit of law and with access to unlimited enjoyment. This is a standard Freudian myth of social formation: We must castrate the unlimited Other to survive.
And so the magical solution of Copyright. At the final hour we are saved by the constitution of the belief that maybe IP is real. Maybe we, too, can possess it.
As a companion to my Black Flag White Paper, which will soon get the serious reading it deserves, today I publish a critique of this gospel. It’s full of cool lore drops, like finally revealing who killed JStark. And it will probably live as an evergreen resource for specialists. Though it borders on the philosophical, in the sense that the original philosophical question is a critique of religion, I’d rather you see it as a bill of indictment. Or maybe an epilogue.
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CAD and CAM at the Third Circuit
November 19, 2024
Yesterday New Jersey filed a transcript of the oral argument held before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on November 4th. Attorney Chad Flores argued for Defense Distributed. The argument was a surprising one, since no one that morning expected to argue the actual merits of the case, which involved the speech value of 3D gun files.
If it sounds like Mr. Flores has had years to get dug into the case, that’s no accident. This is the first time arguments about the federal CAD/CAM distinction have been heard in a federal court, and the panel was actually engaged. I won’t predict that we “won,” but I do get the strong sense of a remand.
We’ll learn more about this distinction and the ontological practices it produced in our community very shortly.
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