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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, not a political problem.
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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Obnoxii Civitati
October 22, 2024
Yesterday Freeman1337 was denied bail and remanded in a New York federal court. The case is United States v. Celentano, 1:24-mj-01204-JJM-1 (W.D. NY). The most recent minute entry says that Freeman, who managed The Gatalog’s entire tech stack, will have his devices forensically examined by the United States “on a rolling basis.” We learn in the unsealed complaint, provided below, that Freeman had, as predicted, been under investigation since at least September.
Standout details from the complaint include an RV stash and an attempted “boating accident.” Turns out ATF just sends a dive team, by the way. Freeman continued the Gravedigging tradition by asking his friends to unknowingly hold his hottest products and, unsurprisingly, this backwoods network collapsed the first time a lawman made a phone call.
We learn Freeman was searched on September 29th and arrested October 17th, meaning Gatalog leadership knew what was up for the last month. As it happens, October 17th is the same day “Dr. Death” suddenly resigned from The Gatalog, professing a renewed interest in family life.
One imagines AUSA Jeffrey Intravatola has as sudden an interest in the name “Dr. Death.”
Why would the good doctor keep this secret? And why did the Gatalog inner party fail to inform its members that the entirety of their profiles, communications, and Odysee activity had been completely captured by the feds? In the spirit of earnest and forthright dealing, you should know The Gatalog Rocketchat software permanently stores every message, public and private. These messages are fully accessible, unencrypted, to any administrator. As we learned from Director Holladay in Everytown v. DEFCAD, the only unacceptable outcome of that case was if Gatalog members found out their leadership had full, historical access to their channel messages and private conversations. Did Freeman, as their IT guy, want it that way?
The Roman concept of liberty in antiquity was always contrasted with the condition of slavery. What made a man a slave was not his being subject to physical force, but his being in poteste. Roman historians like Tacitus drew from this legal distinction a moral one, describing slavery as the condition that makes a man obnoxius — endlessly liable to punishment or the will of another.
In the original sense, Freeman is the most obnoxious person in the movement, but it was his sponsor organization’s commitment to censorship and bureaucracy that subjected hundreds more to harm. Freeman and Dr. Death’s hasty exits mask an administrative history of uncompensated stupidity, and now leave it to a single fall guy named UberClay (read: UberPlayed) to choose whether to delete the server or hold the bag.
TL;DR – It will take a little longer now to get your beta approved. You’d have better luck driving to the local FBI field office and asking them yourself.
Though the final text order in ECF mentions Rule 48(b) and allows the investigation and negotiated plea deal to be finalized by January, 2025, I wouldn’t worry about it. This is a winnable 2A case, and Freeman knows the very best lawyer in the game. The man is a soldier. And if I’ve learned anything at all about him over the years, it’s that he’d never sell out the directors of The Gatalog, and he’d never run from a fight.
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Third Circuit Arguments
October 18, 2024
Yesterday we received news of our panel assignment in Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey. The Third Circuit confirmed arguments will be held in Philadelphia on November 4th.
As a reminder, this case is about settling an extraordinary tug of war between the Fifth and Third Circuits. It’s about which U.S. Court of Appeals has the right to decide the ultimate illegality of New Jersey’s censorship of 3D gun files.
I’ve invited ABC News to attend.
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DD in DC
October 11, 2024
I return from our nation’s whited sepulcher to say that yes, the reports about the arguments in VanDerStok are true! If this case is just to be decided by what we heard at the arguments, or what we can read in this transcript, kit guns by mail are over. And that’s not just because Elizabeth Prelogar is a star. This is not the report I’d hoped to give.
But the Supreme Court is sometimes a law court, so we can hope they make a decision on the law instead of public policy. Cargill thought he lost his arguments as well, and that case had a surprising decision. Even in the worst case, the trip was worth making. As plaintiffs, we were given the right to sleep outside for hours to hear our case.
All through the night we were visited by Dick Heller himself, who arrived by bicycle to deliver medicine and stories about the Cato Institute, his many victories, and his illegal, yet registered, AR-15.
The 3D gun community’s popular subculture of stable geniuses would like to blame a potential negative decision on FPC’s involvement and Cooper & Kirk’s strategy, but this is just more of the perverse disavowal I’ve elsewhere identified as central to the “Fudd Buster Idea.” If these people had anything useful with which to inform the Court’s understanding, they could have scratched together some money and filed an amicus brief. But they didn’t because they don’t.
We can still examine their disavowal in action, however. Attorney Patterson actually delivered a favorite of the 3D gun arguments before the Court. He argued strenuously and repeatedly that the ATF’s “readily convertible” language would also make every AR-15 a machine gun. Checkmate, right?
Unfortunately, this visibly annoyed most of the justices, who would no longer have it after about the third time he’d made the point. General Prelogar reminded the Court it “didn’t have to bind itself to the practical ramifications of the rule.”
The biggest single miss our side made was being unable to persuasively answer Justice Roberts’ question about the people interested in unfinished frames and receivers and, by implication, why. So here goes:
The AR-15 80 percent receiver was created by ATF determination letter in the late 70s. It was produced in reply to a request by an OEM manufacturer who wanted to know where to draw the line for his unregulated subcontractors. The bulk of unfinished frames and receivers were created as a result of decades of ATF accommodation of the political economy of modern capitalism, which includes working with international, unregulated subcontractors. The products are not the result of the insane and illicit designs of a criminal network of gun traffickers.
We the public simply adopted unfinished receivers because they were already legal. Plymouth Rock landed on us.
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Biden Harris 3D Gun Executive Order
September 26, 2024
Today the White House announced an executive order creating new funding and an interagency task force to handle the emerging threat of 3D printed guns. You can find the fact sheet below.
The timing of the order, like the press preceding it, is meant to front run and influence the Supreme Court and the public understanding of VanDerStok, but the effects will be much wider.
One agency in particular will be given the funds and permission to play a much larger role in our story. Things will begin to move quickly now.
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This Week in Guns
September 19, 2024
In Garland v. VanDerStok, the famous “frame or receiver” case at the Supreme Court, the ATF has filed its Reply Brief. Pretty standard hand-waving on the government’s part.
A fun little bit:
Respondents specifically object (VanDerStok Br. 39-40; Defense Distributed Br. 25-26) to the Rule’s clarification that a part is not a frame or receiver if it has not “reached a stage of manufacture where it is clearly identifiable as an unfinished component part of a weapon.” 27 C.F.R. 478.12(c). But that provision and the accompanying examples were included at the request of commenters in the firearms industry in order to provide the regulated community with greater clarity about parts that are not covered by the Rule, such as unfinished frame or receiver blanks.
ATF Reply Brief Pg. 21
Thanks for the clarity, guys. This case’s arguments are less than three weeks away in D.C.
In other legal news, the Third Circuit noticed a merits panel for Defense Distributed, et al v. Attorney General New Jersey (CA3 no. 23-3058) in Philadelphia for November 4th.
Oral argument on the question of the free speech value of 3D gun files. In our Great Nation’s first capital. Just in time for the Election of President Harris!
Aside from these updates, it’s been unusually quiet and uneventful in DD litigation land.
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Influence Operations
September 5, 2024
A telling piece of public opinion-setting from NPR this morning.
https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5099467/nx-s1-5b6c1ff5-2731-426b-b81b-8b3e0cb4f0b2
Steven Inskeep invites Martin Kaste to share the good news of the demise of Polymer80, who “still [hopes] the Supreme Court can save them.” David Pacino of Giffords led the suits that ended the rash of murders driven by this American ghost gun seller, but he warns us the pesky Supreme Court might still throw these bad actors a lifeline.
Everytown and The Trace, Bloomberg organizations, began the push for victory lap pieces on Polymer80 last month. After drifting prole-ward, the news became a part of the elite pressure campaign on the Supreme Court for next month’s oral arguments in VanDerStok.
This is a technical case about federal regulations, Mr. Kaste reminds us, and this is technically true. But the framing is a way to support the modern, adaptive fiction of “our democracy.” A good (democratic) outcome may be undone on a technicality by a political (non-democratic) Supreme Court at the 11th hour. Nevermind that the VanDerStok plaintiffs have been winning since day one, or that the Supreme Court has only been sending lifelines to a hapless, pleading ATF.
That this is national news at least helps us understand the nature of the Republic, so-called Constitutional law, and the role of the “specialized class” of American journalists. The US government is a network of competing power centers. When the New York Times (or The Trace) runs a story on the “secret,” unseen environment in which common sense (democratic) gun laws are undermined in the federal courts, understand that this is one power center of the Republic attempting to influence and delegitimize another.
Of course the useful idiots in our space will fall for this trap and label their mistakes “journalism,” so a rule of thumb: Journalism, since at least Walter Lippmann, is another word for the “post-partisan state,” which is another word for “gun control.”
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NRA’s VanDerStock Brief
August 21, 2024
Of the eleven amicus briefs filed yesterday at the Supreme Court in Garland v. VanDerStok, I’d like to highlight the NRA’s. Joseph Greenlee expands on his previous work to explain how the right to privately build firearms is “deeply rooted in our nation’s historical tradition” and is a necessary part of the Second Amendment.
We digital gunsmiths could say: “But of course.” But this an argument Cooper & Kirk may have been too shy to make! The NRA, and Mr. Greenlee, deserve real credit and thanks here, and I will certainly renew my membership.
After cases like Rahimi, some say the golden age of Bruen is now past. Two short years! So I’m glad Greenlee’s work has the chance to become authority. While it’s on my mind, and because I’ve only had one other chance to fight for the historical tradition of firearms manufacturing technologies in court, I’d like to supplement Greenlee’s work, which often relies on Sawyer’s Firearms in American History vol’s 1 and 2.
I agree with Sawyer’s general divisions of this history into 1) American colonial riflemaking, including the birth of the Kentucky Rifle, 2) the work of Simeon North and John Hall as contractors for the federal armories, and 3) Samuel Colt’s development and production of the patent revolver. And this gets us to the 1850’s, where Bruen asks us to go. But Sawyer’s work shares the style (and accuracy) of 19th century history, and there is a stronger and more interesting story to be told.
In Chapter 1 of David Hounshell’s From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, we find a commanding and well-sourced account of the origin and mechanization of American small arms production. Some historical points of entry:
It’s no exaggeration to say the story of the private manufacture of firearms with machine tools = the story of American mass production, and this is why I find the California (and now Massachusetts) CNC laws backwards and worth fighting by any means. There would be no CNC without the American tradition of privately made firearms.
For details about Simeon North, Thomas Blanchard and John Hall’s work, I recommend Charles R. Morris’ The Dawn of Innovation.
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Supreme Court Brief (Garland v. VanDerStok)
August 14, 2024
Brief of Respondents
Yesterday DD filed its Brief of Respondents in Garland v. VanDerStok, which will be argued before the Court on October 8th.
The filed version is also at the Court’s website here.
Next: Reply & Oral Argument
Our side’s amici will roll in over the next week, and I expect some good ones, but we will, as usual, be outnumbered by Giffords, Everytown and the blue state coalition. ATF files their reply after that.
As mentioned, oral argument is set for October 8th. Cooper & Kirk won the coin toss to do the argument for our side, but we will still assist.
The most important arguments are about how the Rule flatly contradicts the GCA. We advocate for the most natural and concise construction of the statute, making a nice contrast to the pages and time it takes ATF to explain how natural and ordinary their construction of the statute is.
Not that we expect the Court to get to it, but we ultimately make a unique Second Amendment avoidance argument. By now everyone has seen Greenlee’s article, so we add John Dillin’s The Kentucky Rifle to the record as a secondary source on the history of making arms from unfinished components. OG Legio members will note we first cited Dillin on the history of making in 2022’s Defense Distributed v. Bonta in California.
***
Counsel, are you saying making guns from readily convertible components is the country’s very oldest tradition?
Mr. Chief Justice, I am saying the hunters and woodcutters who slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, who, eyes incandesced by their massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease, made their guns before they could make human speech.
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