blog
Massachusetts House No. 4885
July 25, 2024
A friendly journo from WGBH Boston asked me what we think of Massachusetts H4885 serializing all the guns and banning all the gun equipment. I’ll tell you what I told her.
The journalist asked where I got the idea that guns should be unserialized in the first place. I said a couple hundred years ago or so there was a blockade of Boston Harbor that led to a siege. She and her Governor should look it up.
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JStark’s Incel Podcast Interview
July 11, 2024
Internet detectives have recently discovered JStark’s appearance as “K” on the “Incel” podcast from late 2019. I know JStark’s voice well and can personally confirm its authenticity here.
Published six months before the FGC-9, what’s most notable in this interview is JStark’s fatalism and biological reductionism. He is convinced he has a serious, congenital mental impairment, and he sought a diagnosis of “autism” in Europe to confirm the essential reality of this experience (9:37).
The “neurodiversity” narrative is part of an autism critical discourse, but it still leaves JStark trapped in the iron cage of scientism. His recommendations for young, male autists are to forget about PUA and self-improvement and to take an Autism spectrum test. If you score more than 40, you should take good photos, download Tinder and spoof your GPS for matches in Bangkok, Thailand or Manila, Philippines. This is called SEAmaxxing, and JStark said he learned the technique from sex tourist James FT and Incels.co forum user “itsOVER” in 2018. When Stark himself traveled 10,000 km to the Philippines, where some 800,000 women and children are trafficked, he said it was the first time in his life he didn’t have to pay for sex. It was the first time in his life he was happy.
Stark makes prototypical political statements in this interview. His promotion of the popular social construction of autism in the posture of a disability activist suggests left wing sympathies, but his race realism (15:48) and espousal of intrinsic gender differences (33:26) mark him as a man of the right.
The question of suicide is ever-present: “It was in the third grade that I wanted to kill myself for the first time” (9:16). And the most interesting revelation to me is the title of Stark’s (now deleted) first YouTube video: “Love or Death” (27:45). Here is the ur-text and prefiguration of Stark’s famous take on “Liberty or Death.” It is the esoteric signature of his death drive as a sexual drive.
I’ve spoken elsewhere about JStark’s funeral ideology. A more lasting political question may be why, after finding a girlfriend, did Stark continue to identify as an incel?
Busting the Fudd Busters, Part II
June 21, 2024
To demonstrate how much the logic of copyright has rotted his brain, the President of The Gatalog Foundation insists that it was he, and not FPC, the NCLA or Mike Cargill, who won in the recent Garland v. Cargill decision. How did old Fudd Busters manage this achievement? You see, he commissioned the images in an FPC amicus brief in a totally separate case from October 2019.
The only problem is the Supreme Court didn’t cite those images. Justice Thomas’ opinion uses images from an even earlier brief in Guedes, which was written and filed before old Fudd Busters had ever worked for FPC in any capacity. So why does he have to lie about it? And why must Second Amendment advocates endure this bizarre, symptomatic behavior in an otherwise flawless moment of victory?
Fudd Busters makes a scene and breaches attorney-client privilege for … Twitter credit. The Supreme Court did not cite “his” images, and “his” images are clearly derivatives of those in the March 2019 Guedes brief. His real complaint seems to be that no one at FPC, the NCLA, or even Mike Cargill, knew how an AR-15 worked. You are free to believe that FPC didn’t agree with its own public positions in publicly-filed briefs, but that is certified, food-grade Fudd. It is fetishistic disavowal in practice.
Let’s reverse the situation. Say the Supreme Court actually cited any Fudd Busters work product and that FPC denied him his due. This kind of conduct on Twitter, in full view of our friends and enemies, would still be pathological. And I don’t mean this in a moral sense. Fudd Busters is publicly struggling to make his career in the 2A space bearable, or even understandable. He needs the idea of “theft” to maintain his imaginary identifications and ego, and this has begun to affect those around him.
If images can be “property” and if employers can be “authors,” as the Copyright Act and Gatalog Foundation insist, then there’s no possible controversy. And we know Fudd Busters understands this. In his own Copyright Office registration of the SF5 3D gun files, he has clearly listed himself as an employer who commissioned work-for-hire drawings. The SF5 is officially a “work-for-hire” product, and its registration denies Fudd Busters’ underling his proper, public credit.
I will fix this.
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The Gatalog Foundation
June 3, 2024
The Black Flag White Paper is now on Amazon. Thank you for the enthusiastic reception. Yes, I’m showboating in places, but it was fun to stretch my legs. To make the same points, all I really had to do was post the longtime motto of the Deterrence Dispensed Keybase: “Code is free speech. Copyright is theft.”
I wonder where they got that?
These days, you’ll find the admins of that very Keybase misguiding newcomers to our space with entirely opposite (and embarrassing) legal takes:
All we’re left with after such friendly and frequent legal misstatements is the impression these people will proudly suffer comparison to Taylor Swift. Conceptual failures this great invite questions, and I answer the more serious of these in the Black Flag paper.
The most obvious remaining question is cui bono?
In 3D2A, the principles dictate the methods. After JStark died and his Keybase was flushed, his lieutenants had, at best, a casual grasp of the principles. They assumed 3D2A meant property, that copyright meant good title, and they ended up teaching gun control to hundreds of would-be developers without even realizing it.
Consider the new website for The Gatalog Foundation. Though Gatalog Command quickly took it down after publication of the Black Flag, we can still examine the site’s most recent snapshots from May:
$400 a year. Now, I know what you’re thinking. And yes, it does seem a little underpriced.
“Digital Right” means intellectual property. They have no other theory of right. The word “steward” is custodial and similarly propertarian. For $400 a year, these guys will sell you a letter from Ashley at the Copyright Office and a full federal doxxing as title to your work.
And I don’t have to imagine the dumb shit they wrote in their copyright registration applications. Ashley will show me. Did you know it’s a crime to lie to her?
The Gatalog embraced IP to maintain the appearance that they somehow lead community sentiment rather than get led by it. There’s something more than dishonest about this. They misguide the “masses” and demand the impossible of the law in order to be affirmed in their own ideological naïveté. What, for example, am I to make of this text?
By my count, it’s been 5,568 hours since that was sent. Were repression and private vindication not the desired outcomes?
Chief among their feminine habits in conflict, The Gatalog Foundation employs the Fudd Busters method of disavowal.
The Fudd Buster is much more concerned with the possibility of manipulation than with the traumatic dimension of reality. His theories (consumer, legal, media) are entirely anchored in the will to not be deceived; in the will to let others know he is not.
His trivial knowledge of firearms, or really anything, serves as an object-fetish that allows him to ignore and survive the real. We can read The Gatalog Foundation’s tagline differently now: “A pro-gun org run by people who actually like guns.” Ah, so that’s what was missing from 2A advocacy and litigation. Nobody liked the guns enough.
$400 a year is ten times more expensive than an NRA membership. It is twenty-six times more expensive than an annual membership with the Second Amendment Foundation. That organization is running almost sixty cases nationwide, and all the Fudd Buster can do is tell you they’re somehow ripping you off. This becomes even easier for them when there’s no chance they will be invited to participate in major 2A litigation.
So, gun printer to thy guns? Not quite. Though a Creative Commons membership is free, The Gatalog Foundation’s membership fee is less than the $425 required to join the American Intellectual Property Law Association. I’m not saying legal amateurs shouldn’t organize and build what they like, even if that means IP organizations. The American tradition in arms is an amateur tradition.
Marx himself praised the “watchmaker [James] Watt” for inventing the steam engine. So you see, even the best of us get fooled by IP. James Watt improved the steam engine. He patented this improvement, fought his competitors for title in the idea, and delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine by two decades.
Now you’re nobody’s fool. That’ll be $400.
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Memorial Day Weekend
May 24, 2024
There’s a weird trend in our space of ersatz anarchists more or less begging for federal protection of their files. Just a sample:
Big maudlin. One blanches.
It’s become a convenient piece of rhetoric that no one can sue DEFCAD because they’d have to give up anonymity. This is, of course, not true. Our Everytown case was, in the end, about your right to proceed anonymously. I support your right to proceed anonymously. The reason you don’t sue is because you got the law wrong on copyright. That and because you’re a huge pussy.
Anyway, I wrote a paper to commemorate the great pirates who lit our way. They pillaged so we could plunder.
Enjoy your holiday weekend. If you would like to support these legal actions, please join LEGIO.
DD at the Supreme Court
April 23, 2024
Yesterday the Supreme Court granted certiorari in VanDerStok, the so-called “frame and receiver” case where Defense Distributed and Polymer80 are major intervenor plaintiffs. The case’s docket page can be found here.
The Court has posted the case’s “Questions Presented” document, which you can download below. In short, these questions are:
July 8 is the presumptive deadline for our brief on the merits, assuming ATF files on June 6.
July 15 is the deadline for amicus briefs supporting SAF and DD’s side, again assuming that ATF files on June 6.
Amicus Briefs
If you’d like to file an amicus brief, contact SAF, FPC, or DD at [email protected].
Oral Argument
We expect oral argument to be between October 7 and 16. Let me know if you’d like to attend.
Thank you for your support resisting the receiver rule since 2021. Defense Distributed and LEGIO were instrumental in narrowing the first version of the rule, preserving the errors of the second, and successfully challenging the rule in the Western District of Texas and the Fifth Circuit. Only one more stop to go.
If you would like to support these legal actions, please join LEGIO.
Deadly Gifts
March 14, 2024
Yesterday Defense Distributed filed its long-delayed 3D gun brief with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. This one has become the grandfather case to determine the free speech value of CAD files. Its anomalous procedural history shows just how dangerous the federal courts have found it over the years.
Justin Lee at Compact Mag has written a thoughtful piece about Jessica Solce’s film Death Athletic, and the philosophy behind the founding of GunCAD. I encourage you to read it: https://www.compactmag.com/article/cody-wilsons-deadly-gift/#
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VanDerStok Respondents’ Brief
March 8, 2024
This week saw FPC’s and New Jersey’s briefs at the Supreme Court in VanDerStok, the “frame or receiver” rule case against the ATF. Today we filed our brief as well, joined by Polymer80 and JSD Supply.
The differences are merely in emphasis. Where FPC spends paragraphs on Due Process vagueness and the Second Amendment’s necessary inclusion of a “right to make”, the Defense Distributed brief devotes pages.
Thank you for your enthusiastic feedback on our recent podcast about the history of GunCAD.
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Gatalogy
March 2, 2024
Last night I joined Garret on YouTube to answer questions concerning DEFCAD in support of victims of domestic FOSS.
One of the questions we take up is: Why does DEFCAD require a membership even though most 3D gun files have free software licenses?
On June 9, 2021, BIS sent Defense Distributed the first and only EAR enforcement letter concerning the 3D gun question since the completion of the Export Control Reform Initiative, the settlement of Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State, and the regulatory transfer of firearms technical data from the USML to the CCL in March of 2020.
So a simple answer. But this little letter hides a lot.
The policy statement in the BIS letter would seem to contradict the reading of 734.7(c) suggested in 85 FR 4172, which provides for a “CAD/CAM distinction” as an answer to the First Amendment questions raised in Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State. Everytown, among others, pressured BIS in the spring of 2021 to erase this reading of the CAD/CAM rule, and BIS would eventually bury a contradictory interpretation (now a distinction without a difference) in official online guidance that they’d tweak for weeks. Their May 28, 2021 publication follows:
Gun people understand rogue federal agencies can subvert Congress’ legislative power through the process of official rulemaking. This isn’t even that. This is lawmaking by FAQ.
The BIS revisionism in Question 2 of this FAQ is a fun point of departure, for those still interested. It frames the four most fateful weeks in modern guncad. Shall we read it together?
This story about the Ninth Circuit decision (which allowed 3D gun files back on the Internet) is necessary because DEFCAD immediately published, for free, every 3D gun file from across the Internet on April 28th. And published loudly. You’ve read the DEFCAD newsletter. When DOJ threatened to prosecute Defense Distributed again, we immediately went to court for a TRO.
An excerpt from our emergency injunction request that same week in Texas:
In short, the feds were saying “No, you can’t publish yet.” And so was The Gatalog.
To ensure judicial notice of their public domain status, we included the best of the Gatalog designs in our re-release of free files. But this was an outrage for which Gatalog high command required payment. While it may offend modern sensibilities (in 2024 we all know it’s wrong to ask for money for free files), in the wild weeks of May, 2021, free files were pricey things. Just try to remember these were men of their time!
For the FGC-9 Mk II alone, the Director of The Gatalog (then, as now, a little-known figure) demanded a wire payment of $2,500 to his personal shell company. And so this was the price to officially open source the FGC-9 Mk II.
The reader will note I paid for the FGC-9 the day after the Ninth Circuit mandate issued, on May 26th. But it’s also the same day The Gatalog Foundation was formed in Florida. Could these two facts be related?
By June 1st, 2021, DEFCAD went back to a paywall, The Gatalog became a corporation, and BIS would assume jurisdiction of 3D gun files, pretending nothing had happened the previous four weeks.
JStark was dead a month later.
VanDerStok 2024 and John Walker
February 8, 2024
ATF petitioned for cert in VanDerStok v. Garland, our “frame and receiver rule” case that The Fifth Circuit just won’t let Joe Biden win. It’s nice to read the words “Defense Distributed” in yet another Supreme Court petition. Polymer80 and JSD Supply have agreed to join our pending brief, where we will also request the Supreme Court grant cert to at last consider the grand question: what is the definition of a firearm?
We’ll know something here by June.
In DD’s longest running case, Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey, No. 23-3058 (3d Cir.), I’d like to highlight the role and contributions of John Walker, who we learned passed on February 2nd.
Mr. Walker was the founder of Autodesk, a libertarian philosopher in the Atlantic tradition, and the earliest financier of Defense Distributed. In our New Jersey line of free speech cases, beginning in late 2018, Mr. Walker contributed authoritative declarations supporting the speech value of CAD files. I’d like to share one of his original declarations below, which will be used in our upcoming Third Circuit brief :
Kind of difficult for Everytown and the New Jersey AG to contradict the testimony of the inventor of AutoCAD. May he rest in power.
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