A federal judge in Seattle has issued a preliminary national injunction blocking a website from offering 3-D-printer gun blueprints until the case is resolved in court.
Judge Robert S. Lasnik of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington had granted a temporary restraining order on July 31, 2018. That order was set to expire tomorrow, as he considered arguments made by 19 states that asked for an injunction, and the Justice Department, which felt it wasn’t needed.
While Lasnik acknowledged there were considerable First Amendment questions related to the case, he added that “the Court finds that the irreparable burdens on the private defendants’ First Amendment rights are dwarfed by the irreparable harms the States are likely to suffer if the existing restrictions are withdrawn and that, overall, the public interest strongly supports maintaining the status quo through the pendency of this litigation.”
Lasnik’s original order had stopped a Texas group, Defense Distributed, from offering the blueprints for guns made using 3-D printer-produced parts. Since then, lawyers in the case have been making First Amendment and 10th Amendment arguments.
The legal fight over the plastic gun plans goes back to 2013 when Cody Wilson from Defense Distributed created a huge stir by printing out a functional handgun using a 3-D printer. Wilson then put the plans on the Internet for free, and they were quickly downloaded by more than 100,000 people before legal actions by the federal government stopped the official downloads. Both sides went to court, and the Trump administration agreed to the July settlement that allowed Defense Distributed to publish the plans on the Internet in August.
In a prior court filing, Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson said that among the arguments for the restraining order were 10th Amendment state-sovereignty violations.
