My Responses to British Journalism Questions

In case you guys were curious, a UK-based 3D printing journal wanted to get the opinion of a reputable expert for comment on the Chicago glock lawsuit, so they reached out to 3D Print General for comment.

3DPG, who I love dearly, then told them to "talk to the fuddbuster instead.

Here's how it went:

- What are your general thoughts about Chicago’s lawsuit against Glock? 

As a legal practitioner, I find Chicago’s suit interesting in the way it conflates provisions from different laws and jurisdictions in an attempt to manufacture a new type of liability that doesn’t exist. It is a fundamentally unserious lawsuit and will almost certainly be unsuccessful.

Note the suit isn’t predicated on any particular damages flowing from a particular Glock product, as would be required in, you know, a real lawsuit. Instead, it attempts to heap liability upon an Austrian gunmaker and two Chicago gunstores for a non-particularized purported injury to the city through third parties converting the firearms to fire automatically.

The premise of the suit appears to be that Chicago, and the gun control group helping with the suit, believe that Glock should be liable because they feel Glock firearms are “too easily” converted by third parties into fully automatic firearms.

Aside from the simple fact that something either is or is not a machinegun under the law, in reality, Glocks aren’t particularly easy to convert to fire automatically. This is manifest when one realizes how much engineering is spent in keeping self-loading firearms from firing automatically. Compared to the Glock, the UK’s old Browning L9A1and similar handguns were practically begging to fire automatically.

The real reason “Glock switches” are so common isn’t because Glock handguns are particularly easy to convert. It’s because Americans want to shoot fast, and Glock handguns are popular and available. If Walther or Browning had won police contracts across America, becoming the de-facto personal defense firearm those are likely what we’d see conversion devices for.

- If you disagree with the lawsuit, what alternative solutions would you propose to address the misuse of 3D printed gun components like auto sears?

The question presumes 3D printed components are a major or even significant contributor to the perceived harm. As a practitioner, it appears that far more machinegun conversion devices are surreptitiously imported than made on 3D printers.

Still, hasty policymaking is rarely good policymaking. Good policymaking comes after the harm to be addressed is identified, the question of “why” the harm is occurring is asked enough times to arrive at the core of the problem.

If the problem to be addressed is lethality, prevalence in crime, or other acute social harms, we must find out why the crimes are happening in the first place, and whether our proposed solution would address the harm we seek to prevent.

It doesn’t seem to me that regulating 3d printing or DIY firearms would have a significant impact on violent crime in America. The data suggests that most violent crime in America surrounds the nucleus of the drug war. Perhaps easing up on the war on drugs—which drugs have been winning for several decades now, despite the body count—might make the drug trade ever so slightly less violent.

- Do gun manufacturers like Glock have a responsibility to prevent the use of machine gun converters?

Legally? No. Machinegun conversion devices are machineguns in and of themselves and are regulated as such. Practically? It’s not really practicable to prevent. Mechanically speaking, self-loading firearms want to shoot automatically. Virtually any self-loading firearm that feeds from a magazine can be made to shoot automatically.

- In your view, are 3D printable auto sears protected by the Second Amendment?

Yes. The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all arms and accoutrement. While some more milquetoast gun owners invent terms of limitation, those cannot be gleamed from American legal texts, history, or tradition. Any limitation on the peaceable use of arms would have to flow from common law nuisance, and there isn’t really a rational argument to treat automatic weapons in and of themselves as being nuisances more than any other repeating firearm. They aren’t like explosives where nuisance-type harm necessarily flows from their use.

- How do you respond to the argument that 3D printed gun components contribute to public safety risks?

Every single action has attendant risks. A world without risks is one without love, profit, intrigue, success, or really anything fun. Restraints on human liberty for the purpose of security usually damage both liberty and security.

- Is legal action against gun manufacturers an effective way to address gun violence?

No. As discussed before, this lawsuit is in no way calculated to address or improve the situation with respect to violent crime at all, much less gun violence. On the contrary, the groups who orchestrate lawsuits targeting the firearms industry have a habit of losing these suits so fantastically that they wind up owing the defendants legal fees. They then leave the selected plaintiff, in this instance the City of Chicago—and in past instances the families of victims of violent criminals—with the bill. This has been referred to as “revictimizing the victims” and is frankly concerning.

- How might the 3D printed firearms landscape change if Chicago wins the lawsuit?

It likely would not at all. Glock and two all-but-random Chicago retailers are being sued because unknown third parties—in my opinion more often than not with imported parts—modified a gun.

Nobody who 3D printed anything would be materially impacted by a Chicago/Everytown win.