States Sue Trump Administration Over 3D-Printed Gun Regulations

States Sue Trump Administration Over 3D-Printed Gun Regulations

Twenty states and the District of Columbia are jointly challenging the Trump administration’s easing of regulations on so-called “ghost guns.”


The new rules by the Trump administration, which go into effect in March, would remove the software files needed to design and 3D print untraceable plastic guns from the U.S. Munitions List and transfer the regulation of these weapons  from the State Department to the Department of Commerce. Critics say the changes mean the designs will be widely available online.


According to the group of attorneys general, allowing the software design files to be posted online would “effectively deregulate 3D-printable gun files entirely”  and would make firearm files “instantly [and] easily accessible both within the United States … and outside the United States.”


The attorneys general filed the lawsuit about the rules last week at the U.S. District Court in Seattle. The attorneys general from New York, California, and Washington state are leading the group.


New York Attorney General Letitia James tweeted that it’s too dangerous to make these blueprints publicly available. "These files allow anyone to simply go online and download files to print and assemble guns, including assault rifles," James said. "These 'ghost guns' are unregistered, untraceable, often undetectable and risk the lives of every American."


The current lawsuit isn’t the first that state attorneys general have brought to stop the distribution of ghost gun files. The same group of states also brought a lawsuit against gun CAD (computer-assisted design) files in 2018. 


That lawsuit was spurred by the creation of DEFCAD, a searchable online library for printable guns run by Defense Distributed, ..

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