When I finally understood how American jurisprudence worked I asked myself, how can the American legal system be any better than the rest? Through the years that I have observed the legal system through numerous trials for public corruption and drug trafficking my head has spun in disbelief that anyone takes the American legal system seriously.
Consider the 3d printed gun battle raging on. Forget about the possibility of untraceable guns being used in criminal activities or about gun violence and focus on the on-again, off-again availability of computer code to print gun parts at home.
For those not up to the latest news, a company, Defense Distributed won the right to post the computer code to print gun parts on their website. Over the last weekend, the Trump Administration allowed Cody Wilson to post his gun blueprints online and he made them available. According to news reports, the code has been downloaded “thousands” of times. By Tuesday afternoon, judge Robert Lasnik issued a temporary injunction ordering that the blueprints be taken offline.
Cody Wilson complied with the temporary order.
But, by Wednesday morning, the blue prints were still available for download by other people.
Again, forget the debate about guns in general and arguments over the First and Second Amendments and focus on the fact that the blue prints were legally available. When the injunction was made public, the legally-minded Cody Wilson blocked their download from his website.
However, that was after “thousands” of copies had already been downloaded.
But what is worse is that although Cody Wilson is following the law, other people and companies aren’t complying with the law.
After the temporary injunction was issued and Wilson stopped distributing the plans, someone created and launched a website to make the plans available.
There are at least seven people/companies involved.
They are the individual or individuals behind the CodeIsFreeSpeech website that has the files available for download. It is Tucows, a Toronto-based company that provided the registration services for the domain name. Also, there is Amazon who provided the hosting services for the website. (IP: 52.32.135.160) There is also Google which allowed me to find the site providing the downloads to the public. As if that wasn’t enough, there are the numerous internet companies that provide “hops” between the user downloading the blueprints and the company hosting the server.
There are also the numerous news media outlets that provide me the information I needed get to the gun blue print files.
All of these are defying the judge’s orders and are breaking the law.
So, while Cody Wilson is following the law, numerous other entities are openly violating it.
None of them will be held to account, except maybe the individual or individuals behind CodeIsFreeSpeech.
But, Amazon, Google, the news media and Tucows will have made money from the controversy and will not be held to account by the legal system. That is because like there is “too big to fail” there is also “too big to prosecute” in American jurisprudence.
In the end, the companies provided access to files that a judge ordered be withheld from the public openly defying the law. For gun advocates, they champion their actions. For the free speech advocates they applaud them.
For those opposed to the guns, they’ll focus on the dangers of guns and on Cody Wilson but will conveniently forget all those that openly violated the law.
I thought about posting the gun blue prints here to make my point but unlike Amazon, Google or the others, I’m just a small-time operator, an immigrant to boot and I’d probably be prosecuted for defying the judge’s orders and eventually deported.
Regardless, the American legal system is just a joke.
Author’s note: this post does not take a position for or against the gun debate. For the record, I believe gun access comes down to the fact that the guns are already out there, including the “blue prints”. Thus, any gun control that does not address the guns out in the public is foolish.
