Earlier Tuesday, standing in the front room of Defense Distributed’s office in Austin, Texas, Wilson fielded calls from reporters, conducted television interviews and was ready to celebrate.
AUSTIN, Texas — For Cody Wilson, this week had long been in the making. For more than five years, the professed gun-rights and free-speech advocate had sought to publish online his blueprints for a downloadable gun but had repeatedly been blocked by the federal government.
Until Tuesday evening, it looked as if he finally would get his way. But hours before the schematics for a 3D gun called the Liberator were expected to be posted — so-called for the single-shot handguns that the Allies designed as an insurgency weapon in World War II — a federal judge granted a temporary nationwide injunction blocking Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed.
Earlier Tuesday, standing in the front room of Defense Distributed’s office in Austin, Texas, Wilson fielded calls from reporters, conducted television interviews and was ready to celebrate.
“It seems like I’ve crystallized the terms of the debate according to how I wanted it,” Wilson said, adding that his goal was to protect both the First and Second amendments.
“I still believe in the rights to keep and bear arms, and I believe what I’m doing is a way of protecting them,” he said, while also affirming his adherence to free speech.
In one room of the Defense Distributed office hung a framed yellow front page of a newspaper describing the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II. A model of the Liberator, the printer-made pistol, was on a bookshelf. A library in the back had thousands of volumes ranging from technical journals to the works of Shakespeare.
No stranger to controversy, Wilson was listed by Wired magazine as one of the 15 Most Dangerous People in the World in 2012, the year he began Defense Distributed. Included on that list were former President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt and President Bashar Assad of Syria, both known for involvement in crimes against humanity. In 2017, Wilson created Hatreon, a crowdfunding site that has often been used by neo-Nazi groups that were kicked off more traditional peer-to-peer websites like Patreon and PayPal. Many of the organizers of a white supremacist rally last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, for instance, used Hatreon to raise money for the event.
Wilson dismisses the idea that publishing gun blueprints is threatening or illegal.
“The argument that I’m making,” he said, “although not always very well, is that what I’m doing is actually a pretty mainline American idea.”
Asked about his political views, Wilson said he has voted only once in his life: for then-Rep. Ron Paul in a state race in 2008.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Wilson and his family moved to Cabot, Arkansas, when he was in the first grade. At Cabot High School, Wilson was elected student body president. He attended the University of Central Arkansas, where he majored in English, and studied abroad in China for a semester. After graduating in 2010, he went to law school at the University of Texas.
In his second year there, Wilson began tinkering with a 3D printer to design a functional gun. By 2013, he had created his company, Defense Distributed, and published online the blueprints for a gun that were downloaded more than 100,000 times. Dropping out of law school to pursue his new idea full-time, Wilson received a letter from the State Department in May 2013 ordering him to pull his files from the internet, citing arms export laws.
While Wilson, 30, has described himself as a techno-libertarian, free-speech provocateur and online heretic, his critics have said he is a media hound and a peddler of “open-source terrorism.”
Called “ghost guns” because they lack serial numbers and are made almost entirely of plastic, Wilson’s blueprints would allow for the mass production of untraceable firearms that could be made at home, gun-control advocates have warned, including by felons, terrorists or other people prohibited from buying them.
“The people who make them will be state actors or well-financed criminal cartels who have the ability to execute well-organized criminal attacks in the United States and elsewhere,” said Avery Gardiner, the co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Since starting his company, Wilson has faced pushback from all sides. YouTube has repeatedly pulled his promotional videos. Once it learned of his plans, Stratasys, the company from which he leased a 3D printer, forced him to return it. Indiegogo canceled his crowdfunding campaign, forcing him to set up a bitcoin account to receive donations. A company called Thingiverse, which publishes user-created design files, removed all of his designs.
On Monday, attorneys general in eight states filed a joint federal lawsuit in Seattle to block Defense Distributed from publishing the files online.
But Tuesday morning, things were looking up. With practiced calm, Wilson answered questions from reporters while also taking calls from his lawyers and monitoring judicial hearing updates.
To him, Wilson explained, the fight over the publishing of his blueprints was less about guns than it was about renegotiating the relationship between citizens and the state.
“I think the state should be as weak as possible relative to the individual,” he said. “The proper posture of the state is one that at least is in fear of its citizen, not one that lords over it.”
When asked about the potentially dire consequences of his 3D printed weapons, Wilson often responds with a philosophical view. “Understanding that rights and civil liberties are something that we protect is also understanding that they have consequences that are also protected, or tolerated,” he said to Popular Science in 2012, shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting.
Wilson’s Twitter handle is @Radomysisky, named after the Russian revolutionary and leader of the Communist International who was executed for trying to kill Stalin. Among his heroes, Wilson cites Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a Frenchman considered by many to be the “father of anarchism.”
Wilson is also a fan of Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who is a staunch libertarian and funder of causes such as paying young people not to go to college. Thiel invited Wilson to a private Wyoming retreat, where the two men discussed the future of bitcoin. Wilson was inspired by the potential of bitcoin, an encrypted, digital currency that forgoes more traditional routes and works person-to-person online.
The cryptocurrency’s potential, he said, is to disrupt the ability of governments to raise taxes. This was partly his motivation for starting Dark Wallet, a secure online means of storing currency. With Dark Wallet, which he started in 2014, Wilson hopes to simplify bitcoin, which can be tech-intensive and difficult to use.
Wilson has said that the goal of Defense Distributed is to promote decentralized solutions in an ever-centralizing world. In recent media appearances, he said that companies like Google, Facebook and YouTube have tried to exert more control over public discourse, particularly after racial unrest last summer in Charlottesville.
“They can decide at will who isn’t able to participate,” he told Reason magazine in April, adding that he hates Silicon Valley almost as much as he hates Washington, D.C. In the push to democratize information, Wilson has said, 3D printers will only become revolutionary tools when they are used not for useless things like trinkets or lawn gnomes, but medical devices, drugs or guns.
Wilson said that the Allies’ efforts to liberate Europe in World War II partly inspired the development of the 3D-printed firearm. Before the invasion, he said, they contemplated dropping guns behind enemy lines to resistance fighters in occupied territory.
“Instead of dropping the gun on Europe,” he said, “we dropped it on the internet.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.