Posts Tagged itar

What’s The Point Of A Printed Gun?

From Aier.org:

This gun is a manifestation of the new digital reality: the physical world has become information-based. The only way to control it is to muzzle people, violate free speech rights, and fundamentally transform a principle we have come to believe about the relationship between the individual and state.

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Gov’t Settles Case With Defense Distributed

From Reason:

The Justice Department has reached a settlement with the Second Amendment Foundation and Defense Distributed, a collective that organizes, promotes, and distributes technologies to help home gun-makers. Under the agreement, which resolved a suit filed by the two groups in 2015, Americans may “access, discuss, use, reproduce or otherwise benefit from the technical data” that the government had previously ordered Defense Distributed to cease distributing.

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Blueprints Of Guns Not Allowed, Court Says

From Ars Technica:

In a 2-1 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not persuaded that Defense Distributed’s right to free speech under the First Amendment outweighs national security concerns.

Ordinarily, of course, the protection of constitutional rights would be the highest public interest at issue in a case. That is not necessarily true here, however, because the State Department has asserted a very strong public interest in national defense and national security. Indeed, the State Department’s stated interest in preventing foreign nationals—including all manner of enemies of this country—from obtaining technical data on how to produce weapons and weapon parts is not merely tangentially related to national defense and national security; it lies squarely within that interest.

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NRA Fights New ITAR Regulations

From NRA:

In July, we reported on an ill-advised attempt by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls of DOS (DDTC) to “clarify” who is a regulated firearms “manufacturer” for purposes of the Arms Export Control Act and its implementing rules, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

As we noted in that report, DDTC’s “guidance” document creates far more confusion than clarity and threatens to chill lawful behavior and put small commercial gunsmiths who cannot afford ITAR’s heavy compliance costs out of business.

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ITAR Changes Affect Gunsmiths

From Guns.com:

On July 22, the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls issued new guidance for firearm manufacturers and gunsmiths to register as exporters under the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and pay an annual $2,250 fee — even if they had no intention of exporting. This included companies and individuals who performed machine work on firearms such as threading barrels, magazine modifications and rechambering.

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WaPo: Printed Guns Will Lead To Printed Nukes

From The Washington Post:

The ability to “print” or manufacture guns privately will allow individuals to bypass background checks, the primary way that guns are regulated today. And that challenge will expand exponentially as the technology advances, one day enabling individuals to print chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction at home.

The threat of privately printed weapons will soon grow beyond the lethal handguns now in circulation. As we argue in research forthcoming in the October issue of the Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, considering expected advances in the technologies, terrorist groups will threaten nations with 3-D printed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons within a couple of decades.

 

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NRA Stands Up For First Amendment

From NRA-ILA:

As we reported in June, the Obama Administration’s State Department (DOS) proposed a revision of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) on June 3 that would require anyone seeking to make certain types of information about firearms publicly available to first obtain government approval. Prior restraints of the sort contemplated by the proposal are among the most disfavored regulations of speech under First Amendment case law. Our original alert encouraged gunsmiths, manufacturers, reloaders, serious hobbyists, and others who rely on design, development, production or manufacturing information about firearms to file comments with the State Department opposing the rule and explaining its problems.

 

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State Department Gun Regs Designed To Counter Defense Distributed Lawsuit

According to Sean Davis at The Federalist the new regulations are nothing more than retaliation against Defense Distributed:

On June 3, just four weeks after Defense Distributed filed its complaint in federal court, the State Department suddenly decided to propose a new rule giving it the authority to pre-approve speech related to publicly available firearm plans. The State Department’s play here is obvious: it hopes to promulgate a new rule making its previous anti-speech efforts superficially legal in order to short-circuit Defense Distributed’s court case. If that were to happen, the non-profit would then have to file a new and separate suit alleging the unconstitutionality of the new rule.

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Feds Want To Restrict Talking About Guns On The Net

The State Department has proposed new ITAR rules that would cover merely talking about guns according to the NRA.

From The Washington Examiner:

…the NRA boiled it down for gun owners with this warning:

“In their current form, the ITAR do not (as a rule) regulate technical data that are in what the regulations call the ‘public domain.’ Essentially, this means data ‘which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public’ through a variety of specified means. These include ‘at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents.’ Many have read this provision to include material that is posted on publicly available websites, since most public libraries these days make Internet access available to their patrons.

“The ITAR, however, were originally promulgated in the days before the Internet. Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been ‘exported,’ as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.

“With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be ‘clarifying’ the rules concerning ‘technical data’ posted online or otherwise ‘released’ into the ‘public domain.’ To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the ‘authorization’ of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible.”

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