Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed and inventor of the world's first printable gun, the Liberator, has pledged to put all his efforts toward fighting the temporary restraining order imposed on his nonprofit's DEFCAD website, where gun schematics were published, by a US district judge in Seattle.
Speaking with CBS News Wednesday, Wilson promised to appeal the order.
"I will go to the appellate level. I will go to the Supreme Court. I will waste all my time," Wilson said.
"Access to firearms is a fundamental human dignity" Wilson told CBS. He believes this access is "a fundamental human right."
"What I'm doing is legally protected," he said in an interview hours before the US District Judge Robert Lasnik imposed a temporary restraining order Tuesday on publication of the Liberator's schematics.
As Wilson prepares to fight the court's decision, a group of US gun rights activists running a blog called Code Is Free Speech has already posted schematics for the 3D-printable guns online, in violation of the court's decision. Judge Lasnik's order violates the US Constitution, the group argued, as sharing the weapons' schematics should be protected speech under the First Amendment.
Those who oppose freely sharing blueprints for manufacturing 3D-printable weapons say they could too easily be obtained by teens, "lone wolf" shooters and psychopaths. The argument is complicated by the fact that the schematics for the Liberator were downloaded more than 100,000 times when they were shared back in 2012 and have been available through a variety of online sources like The Pirate Bay torrent tracker ever since.
Proponents of printable guns say the amount of time, money and labor needed to produce a finished Liberator is still comparable to those needed to manufacture a traditional makeshift gun, and therefore sharing these particular plans doesn't change the status quo in any way.