The Second Amendment Foundation(SAF) petitioned the Supreme Court Monday to hear a case targeting New Jersey’s ban on publishing 3D printing code for firearms.
New Jersey passed a law in November 2018 criminalizing the distribution of “digital instructions in the form of computer-aided design files or other code or instructions stored and displayed in electronic format as a digital model that may be used to program a three-dimensional printer to manufacture or produce a firearm, firearm receiver, magazine, or firearm component.” SAF backed a lawsuit by Defense Distributed, which created files that allowed people with 3D printers to make firearms at home for their personal use, when New Jersey’s attorney general at the time, Gurbir Grewal, threatened legal action against the company, and asked the court to determine if software code is protected by the First Amendment.
“New Jersey enacted the statute to stop Defense Distributed in particular,” SAF says in its petition to the Supreme Court. “At the signing ceremony, the Governor [Phil Murphy] linked the law to the Attorney General’s earlier action against Defense Distributed, and the Attorney General identified Cody Wilson and his supporters, said they were ‘still trying to release these codes online,’ announced stronger tools ‘to stop them,’ and warned, ‘we will come after you.’”
“You can also publish a book on how to build a gun, right? And that’s not even in question, right?” SAF Senior Director of Litigation William Sack told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So you can post, you can publish a book, here’s how to build a gun with diagrams and instructions and a build sheet, no one’s questioning that.”
“Our perspective is that does not change at all if what you’re publishing is computer files,” Sack continued.
In addition to the First Amendment claim, SAF also asked the high court to resolve what they described as a “spat” between the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
A three-judge panel from the Third Circuit upheld New Jersey’s ban, when the case was transferred to New Jersey due to a federal district court ruling in Texas. However, the Fifth Circuit overturned the lower court’s ruling and directed that the case be returned, which the New Jersey court refused to do, according to the petition SAF filed with the Supreme Court.
“The Fifth Circuit and the Third Circuit kind of got into a spat,” SAF Senior Director of Litigation William Sack told the DCNF. “The case bounced back and forth between them, and then essentially a dispute arose between them as to who rightfully had the case, and so we have filed a cert petition on both really the core First Amendment question, but also this other question because it raised an important and important kind of federal courts question as to whether, essentially what our position is that the Third Circuit kind of snatched this thing back against the Fifth Circuit’s will.”
Democratic New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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