Eight states announced Monday that they plan to ask a federal judge in Seattle to immediately issue a temporary restraining order against Defense Distributed, a Texas-based group that has already begun making 3D-printer gun files available on its DEFCAD website after a recent legal settlement with the US State Department.
Those states include: Washington, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and also the District of Columbia. A total of 20 states (and DC) have sent a separate letter expressing their support, but for now, only the group lead by Washington is officially part of the lawsuit.
“After almost 18 months I was skeptical that there was anything else that this administration would do that would truly shock me, but they have,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson told reporters assembled in Olympia and by phone. “Frankly, it is terrifying… We think that it is important to put a stop to this right away and make it as difficult as humanly possible to access this information.”
The new lawsuit, which Ferguson explained will be filed “within hours,” comes just one day after Defense Distributed voluntarily agreed to block IP addresses from Pennsylvania after that state’s attorney general filed a similar motion in federal court there.
“Pennsylvania is still suing and we are still responding,” Defense Distributed’s founder, Cody Wilson, told Ars.
Preemptively on Sunday, Defense Distributed sued the attorney general of New Jersey and the city attorney of Los Angeles to stop those lawsuits, largely on First Amendment grounds.
In this new 20-state initiative, the Washington attorney general argued that the State Department settlement violated the Administrative Procedure Act and also infringed upon states’ Tenth Amendment right to regulate firearms within their own states. Ferguson pointed out, for example, people convicted of domestic abuse are flagged when they attempt to legally buy a gun. Allowing anyone to download and manufacture their own gun circumvents that process, he said.