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If Words Could Kill... 3D Gun Case Shows Free Speech Extremists Would Defend That Too

The 'weaponization' of free speech is no longer a metaphor.

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I cast Appalling Absolutism against your Reasonable Restriction.
(Robert MacPherson/AFP/Getty Images)

The plot of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a video game made before Fortnite, generally revolves around people who have the ability to kill with their voice. Various authorities want these people captured, controlled, or even persecuted, and the player who also has this power must decide whether to support the shouty rebels or not.

It’s supposed to be a grand moral dilemma, and there are lots of games that play with the concepts of unregulated “magic” users who can speak weapons of mass destruction into existence. Some of them are always “good,” some of them are always “bad,” the authorities are always willing to use their own magic users to hunt and capture the “free” magic users. Fire up some Hot Pockets and strap in.

The moral quandaries presented by these games never quite land for me, probably because going to law school has robbed me of my ability to think like a normal human, even when conjuring Melf’s Magic Missiles up someone’s ass. Obviously, some speech can be regulated. Obviously, speech that literally kills should be regulated at the highest level. Obviously, regulating killing speech isn’t tantamount to denying a person’s right to speak in society, and any “authority” who says that the only way to control magic users is to have a mage holocaust should be rejected outright. “Should we allow mages to kill as a matter of free speech?” No. “Should we kill all the mages?” NO. WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU, COLONEL TIGH? Christ, these are not hard questions. Abortions for some, tiny American flags for others.

Of course, I’m not a conservative, which is another way of saying “I am comfortable with nuance.” I’m comfortable living in a world where different things are treated differently. For the conservative free speech absolutist, my world cannot be allowed to exist. Either everything is okay, or nothing is okay. Either freedom of speech exists, or it doesn’t. Either we arrest magic users only after they’ve completed their ritual to summon forth interdimensional demons, or we have to kill every last one.

The free speech absolutists usually make the argument “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Oh, they use more Latin than that, but their legal arguments reduce to: Speech is innocent, violence is a different thing altogether, and it’s wrong to equate ouchy words with acts of violence.

I’ll note that these conservative free speech extremists are almost always straight white cis males. They can afford to wait for an outbreak of physical violence, because the physical violence almost never comes for them, their families, or their entire people. And on the rare occasions it does come, the perpetrators are quickly caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The violence they occasionally experience comes from rogue elements, not at the systemic behest of all three branches of government.

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But even the childlike conservative distinction between stones and speech is being blurred by technology. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik stayed a settlement that would have allowed the blueprints for making guns on a 3D printer to go public.

As many have noted, the grounds the 3D printer guns case has been fought along are the First Amendment, not the Second Amendment. The NRA, among others, have been all too eager to point out that printing (manufacturing) untraceable and undetectable guns is already illegal. That’s a little bit like your coke dealer pointing out that the FDA does not promulgate rules on safe cocaine use. But, for the extremely limited purposes of this specific paragraph, the NRA is right.

The 3D printer guns issue is being fought on free speech grounds because a former University of Texas law student owns the company that wants to make the blueprints public, and he knows that the law might be just stupid enough to let him. His lawyer, Josh Blackman — who was last seen martyring himself on white supremacist media because a de minimis number of college students thought he was a tool — said that Judge Lasnik’s decision was “a massive prior restraint of free speech.”

There are, of course, a bunch of things you can legally talk about that you can’t legally do. Blackman and his ilk are trying to widen that loophole so that it’s large enough they can launch a nuclear weapon through it. But placing a reasonable restriction on “speech” that may be used to literally murder people is not that difficult to square with an overall support of free speech.

We already place restrictions on speech that is used to incite violence. We place restrictions on speech that is intended to encourage people to break the law. Go ahead, grab a megaphone and tell people “everybody, charge through the Secret Service protection perimeter” and see how quickly you end up pleading “no contest,” you know, once you get back from the hospital. Telling people how to use their 3D printers in a way that would allow them to circumvent air safety restrictions, should they want to do so for whatever reason, is not speech that deserves a high level of protection. It’s not political speech, it’s not comedic speech, it’s not even commercial speech. It’s just some dangerous crap somebody wants to put on the internet. WE CAN REGULATE THAT and get back to musing about the violent overthrow of the government, as was intended by the Framers of the First Amendment.

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Blueprints for making guns on a 3D printer is not a difficult free speech case. It’s a crappy law school hypothetical dreamed up by a frustrated Dungeon Master who is too absolutist to get a morally interesting role-playing game going.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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