Starting on July 1, it will be illegal in Colorado to knowingly manufacture or produce “a potentially functioning firearm, unfinished frame or receiver, large-capacity magazine, or rapid-fire device” using a 3D printer… at least for most Coloradans.
There are a couple of exceptions in the new law. A federally licensed firearm manufacturer can still use 3D printers, as can “an instructor or student of an accredited gunsmithing program, or an institution that operates an accredited gunsmithing program.”
While Denver Democrat Rep. Lindsay Gilchrist, who sponsored the bill, claimed ““3D-printed guns and gun components are an increasing threat in our communities because they lack identification that law enforcement can use to track the weapon back to a suspect, and they undermine life-saving guardrails like background checks and waiting periods,” Republicans have taken a much different view.
Not a single Republican lawmaker vote in favor of these new prohibitions, and as Republican Rep. Zamora Wilson argued during debate back in March, “This bill is highly vulnerable to constitutional challenge, particularly as applied to conduct protected by the Second Amendment.”
Indeed it is, and thanks to those exemptions listed above it’s going to be difficult for the state to argue that the new law doesn’t implicate the Second Amendment in any way.
Some anti-gun judges have been taking a very literal view of the text of the Second Amendment since the Bruen decision was handed down four years ago. If a gun control law doesn’t explicitly involve keeping or bearing, then the activity it does cover isn’t protected by the Second Amendment.
That would include building a firearm, at least for some anti-gunners on the bench. But because the new law in Colorado allows some individuals to use 3D printers to craft a gun without requiring them to dispose of it immediately afterwards, it therefore also allows them to be kept, at least for some period of time and by some people.
So the Second Amendment is implicated here, no matter how limited a judge might view the right to keep and bear arms. And that means its up to the state of Colorado to justify this law in accordance with the national tradition of gun ownership and regulation.
I don’t see how the state can do that. At the time the Second Amendment was ratified, there were no longstanding and widespread laws that prohibited the average American from crafting their own guns using the available technology. The same is true for the time period surrounding ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
I searched the Duke Center for Firearms Law’s repository of historical gun laws and found only one mention of the word “manufacture” in laws between 1755 and 1810: a 1775 resolution by the Maryland Constitutional Convention stating in part that “ll persons employed in the manufacturing or repairing of arms for the public, or in repairing arms for the use of the militia by order or appointment of any field officer of the militia… shall, during the time they are actually so employed, within one year next following, be exempt from attending on musters.”
There are a handful of laws enacted between 1865 and 1895 that mention manufacturing, but those deal with the manufacturing and storage of gunpowder, not firearms. There’s certainly nothing in statute that limited the use of tools to manufacture firearms solely to gunsmiths or companies that mass produced firearms.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser can try to argue that the law is in response to an “unprecedented societal concern,” but what concern is that? Violent crime? That’s been around since the beginning of time. Home-built guns? The tradition of home manufacturing of firearms predates the founding of this nation.
The problem that Colorado is trying to solve with this soon-to-be-enacted law is the criminal acquisition of weapons. The “why” might fit within a national tradition of gun regulation, but the “how” simply does not. Some federal judge may still find Colorado’s law to be compatible with the Second Amendment if and when it faces a legal challenge, but they’re going to have to get awfully creative to do so. In fact, they’re going to have to rewrite history or the Constitution in order to uphold it.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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