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Cody Wilson is pushing forward with the technology to enable printing a firearm at home.

Yesterday, the controversial founder and director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit that he launched to explore the possibility of manufacturing weapons with 3D printers, was in Manhattan to talk at the Inside 3D Printing Conference. After a panel on how copyright affects the 3D printing industry, he confirmed to Mashablewhat he had already hinted at before: that what was once unthinkable — a gun entirely made of 3D-printed parts — is actually right around the corner.

Will it work? Wilson thinks it will, and it won’t be just a one-shot wonder it will be able to fire a few shots before melting or breaking.

Wilson didn’t want to reveal too much about what could become the world’s first fully 3D-printed gun, saying he will make the actual announcement soon. He did reveal some details, however.

The gun will be made of 12 parts, all printed in ABS+, a very sturdy type of thermoplastic. There might be, perhaps, just one small metal part — a firing pin. While Wilson and his team are still designing the weapon, it won’t be a reproduction of an existing firearm, but instead a custom design.

Defense Distributed has been working on this project — dubbed Wiki Weapon — since last summer, but the group initially focused on printing specific gun parts, like lower receivers and magazines. But in the last two months they have moved away from that to go after the bigger prize: printing an entire gun.

If Defense Distributed is really able to print an entire working handgun, the group will be one step closer to reaching its lofty goal of giving every citizen of the world “near-instant access to a firearm through the Internet.” If they do, everybody will then have a chance to print their own gun, in their own bedroom — with just a 3D printer and a blueprint downloaded fromDefcad, Defense Distributed’s search engine and repository for 3D-printable weapons’ designs.

One interesting element of the debate is how others in the 3D printing community are approaching it. By and large, they don’t like guns. That is a given. But they oppose government intervention, as this type of DRM could cripple 3D printing more broadly.

“It’s a very frightening prospect,” said Brian Quan, president of X-Object, a Brooklyn-based startups that distributes consumer 3D printers made by Delta Micro Factory Corporation. “I’m against the idea that someone could stealthily have a weapon that could kill somebody without even being traced.”

At the same time, though, Quan doesn’t think the government should step in. He’s more in favor of an industry self-imposed regulation, perhaps using DRM-style access control technologies, which are used to limit the copy of DVDs.

I am working on an article about the 2nd Amendment and 3D printing. I should have something ready over the summer.

After Citizens United, the President called on Congress to swiftly pass laws to undo the effects of that decision. This request was silly of course–only a constitutional amendment can undo an opinion interpreting the First Amendment (see this video). But what Congress, and administrative agencies could do, was work within Citizens United.

The SEC is may do just that, by requiring disclosures to shareholders of political donations:

A loose coalition of Democratic elected officials, shareholder activists and pension funds has flooded the Securities and Exchange Commission with calls to require publicly traded corporations to disclose to shareholders all of their political donations, a move that could transform the growing world of secret campaign spending.

S.E.C. officials have indicated that they could propose a new disclosure rule by the end of April, setting up a major battle with business groups that oppose the proposal and are preparing for a fierce counterattack if the agency’s staff moves ahead. Two S.E.C. commissioners have taken the unusual step of weighing in already, with Daniel Gallagher, a Republican, saying in a speech that the commission had been “led astray” by “politically charged issues.”

Of course, everyone on the Court–save Justice Thomas–was okay with disclosures.

In seeking greater disclosure to shareholders, many of the advocates are citing an unlikely source: the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. In clearing the way for unlimited corporate expenditures in campaigns, Justice Kennedy suggested that “shareholder objections raised through the procedures of corporate democracy” could provide accountability for the new political powers.

“I think the S.E.C. staff is very sympathetic to the petition itself, and a lot of the comments have referenced Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United,” said Karl J. Sandstrom, counsel to the Center for Political Accountability, which advocates transparency in corporate political spending. “But they have so much on their plate, they have to decide what’s going to come first,” he added.

An Anti-Citizens United amendment was always a pipe dream. But more disclosures would be constitutional.

Update: Thanks to Alison Frankel, a slight update.

That’s a long time–the NBA finals are scheduled to begin on June 6 and end on June 20.!

 James said he has shut down his phone for the playoffs, just as he did last season.

“I don’t have a phone right now,” James said.

Impressive fortitude.

Kyle Graham unearths some sage wisdom from a young John Glover Roberts about the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the risk hackers pose to the safety of the Garden State.

The memo reads, in part:

“The additional penalty is designed to deter the junior high school computer whizzes who break into the Los Alamos computers and do such things as change the targets on all our nuclear missles [sic] to various points in New Jersey.”

The memo was written at the request of “Assistnat Attorney General McConnell.” No, it’s not Michael McConnell in the Office of Legislative Affairs, but Robert McConnell. Michael at that point was in the SG’s Office.

On Monday, October 1, 2012, The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) and The Harlan Institute kicked off their inaugural Virtual Supreme Court Competition. The competition offered participating high school students the opportunity to research a contemporary constitutional issue – this year, affirmative action, craft appellate briefs, and present convincing legal arguments in our virtual courtroom using Google+ Video Hangouts.

Students from around the country submitted appellate briefs aimed at addressing the constitutional question – Is the Fourteenth Amendment color-blind? From the impressive briefs submitted as blog posts on the Harlan Institute’s FantasySCOTUS page (http://harlaninstitute.org/scoreboard/), legal experts at ConSource and the Harlan Institute selected the top brief-writing teams to participate in the oral argument round of the competition.

On Monday, April 22, 2013, students from the Frisco Career and Technical Education Center in Frisco, Texas competed in the championship oral argument round in front of a virtual bench of esteemed legal professionals. The judges included: Julie Silverbrook, Executive Director of ConSource; Josh Blackman, Harlan Institute President and South Texas College of Law professor; Tom Krattenmaker, former William & Mary Law School dean and clerk to Justice Harlan; and Matthew Fitzgerald, associate at McGuireWoods LLP and clerk to Justice Thomas.

The competing Frisco teams included seniors DJ Anderson and Jason Parson, as well as Derani Wiggins and Sarah Sietmann. Although the scores were incredibly close, the grand prize winners of the championship round were DJ Anderson and Jason Parson. Anderson and Parson will be flown to Washington, D.C. to participate in ConSource’s Fifth Annual Capital City Constitution Day program.

A video of the championship round is available here: http://youtu.be/rZl4yQ-2zlQ. Both teams of students should be commended for their excellent historical and legal research, writing, and oral argument skills.

Later in the day, another team of students from Frisco, as well as a team of students from Sioux Central High School in Sioux, Iowa competed in a non-advancing runner-up round. Again, the competition was very close, but the students from Frisco, Texas were able to prevail over their colleagues from Sioux Central High in Iowa.

All of the students and teachers who participated in the program should be applauded for their hard work and dedication. Mr. Benjamin Ewald of the Frisco CTE Center and Ms. Erin Olson of Sioux Central High School should be saluted for going above and beyond to prepare their students for the competition. Please join us in congratulating the participants and their wonderful teachers.

Information about the Inaugural Virtual Supreme Court Competition is available at: http://harlaninstitute.org/contests/virtual-supreme-court/,

http://harlaninstitute.org/2013/04/22/live-the-2013-harlan-institute-consource-virtual-supreme-court-competition-fisher-v-university-of-texas-austin/

Interested in coaching a team of students for the 2014 Virtual Supreme Court Competition? Email ConSource Executive Director Julie Silverbrook at

Julie.Silverbrook@consource.org or Harlan Institute President Josh Blackman at[email protected].