Cody Wilson: troll, genius, patriot, provocateur, anarchist, attention whore, gun nut or Second... 1 of 7

Defense Distributed’s Liberator pistol is, on balance, a fairly piss-poor excuse for a gun.

While the world’s first wholly 3D-printed firearm is somewhat gadget-beautiful — its components made of ecru plastic except for the nail used for a firing pin and a six-ounce block of steel glued into the frame in order to adhere to the Undetectable Firearms Act — it has a look that would probably send industrial designer Raymond Loewy into an epileptic fit: stubby, chunky, with all the charm of a plastic toilet brush handle blow-molded in Shanghai. The thick, 3-inch barrel, chambered for .380 caliber pistol ammo, is unrifled, which means at any range further than you can throw it underhanded, it’s mostly just a point-and-pray noisemaker. Because the ABS plastic barrel refuses to remember its shape after firing, deforming a bit more every time you run a bullet through it, the barrel can survive around eight shots before you’re basically holding a fragmentation grenade.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the media and political arena over the idea of a printed gun falling into the wrong hands. Hypothetical mental patients and kids printing out guns in their bedrooms come up a lot. While a printed gun is clearly a problem for countries with strict gun control like Japan and the United Kingdom, in America, where you could probably go a long way toward filling the Potomac from source to sea with the perfectly functional guns already out there, there’s a whole lot better chance that Little Johnny is going to know where Dad keeps his Glock than that he’s going to go through the tedious, day-long process of printing himself a single-shot plastic gun if he gets a mind to plug his rival for Little Jenny’s affections. A Saturday Night Special it ain’t.

So what is The Liberator, exactly, if not a reliable firearm in the commonly accepted sense? It’s clearly the first of something: the Wright Flyer of a maybe more worrisome future, especially as technologies to 3D print in metal alloy come online and grow cheaper. It’s also a real-world “troll,” an intentional and calculated provocation, designed to simultaneously gig the bear of the U.S. government while ruffling the feathers of the maximum number of people, from gun control advocates to hobbyists who see 3D printing as nothing more than a fun way to make Etsy-ready broaches and dust-catcher tchotchkies.


Arkansan turned Texan Cody Wilson, 25, enjoys the provocateur role of his Defense Distributed collaborative in Austin. The philosophy-spouting Wilson’s clearly been reading his P.T. Barnum along with his Friedrich Hayek. The story of every project Wilson’s been involved in — from the printed (and serial-numberless) AR15 lower receivers that first got his name in the paper, to the high-capacity magazines Defense Distributed started printing during the post-Sandy Hook assault weapons debate, to the Liberator pistol, to the Dark Wallet Bitcoin project he’s currently working on — begins with his and his colleagues’ efforts to attract as many calls from the likes of New York Times and Der Spiegel as possible.

You can understand why reporters love him. Wilson’s a quote machine: smart, argumentative without turning shrill, prone to grinning out slogans. Sure, you can call that being an attention whore, or you can call it gaming the age of the 15-minute attention span. We live in the era of “Pics or it didn’t happen,” and whether you’re with him or not, Wilson’s had his picture taken many, many times since starting on his quest to upset the national apple cart on the subject of gun control. Too, Wilson grew up on the Internet, and the first rule of being heard on the Internet isn’t to shout the loudest, it’s to figure out a way to get everybody else to do the shouting for you.


Talking to him, you get the sense that Wilson’s gun-related projects are actually thought exercises made real, a kind of political and regulatory Mt. Everest that Wilson climbed for no other reason than because it was there, to make the point that it could be done and that no law currently on the books could stop him. Though his attitude about gun control has won him fans from hardcore Libertarians to Glenn Beck — strange bedfellows for a guy who started out reading Lenin in high school and got more economically and politically radical from there — he’ll tell you that his firearm-related projects are not about politics, and really not even about guns. They’re about, as he puts it, the liberation of information. They’re about getting out the message that, because of the Internet (and now, thanks to 3D printing, real-world things like guns), the powers that be can no longer control and regulate information. Whether you agree with that line of thinking or not, whether you see it as dangerous or not, it’s pretty much irrefutable that Wilson’s logic falls squarely in line with the kind of dream it/do it attitude that led to the creation of 3D printing in the first place, though it’s a sure bet that the printer designers never considered producing untraceable parts for AR-15s any more than Orville Wright ever imagined the Enola Gay.

For Wilson’s critics, the debate always eventually comes back around to: Just because you can do something, should you? That’s another thing you realize in talking to Cody Wilson — for better or worse, the idea of “should you?” never really figures into his equation.

The poison word

Cody Wilson was born in Little Rock. The family — “your mainstream Arkansan conservative types,” he said — moved to Cabot when he was in the first grade. Wilson excelled in school, participating in varsity athletics at Cabot High, where he was elected student body president before graduating in 2006. By then, Wilson said, he was reading Marx, and had become sympathetic with the modern left’s concern for justice and equality. At the same time, he said, “I’ve always been maybe informed by the more conservative or individualistic kind of American stuff about the role of the individual in society.”


Accepting a scholarship to attend the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Wilson majored in English, joined Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, traveled to China with the university’s study-abroad program, and was elected president of UCA’s Student Government Association. The Internet is a kind of amber where everything exists forever, and interviews with Wilson at the time, with him gushing about courses on Milton, hoping to have a job in five years, and describing how his schedule left him “darting around campus, often like a madman,” make it hard to believe he’d ever be named one of the “15 Most Dangerous People in the World” by wired.com.

UCA English professor Raymond-Jean Frontain had Wilson in several classes as an undergrad, including his course on Milton. He called Wilson the finest student he’s had in 25 years of teaching.

“He was extraordinarily thoughtful,” Frontain said. “His mind was constantly working. You could see thoughts pass over his face in the middle of a lecture. He was able to do more in the opening paragraph of an essay exam than most other students could do in their entire essay. He was simply the best critical thinker, critical reader, critical writer that I’ve had at UCA.” Frontain said that during lectures and class discussions, it was often clear that Wilson was “about three steps ahead” of the rest of the class, even him.

“The level of discussion was so much higher in the classes that he took,” Frontain said. “When he was in the class, everybody was stimulated to do far superior work than they would have done if he was not. That’s an incredible power to have.”

Frontain noted that while Wilson was Student Government Association president at UCA, Wilson lobbied the administration and board of trustees to institute a mandatory library fee that was on par with the athletics fee, something that broke what Frontain called a stagnation of the library’s budget that had persisted for years. “I doubt that in the history of the institution any other student leader accomplished anything that has had a greater lasting effect as Cody did in this instance,” he said. He and Wilson remain friends, he said, with Wilson often stopping by for a chat when he’s in Arkansas.

While most dorm room radicals are content to roll up their poster of Che Guevara the day they graduate from college, the changes in Wilson’s mind during those formative years seem to have stuck. While at UCA, he met many of the core of Arkansans who would eventually help him found the non-profit Defense Distributed — Benjamin Denio, Dana Bizzell, Sean Kubin, Chris Hancock and Brad Bridges — and soon, his Libertarian-flavored political thought about privacy, speech and anti-globalism began to meld with the Internet, a place where the real-world rules often didn’t apply.

“It wasn’t until college,” he said, “that I went ahead and said: ‘You know what? I’m an anarchist.’ … I’ve always been on the Internet, but basically my zeal for the Internet and my anarchist tendencies all kind of cross-pollinated. I discovered crypto-anarchy and the cypherpunks and Internet radicalism.”

While people bristle at the word “anarchist,” Wilson said that in his case, it’s an attempt at “persuasive redefinition” in order to “rehabilitate the old, poison word.”

“But, essentially, it’s the correct one,” he said. “I don’t believe in political and social privilege and hierarchy. I don’t believe the free election of rulers somehow makes you in charge of your own life. I believe that people should be responsible for direct action and planning their own lives. This is less achievable in the real, but more achievable in software relationships.”


Nearing graduation at UCA, Wilson had planned to attend NYU law school, but “got cold feet” at the last minute, mostly over the quarter-million in student loan debt it would cost to attend, he said. Instead, he took a year off before accepting a scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Though Wilson did well in law school, he says it bored him. Before too long, he was looking for ways to change the world that didn’t involve a suit and tie. By then, he was talking regularly with fellow UCA alumnus Benjamin Denio.

Denio, who helped Wilson found Defense Distributed, had heard of Wilson in college, but didn’t begin to collaborate with him until after Wilson graduated. He said they soon found that they saw eye to eye on most political views. Denio characterized Wilson as driven, brilliant, “incredibly scrupulous,” and with a razor wit, able to distill very complicated philosophical and political ideas in ways that are “very ascertainable to the public mind.”

Since emerging as the poster boy for printed firearms, Wilson has become something of a gun aficionado, showing off a home arsenal of handguns and rifles to camera crews visiting his apartment in Austin. When Denio first began talking to him, however, he said that Wilson didn’t own a firearm of any kind.

“When I first met Cody, he was in no way a ‘gun guy’.” Denio said. “He didn’t own any firearms, and as far as I know, his family wasn’t really into firearms either. In fact, he asked me when he sought to purchase his first firearm what he should get, and I gave him some advice on what he should get.”

Part of Wilson’s personality, Denio said, is to want what others say he can’t have. Or, as Denio put it: “If they told him that he couldn’t have a tuna sandwich, he would want a tuna sandwich. You can really take him at face value. He’s absolutely scrupulous and honest about his intentions, and his background is not one informed by what the public might consider an insipid kind of radicalism. On the contrary, at least in his case, it’s very thoughtful and well-constructed.”

Wiki weapon

In the spring of 2012, Wilson said, he was on the phone with Denio when they started talking about 3D printing. Soon, the conversation turned toward the question of whether you could build a gun with a 3D printer. Wilson said that he’d heard of 3D printing a few years before.

A 3D printer is something like a computer-controlled glue gun. A heated printing head liquefies a long strand of plastic filament, then deposits the resulting goo in a controlled pattern that represents a layer of a three dimensional object, as laid out in a digital computer-assisted design, or CAD, file. After that “slice” cools, it deposits another, and another. Do that a hundred or a thousand times, and you’ve got a plastic, three-dimensional object. Originally expensive, prices for 3D printers have plummeted in the last few years. You can now buy an entry-level printer for $500-$1,000 dollars.

“We were talking about how to bring different digital techniques to gun manufacture. Would that be something we were interested in doing?” Wilson said. “We weren’t, but then I said, ‘You’ve heard of 3D printers, right? I wonder if you could 3D print a gun?’ Then we were like: ‘If you could, that means anyone could, and it would be a Wikileaks-style brouhaha if we put that file out on the Pirate Bay [software-sharing website].’ “

On July 27, 2012, Wilson posted a video on YouTube titled “The Wiki Weapon.” In it, Wilson sits in a computer-cluttered room in a peach-colored shirt, Ray Bans in his pocket. The video has since been seen over 1.2 million times.

“A group of friends and I have decided to band together under a collective name,” Wilson tells the audience. “We’re not a company, we’re not a corporation, we’re not even a business association of any kind. We just call ourselves Defense Distributed. We want to share with you an idea. This idea is not original. This idea has been had before. But it’s an idea whose time has come. We think we have a way to get there. The Defense Distributed project has developed an idea we’re calling the Wiki Weapon. It would be the world’s first 3D-printable personal defense system.”

Saying that the project was trying to raise $20,000 in online funding, Wilson said the real goal of the Wiki Weapon project wasn’t a gun, but a digital, 3D-printable CAD blueprint of working gun that could be distributed for free over the Internet. “As long as there’s a free Internet, that file is available to anyone at any time, all over the world,” Wilson tells the camera. “A gun can be anywhere. Any bullet is now a weapon. But Defense Distributed’s goal really isn’t about personal armament. It’s more the liberation of information.”

“Every dollar is a statement to these international kleptocrats that this isn’t in your control anymore,” Wilson says in closing. “You want to announce treaties and new legal regimes announcing greater and greater eras and strata of gun control? Listen, it’s over. You don’t understand the world you’re living in. We’re bringing something else into being.”

It wasn’t long before some of the tech companies Wilson had relied on to make the idea a reality began to balk. Less than a month and $1,700 into the fund-raising drive, the crowdfunding website Indiegogo booted the Wiki Weapon project from its site. Indiegogo refunded all the money that had already been raised to the people who had contributed it, forcing Wilson to raise money for the project by accepting Bitcoin, an online currency that has been growing in real-world value in recent years.

Then, in September 2012, Stratasys, the company that had leased Defense Distributed its printer, informed Wilson that he had broken the terms of his lease by using the printer for illegal purposes because he didn’t have a federal firearms manufacturer’s license. (Wilson would later apply for and receive a federal firearms license in March 2013, allowing him to legally make and sell guns.) Even though Wilson hadn’t even unpacked the Stratasys printer from the boxes yet, they told him he had 48 hours to surrender it, which he did, filming it being loaded onto the truck.

Defense Distributed soon acquired a used 3D printer, sought other funding sources, and pressed on.

Magazines and receivers

Working its way up to a wholly-printed gun, Defense Distributed began printing lower receivers for AR15s, the widely-available, semi-automatic version of the military M16 assault rifle. In the exploded view, the lower receiver is the chunk of an AR15 that contains the trigger assembly and which the magazine snaps into. The other parts of the assembled rifle attach to the lower receiver, which is also the place where the manufacturer stamps or etches the gun’s serial number. That number allows it to be tracked by the federal government, making the lower receiver the only “regulated” part of an AR15. Print the lower receiver, attach the other parts, and you’ve theoretically got an untraceable rifle.

While the idea of a printed lower receiver wasn’t new — as early as September 2011, a Wisconsin gunsmith had posted a printable design for an AR15 lower online — the available designs were based on CAD files for machined-metal lower receivers, and were also under-engineered to stand up to the stress of recoil when printed in plastic. A YouTube video from December 2012 of Defense Distributed tests with printed lower receivers showed an AR15 only managing five shots before the stock snapped off, the rifle vomiting parts onto the shooter’s shoulder.

Wilson and co. kept reinforcing their designs, however, and by the time reporters with vice.com visited Wilson in Austin in spring 2013 to shoot a documentary called “Click. Print. Gun.,” Wilson boasted he had a version that could fire more than 100 rounds before failure. A test filmed by the Vice crew, however, showed the rifle making it through just 30 before the stock broke off.

That same month, on Dec. 14, 2012, a 20-year-old man armed with an AR15-style assault rifle massacred 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. The online 3D file repository Thingiverse.com, run by 3D printer company MakerBot, pulled down all files pertaining to guns and gun parts. In response, Wilson and Defense Distributed announced fundraising for a website called defcad.org that would host gun-related 3D design files.

In January 2013, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law a ban on gun magazines holding more than seven rounds. Defense Distributed responded by releasing free plans for a printable 30-round AR15 magazine it called, pointedly, “The Cuomo.” In March, they would release a design for an AK47 magazine called the “Feinstein,” after gun control advocate Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.

By February 2013, Defense Distributed posted a video on its YouTube page that showed an AR15 fitted with a drum magazine and the fifth version of its printed lower receiver firing over 660 rounds without breaking. That version of the receiver was soon uploaded to the Internet as a printable file.

In April 2013, U.S. Rep. Steve Israel of New York proposed House Resolution 1474, the “Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act,” a bill that would reauthorize the ban on metal-detector-defeating plastic and ceramic guns, but which included changes that would make it illegal for anyone who wasn’t a licensed gun manufacturer to create ammunition magazines and lower receivers in any material, including printing those parts out of plastic. The proposed changes about 3D printed guns and gun parts were stripped from the final bill. The Senate passed a similarly watered-down version of the renewal a few days later.

Politics aside, Wilson said that he was “more or less conscripted” into the gun debate while trying to make a larger point about information accessibility and a gun that exists “outside the system” of serial numbers and government control.

“The future is one of tumbling costs of the means of production, and more individual and unobserved production,” Wilson said. “That really scares people.”

The Liberator

Cody Wilson’s baby is the Liberator.

He rarely lets down the polished, Geek Cool aura — two clicks south of arrogance — that hovers about him most of the time. But there seems to be a weird kind of reverence that comes over him when he touches The Liberator, a product of countless hours of research and work. No matter how you feel about the thing itself — the gun, which could, if aimed in the right direction with malice, kill someone — it gives you a sense of the months he spent spinning it in his head, trying to want it into existence for reasons wholly his own. In his original video announcing the Wiki Weapon project in July 2012, he said his vision of a printed gun is “about the preservation of human dignity.” Whether you believe that to be ultra-Libertarian horseshit or not, Wilson clearly believes it. Though the copy he brought to the offices of the Arkansas Times in late December is probably one of secret thousands by now, he still turned it in his hands the way anyone else would hold a unicorn horn.

Defense Distributed started working on the Liberator pistol in March 2013. While printing magazines and lower receivers was floating in a gray area of the law, printing a working, firing gun was something else, both legally and politically, and his whole team knew it. Wilson admits he and his colleagues talked quite a bit about the consequences.

“At the end of the day, we realized the political reality, which is that this is something that at least the current administration doesn’t want to happen,” he said. “They have a real antipathy for it. So at any opportunity, if you messed up, that’s a point of criminal investigation or prosecution.” Wilson said that during the time they were working on the Liberator, there was an undercover cop outside his apartment for a while, and the server logs of the Defense Distributed websites showed the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice “just sitting on our websites every day.”

The work they’d done printing lower receivers and magazines paid off. “We’d gotten pretty good at building plastic guns. We had a secret location for Liberator tests, and we were doing other tests more in public,” Wilson said. “We heard we were being monitored by the Feds back in February — not that they didn’t know, but we’d go in [to the test site] with no phones and stuff. … We tested barrels for about a month: What’s the right thickness? What’s the right concentricity? What direction should you print them? Very basic things.”

They learned, for instance, that by fogging the plastic with acetone vapor, they could smooth the barrels out a bit and keep the print from cracking so quickly. Scanning the thick, stubby barrels before and after firing, Wilson and his engineer were also able to determine that the plastic showed significant expansion and deformation every time it was fired. “We knew the barrel would fail, because it would expand and it would stay expanded,” he said. “That’s the simplest way I can say it. So we knew that eventually these barrels would degrade.”

Still in law school at UT, Wilson researched firearms law up, down and sideways. He also ran his plan and the National Firearms Act and Undetectable Firearms Act by everyone he could think of. “I took that to everybody,” he said. “My criminal law professors. I took it to the gun lawyers we had. Institute for Justice, a big Libertarian firm. Everybody read it and re-read it. We asked the big questions.” While most of the people he approached with the project were “curiously excited about it,” he said, one of his criminal law professors he talked to asked him what turned out, in hindsight, to be one of those big questions.

“This was in late April [2013],” Wilson said. “It’s like two weeks before I released the Liberator. I said something like: ‘Nobody’s ready for this,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but are you ready for this?’ “

On May 5, 2013, Defense Distributed uploaded video of Wilson performing the first in-hand test firing of the Liberator at a range outside Austin. While the video on the Defense Distributed YouTube page features a deep drum beat when the gun goes off and soaring music afterward, raw footage on another YouTube page seems to show a sense of apprehension on Wilson’s part as he prepares to pull the trigger: He waits for a long moment and looks at the gun for a pregnant second before snatching in a quick breath, jerking his hands up, and firing. If he was nervous, he had a right to be. Though a handle-less, .380 caliber version of the Liberator had earlier been successfully fired with a string tied around the trigger as a reporter from Forbes.com looked on, Forbes reported that a later test of a gun fitted with a different barrel and a larger-caliber cartridge exploded on the stand, “sending shards of white ABS plastic flying into the weeds and bringing the Liberator’s first field trial to an abrupt end.”

With all his fingers still attached, Wilson and Defense Distributed released a CAD file to download plans for the Liberator, and more than 100,000 copies were soon downloaded.

The files didn’t stay up for long, however. Within the week, the State Department’s Defense Trade Controls division stepped in. Citing the Arms Export Control Act, which regulates the export of firearms up to .50 calibers, the State Department requested that the Liberator files be removed from public access, along with files for magazines, silencers and other gun parts. There was an unspoken “or else.” Wilson reluctantly complied. By then, however, the Liberator CAD file was wild on the Internet, available from unregulated, offshore download sites like The Pirate Bay, where, barring changes to the fundamental structure of the Internet, it will likely exist forever.

As for the political and press reaction to the Liberator, it turned out to be exactly the Wikileaks-style circus that Cody Wilson had envisioned, with the word carried from one outraged ear to another. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, for one, called the Liberator “stomach churning,” holding a press conference in which he told the press: “Now anyone, a terrorist, someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon, can essentially open a gun factory in their garage.” Wilson’s phone was soon ringing non-stop.

“You can depend upon a certain reaction, and I especially mean the progressive wing of the Democrat party [and] the progressive, collusive members of the media,” Wilson said. “It’s just visual candy. People will flock to it and even if they disagree with it, they will carry the message. This entire project, in its strategy, was inspired by … the idea that a complicit, unwilling media would be a kind of Trojan Horse.”

Going dark

Where Defense Distributed’s work with lower receivers and magazines had created buzz with the Guns and Ammo crowd, the Liberator was finally the thing that captured the public’s imagination, bringing to mind the law prof who’d asked Wilson if he was really ready for it.

“How can you be ready for something like that?” Wilson said. “It ended up being a kind of event. Not even just a couple of days, but the ripples and the reverberations. I mean, it was acquired by museums of design. All summer, it’s been traveling to different exhibits. It’s been the subject of more media well after it was released than our entire project beforehand.”

Still in law school when he released the gun, Wilson said he’d been thinking of dropping out since the spring of 2013, when he visited the Bay Area Libertarians in San Francisco. The press over the Liberator release sealed the deal. He may return to finish his degree, but it won’t be anytime soon.

These days, he’s largely focused on projects revolving around Bitcoin, the encrypted, computer-generated digital currency that works “peer-to-peer” online, without the need for a third-party intermediary like a bank. Developed as open-source software in 2008 by an anonymous programmer or group of programmers, Bitcoin was once a curiosity of hackers and technophiles, but speculation has caused the value to skyrocket in recent years. Though the currency took a major tumble following China’s December decision to ban Bitcoin transactions by Chinese banks and payment service companies, as of this writing, according to the Bitcoin tracking site coindesk.com, the value of a single Bitcoin was $940.10, up from $770.44 on Jan. 1.

While some worry that Bitcoin is a Tulip Mania-sized bubble, Wilson is a believer, mostly because the idea of an unregulated online currency fits with his anti-government views. With Spanish colleague Amir Taaki, whom he met while fund-raising for the Wiki Weapon project in Bitcoin, Wilson is working on something called Dark Wallet. While current systems for using Bitcoin can be difficult and tech-intensive to use, the Dark Wallet project hopes to simplify the process, creating a browser plug-in that makes Bitcoin transactions no more difficult than using a credit card. He hopes to launch the Dark Wallet early this year.

Not only can Dark Wallet potentially open the door to Bitcoin use by the mainstream, Wilson hopes it will also lessen the role of the Bitcoin Foundation, which, according to its website, “standardizes, protects and promotes the use of Bitcoin cryptographic money for the benefit of users worldwide.” Wilson doesn’t like the idea of One Ring to Rule them All, and the Bitcoin Foundation was, as he put it, “getting a little too big for their britches.” As with many things in his life, at least part of the project was about getting his name in the paper, but it was also about decentralization of power.

Unless the world goes through a radical monetary shift Wilson dreams of, however, it’s probably going to be guns that Cody Wilson is most remembered for in at least the short term. Asked if he believes in any form of gun control, he said he’s “too radical for that,” though he said he does believe there could be “some form of social enforcement and control,” in which individual communities set their own rules about firearms.

“These strict liability regimes, based on just pure discovery and possession?” Wilson said. “No, I don’t think these are useful. I think they’re meant as suppressive techniques and social enforcement. In the end, the only way you can deal with guns is in that kind of older, liberal-core framework: You deal with people after they’ve committed crimes. If that 13-year-old shot his bully, that’s a tragedy, and justice should be served, but that’s not a justification for the establishment of an entire framework to prevent whole classes of people from having a weapon. … We need the entire warfare-surveillance state because Jimmy might print out a gun and shoot his bully?”

Still, mass shootings always come up in interviews. Wilson often bats those questions away, dancing into the abstract. The week after the Sandy Hook massacre, he told Popular Science of the tragedy: “Understanding that rights and civil liberties are something that we protect is also understanding that they have consequences that are also protected, or tolerated. The exercise of civil liberties is antithetical to the idea of a completely totalizing state. That just the way it is.”

Though his stance on gun violence versus gun regulation hasn’t changed much a year later, it seems to have taken a more measured, and somehow darker, tone.

“In the end, I’m saying: I recognize that there’s costs,” he said. “I accept the costs. I’ve made that decision. Some people would say: ‘Well, I didn’t.’ I’m sorry. There’s plenty of people living and acting in this world. The world’s moving into something where ‘one man, one vote’ doesn’t apply to some of the things that we’re getting into.”