The United States has long had a pathological relationship with guns. But other countries must now deal with the consequences. That is the logical outcome of the extraordinary decision of the State Department to cave in to the demands of a young libertarian who believes that everyone in the world should be able to make and use guns without any government control.

Like so many libertarians, Cody Wilson believes that he can use technological change to enact his political vision. In this case, it is the technology of 3D printing, which allows almost anything to be modelled in plastic using relatively cheap and widespread machinery operating under computer control. Mr Wilson’s organisation sells 3D printers and gives away the software needed to drive them and the instructions to assemble the result into lethal weapons. Until June, the State Department was trying to stop him distributing the software files on the grounds that these breached laws on weapons exports. The case had been running since 2013, when Mr Wilson put on the internet his first instructions for making a gun which would be invisible to metal detectors and – because of the lack of serial numbers – untraceable by governments. They were taken down within a week, after the State Department first stepped in. Now that it has surrendered (and even paid some of Mr Wilson’s legal costs), the only legal obstacle to his plans is a suit brought by eight states. On Tuesday, a district judge issued a temporary order stopping the release of the blueprints.

In one sense this case is all shadow boxing. The software is already available to anyone with access to a search engine and has been for years. But only a few thousand copies have been downloaded, perhaps because the guns themselves, although undoubtedly lethal, possibly to their users, can’t kill anyone without ammunition, which is tightly controlled in most developed countries. Mr Wilson argues that his software is protected speech under the first amendment of the US constitution. A similar argument was made and won in the 1990s by Phil Zimmermann, the author of an early cryptography program called PGP which the American government tried to ban because it would be useful to terrorists. Mr Zimmermann opposes the spread of gun-printing software today.

There may be another parallel between the two cases: although encryption is now the foundation of secure commerce on the internet, and so of much of the modern economy, the Zimmermann implementation is notoriously difficult to use and never gained popularity outside a tiny circle of cryptography geeks. Not until it was brought to the mass market in almost invisible forms, in apps such as WhatsApp, did encryption become popular. It is probable that Mr Wilson’s invention will languish in a similar way until and unless someone else finds a way to make it easy and convenient for anyone to manufacture weapons and ammunition at home. In a country with 10,000 gun homicides a year, it’s easy enough to get hold of an entirely legal weapon, even if US law enforcement worries about untraceable firearms.

Nonetheless, there are wider issues involved. The technology of 3D printing does have huge possibilities for good as well as for wicked silliness. It is already used in surgery, in engineering, and in the manufacture of cheap prosthetic limbs for children. In future, researchers hope to be able to print out human skin and organs, or to replace broken bones with exact copies. So the technology should not be suppressed, even if that were possible, which it is not. But it must nonetheless be controlled, like any other. The argument that all computer code must be protected under the US first amendment would, if taken seriously, make it impossible to regulate the internet.

In the end, Mr Wilson’s guns are dangerous not so much because they will often fire bullets without exploding but because they are an idea given form in plastic. It is the libertarian idea that individual rights must take precedence over any form of government control which makes American handguns uniquely dangerous. True freedom does not depend on the ability to kill your fellow citizens.