January 15th Hearing

If his state’s public safety was of paramount concern, you’d think the attorney general of New Jersey would have made a personal appearance at a hearing where he was in fact ordered to appear. Instead he said “hi” and let a corporate lawyer from TX fumble through the same four talking points while his entire office listened in on the phone in silence.

As advertised, New Jersey’s representative confused and frustrated the court. When in doubt, he’d get out some non sequitur about our company as the “Amazon of fully functioning, fully 3D AR-15s.” But he doesn’t deserve blame for being unable to explain Section 3(l)(2) of New Jersey Senate Bill 2465, because it is, of course, inexplicable.

Is a statute that bans every form of communication related to firearms manufacturing CAM and CAD content as narrowly tailored as it could be?

Is it the state’s position that it is criminal to mail otherwise legal CAD data about otherwise legal firearms to a New Jersey address?

How is this state action not preempted by the federal protections within the Communications Decency Act and indeed the ITAR itself?

Silence from the huddled officeholders on the phone in New Jersey.

The judge offered them a chance to file something intelligible on a later day.

We’ve been asked “what are the next steps now?” or “why no result?” It isn’t that we expect too much. Our judge has already come up with remarkably inventive ways to avoid the merits of this dispute. In our urgent motions for temporary injunctive relief against New Jersey at the end of the year, the judge wrote that Defense Distributed, the world-famous online and commercial distributor of 3D gun files:

… [had] failed to identify the speech content, if any, of the activities they claim the statute will force them to cease.

This from a judge who had handled our previous federal case for the last four years.

So what are our expectations?

We believe the judge will issue an order within a week or two, and regardless of that order the case will proceed on appeal. It’s just good to get these people in a room once every few months to defend things other people wrote for them, about things only other people understand.

If you’d like to join this fight, we ask you to join LEGIO.