Dear President Trump,

I saw this morning that you sort of weighed in on the free downloadable 3-D printer plans to make guns, Tweeting out to the world that you are looking into them, have spoken with the NRA, and that they don’t make much sense to you. You don’t say why they don’t make sense, which leads me to think you are probably less concerned with the public safety aspects of this ludicrous situation than you are with the economic aspects. If people are able to download the plans for free, what will happen to one of your favorite pro-you industries?

I also saw (in that same WP article) that it was your administration that opened the door to the favorable ruling for the 3-D gun plan makers by pulling technical plans for gun manufacture off the US munitions list. Someone in the State Department is quoted as saying this was “in the interest of the security and foreign policy of the United States.” How in the world could anyone think that making it possible for people to self-manufacture countless untraceable, unregulated guns is in the interest of our national security? This makes no sense whatsoever unless the goal is a civil war.

Defense Distributed says free speech and Second Amendment rights are their motives for pushing to have these blueprints freely available over the Internet. I don’t understand how the free speech portion got any traction given the limits on speech that is likely to endanger the public. We all know we can’t stand up in a crowded auditorium and yell “Fire!” when there is no fire – it’s likely to cause panic and people are likely to get hurt. So why didn’t the courts decide that speech in the form of technical plans for manufacturing untraceable guns is highly likely to decrease public safety? I don’t get it.

This weird apparent oversight along with your administration saying that making the plans available to anyone (of any age), anywhere in the world to use to make any number of different weapons is actually in the country’s best interest from a national and foreign security standpoint is frankly, very scary. What the hell are you people thinking? What are you setting in motion?

May we be safe from plastic guns that are not toys.
May we be willing to recognize that a functional civil society needs to curtail some forms of speech.
May we be healthy enough not to be seduced by every bauble that comes our way.
May our government not worsen our gun-related public health crisis or support a civil war.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson