 Today I'm announcing several initial steps my administration is taking to curb this epidemic of gun violence. On April 8th, President Biden announced a handful of executive actions meant to curb gun violence following shootings in Atlanta and Boulder. At the top of the list was a proposal to stop the proliferation of so-called ghost guns. These are guns that are homemade, built from a kid. Ghost guns or unregistered firearms that aren't assembled by licensed gun manufacturers are sold in highly regulated gun shops are most closely associated with this man. Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed and creator of The Liberator, a 3D printed plastic gun that captured the public imagination. 3D printed guns wouldn't have serial numbers because they could be made entirely out of plastic they could bypass metal detectors. Defense Distributed's signature product is the ghost gunner, a do-it-yourself gun milling machine the size of a small printer that enables anyone with enough time and interest to create unregistered firearms simply by purchasing parts online, downloading specs from an online library like Wilson's Def Cad and assembling the final product. Wilson says the units fly off the shelves every time a major politician so much as mentions gun control. As soon as Biden says hey you know in 30 days you're gonna lose your ghost guns everyone's like I gotta buy a ghost gun you know at some of our sites we sold out you know 25-30 items you know like instantly. Wilson is back at the helm of defense distributed after stepping away in 2018 when he was arrested for allegedly paying for sex with a 16 year old who may have misrepresented her age. The legal age for consent in Texas is 17. Wilson pled guilty to a lesser charge and is on probation. He's also had to register as a sex offender and agree not to purchase new firearms. Every farm that I own I'm able to continue to own so it's kind of a legal gray area actually which you know are the types of things I'm most comfortable with. How easy or difficult you know has it been to jump back into this role? I never truly left the company but to be the public head of this company is to face like a lot of scrutiny and that wasn't appropriate while I was under indictment but after the indictment was over there was really no legal difficulty anymore and the counting the state were cool so I didn't feel like it was fair to have anyone else face the difficulty in the scrutiny of running this company. Defense distributed has been fighting off federal and state legal challenges since its founding in 2012. Biden's requested rule change is the latest front in that legal battle. The president was vague on the details but he has asked the Department of Justice to issue a new rule on ghost guns within 30 days. Wilson anticipates that the proposed regulation will classify more gun parts such as the lower receiver that the ghost gunner modifies as firearms that would each require registration numbers branded on them. That was the rule change proposed by the non-profit gun control advocacy organization Every Town for Gun Safety which was founded by Michael Bloomberg. They think if they add more components and define more things as firearms that require serial numbers that means more background checks that means less DIY unfortunately I believe it means more 80% receivers more DIY. Why is that that it would have the counterintuitive effect? Well I think we're all good libertarians here right we recognize people actually respond to incentives and so if it's actually more difficult to buy an AR an AR upper receiver like from PSA because it's serialized and now I got to go to the through the background check and everything I'm now going to consider for the first time making an AR upper receiver. And while Wilson was a pioneer in the DIY gun space defense distributed is now just one of many players meaning regulating ghost guns will be more of a challenge. Just in the last year we've seen an amazing development of popular 3d printed kits which include Glock slides printed SMG that incredible hybrid and mostly 3d printed gun concepts which were far beyond like what we were doing just a few years ago. This community of people is not limited by the law defense distributed ghost gunner we always kind of build our igloo with building blocks of the law this other group of kids they've decided well actually we don't we don't respect the law at all and they freely illegally sure but freely share and advance the stuff even faster because of the opposition that companies like mine encountered leading up to even 2018 so again another example of an acceleration of what's an obvious technical endeavor. If you have the right kind of machine in your garage a raw block of aluminum is readily convertible into a firearm receiver. I think the interesting thing with these sorts of laws is there's this sort of growing gap between the what's on paper and what is enforceable in law. Karim Shia is a software engineer and co-founder of open source defense a gun rights organization mostly made up of engineers in Silicon Valley programmers seeking to distance the debate over the right to armed self-defense from the left right culture war. If you look at the path gun rights have taken over the past five years really that is the story of gun rights moving from a world of politics to a world of culture in 2020 between 7 and 15% of the people who are gun owners today in the US became gun owners in 2020 and the fastest growing segments within that were black people and women the way any network grows is kind of as a function of how active the nodes in a network are. So as people join if they are eager about getting more people to join that compounds really quickly and so the more it gets away from politics the faster it's going to keep getting away from politics and going to this place of just building a culture that everyone can be part of. In the tumultuous year of a pandemic mass protests riots and a contested election gun sales spiked across America and especially in big cities the firearm industry trade association says that more than five million registered gun sales in the first seven months of 2020 were to first time buyers. As people learn about guns they tend to be cool with them I think arguably YouTube and Twitter and Instagram are the biggest advances for gun rights of the past several decades at least and actually like arguably more important than any actual gun technology in terms of spreading gun rights. Gun violence in this country is an epidemic and it's an international embarrassment. In the COVID era the Biden White House is framing gun violence as a public health issue but Wilson believes the career bureaucrats at the ATFE have long had these regulations ready to go and we're just waiting for a president to enact them. Joe was simply able to take advantage of what the ATF was already preparing and ready to do and kind of wanted to do for the last four years so this might feel like a kind of warp drive or acceleration of the problem but in fact it's it's simply the problem of not being able to replace the permanent government bureaucracy that's installed in DC so Biden doesn't have I think unique ideas he's simply lent an agency which is willing and waiting to a more robust activist center you know funded by Bloomberg more installed in the government like Senator Mark Kelly brought the Giffords desk to the Senate and Menendez New Jersey Delegation Connecticut etc they have open lines to the executive now they're gonna constantly be asking the ATF to to shop in their wish list if there's a real Republican Party that's a big if surely they can stop a lot of it legislatively but you know this is the problem of a permanent executive staff and we'll always having to watch these rules. The old idea of how gun laws worked was this idea that safety comes from this central authority what the internet has changed is well rather than having a centralized model about who gets to be safe and how each person has a right to determine how they are going to be safe in other words if someone is trying to hurt you you have the right to stop them and that's pretty uncontroversial if you gonna think about it that way and so if you have the right to stop them you you have the right to the tools to do that. Biden is also proposing to ban pistol braces and push for more red flag laws that would allow police to confiscate someone's firearms based on reports of erratic behavior from acquaintances but Wilson says he isn't particularly worried about the effect of these rules will have on his business or on gun rights in America. Your general attitude every time I've talked to you regarding that question has been to say more or less that the technology simply outpaces the speed at which the regulators can react. Do you still feel that way or have they now started to catch up in important ways regulators and attorneys general have caught up I mean they can define the problem and the terms be specifically began with five six years ago but that doesn't mean that they can accomplish meaningful regulation of it it's kind of like you know they're using the laws like talisman as a kind of magical thinking like no one can really understand what you're doing with your computer where you're getting this information on the internet everybody knows that it's like the file sharing wars of the 2000s to this day you can pirate share anything you want online everyone knows that so we're probably to meaningfully challenge what we're doing right now there needs to be an act of Congress I don't see that happening in the next couple years.