The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was a law in the United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of restricting access by minors to any material defined as harmful to such minors on the Internet. The law, however, never took effect, as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009.
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) is a United States nonprofit organization that supports gun rights. Founded in 1974 by Alan Gottlieb and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, SAF publishes gun rights magazines and public education materials, funds conferences, provides media contacts, and has assumed a central role in sponsoring lawsuits.
Scott Milne Matheson Jr. is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He has served on that court since 2010.
District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. It ruled that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms—unconnected with service in a militia—for traditionally lawful purposes such as self-defense within the home, and that the District of Columbia's handgun ban and requirement that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" violated this guarantee. It also stated that the right to bear arms is not unlimited and that certain restrictions on guns and gun ownership were permissible. It was the first Supreme Court case to decide whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense or whether the right was only intended for state militias.
Robert Stephen Lasnik is an American attorney and jurist, who serves as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Nordyke v. King was a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in which a ban of firearms on all public property and whether the Second Amendment should be applied to the state and local governments is to be decided. After several hearings at different levels of the federal court system, Alameda County, California promised that gun shows could be held on county property, essentially repudiating its ordinance.
Defense Distributed is an online, open-source hardware and software organization that develops digital schematics of firearms in CAD files, or "wiki weapons", that may be downloaded from the Internet and used in 3D printing or CNC milling applications. Among the organization's goals is to develop and freely publish firearms-related design schematics that can be downloaded and reproduced by anyone with a 3D printer or milling machine, facilitating the popular production of homemade firearms.
Cody Rutledge Wilson is an American gun rights activist, and crypto-anarchist. He is a founder and director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization that develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called "wiki weapons", suitable for 3D printing and digital manufacture. Defense Distributed gained international notoriety in 2013 when it published plans online for the Liberator, the first widely available functioning 3D-printed pistol.
DEFCAD, Inc. is an American startup that has created a search engine and web portal for designers and hobbyists to find and develop 3D printable and other CAD models online.
The Liberator is a 3D-printable single-shot handgun, the first such printable firearm design made widely available online. The open source firm Defense Distributed designed the gun and released the plans on the Internet on May 6, 2013. The plans were downloaded over 100,000 times in the two days before the United States Department of State demanded that Defense Distributed retract the plans.
People v. Aguilar, 2 N.E.3d 321, was an Illinois Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Aggravated Unlawful Use of a Weapon (AUUF) statute violated the right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The Court stated that this was because the statute amounted to a wholesale statutory ban on the exercise of a personal right that was specifically named in and guaranteed by the United States Constitution, as construed by the United States Supreme Court. A conviction for Unlawful Possession of a Firearm (UPF) was proper because the possession of handguns by minors was conduct that fell outside the scope of the Second Amendment's protection.
A 3D printed firearm is a firearm that is partially or primarily produced with a 3D printer. While plastic printed firearms are associated with improvised firearms, or the politics of gun control, digitally-produced metal firearms are more associated with commercial manufacturing or experiments in traditional firearms design.
Peruta v. San Diego, 824 F.3d 919, was a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit pertaining to the legality of San Diego County's restrictive policy regarding requiring documentation of "good cause" that "distinguish[es] the applicant from the mainstream and places the applicant in harm's way" before issuing a concealed carry permit.
James Chiun-Yue Ho is a Taiwanese-born American jurist who serves as a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He was nominated to the Fifth Circuit by President Donald Trump, and took office in 2018. Ho formerly served as Solicitor General of Texas from 2008 to 2010.
National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, 585 U.S. ___ (2018), was a case before the Supreme Court of the United States addressing the constitutionality of California's FACT Act, which mandated that crisis pregnancy centers provide certain disclosures about state services. The law required that licensed centers post visible notices that other options for pregnancy, including abortion, are available from state-sponsored clinics. It also mandated that unlicensed centers post notice of their unlicensed status. The centers, typically run by Christian non-profit groups, challenged the act on the basis that it violated their free speech. After prior reviews in lower courts, the case was brought to the Supreme Court, asking "Whether the disclosures required by the California Reproductive FACT Act violate the protections set forth in the free speech clause of the First Amendment, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment."
Joshua Michael Blackman is an American lawyer who is employed as an associate professor of law at the South Texas College of Law where he focuses on constitutional law and the intersection of law and technology. He has authored one book and co-authored two others.
A privately made firearm is a legal term for a firearm produced by a private individual as opposed to a corporate or government entity. The term "ghost gun" is used mostly in the United States by gun control advocates, but it is being adopted by gun rights advocates and the firearm industry because of recent regulations adopted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Deterrence Dispensed (DetDisp) is a decentralized, online collective that promotes and distributes open-source 3D printed firearms, gun parts, and handloaded cartridges. The group describes itself as aligned with the freedom of speech movement.
Houston Community College System v. Wilson, 595 U.S. ___ (2022), is a United States Supreme Court case involving the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The unanimous Court held that a local government board member's freedom of speech was not abridged when he was verbally censured by his colleagues.
Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture is a 2023 American documentary film written, produced, and directed by Jessica Solce about the life of famed 3D printed gun inventor, Cody Wilson, over a period of around 7 years, from 2015 through 2022.
