Colorado's anti-freedom lawmakers just passed a new law banning 3D-printed firearms, and they're patting themselves on the back like they've solved something. Starting July 1st, it becomes illegal in the Centennial State to knowingly manufacture "a potentially functioning firearm, unfinished frame or receiver, large-capacity magazine, or rapid-fire device" using a 3D printer.
But here's where it gets funny — and by funny, I mean constitutionally doomed.
The law has exceptions. Licensed manufacturers can still use 3D printers. So can instructors and students of accredited gunsmithing programs. Talk about your regulatory carve-outs! These exemptions basically hand Second Amendment advocates the ammunition they need to take this thing to court.
See, under the Bruen decision, judges are supposed to look at the text of the Constitution. The Second Amendment protects keeping and bearing arms. Because Colorado's law allows SOME people (those licensed or in accredited programs) to build guns AND keep them, the right to keep arms is clearly implicated. You can't exempt your way out of constitutional scrutiny.
Now the state has to justify this law according to our national tradition of firearms regulation. Good luck with that. Historical research shows zero founding-era laws restricting the average American from crafting their own firearms. We're talking colonial-era gunsmiths making muskets in workshops, free men building their own rifles — this was as American as apple pie.
The anti-gun crowd wants you to believe 3D-printed guns are some new "unprecedented threat." But violent crime isn't unprecedented, and home-built firearms certainly aren't. People have been making their own guns since before this country existed.
Every single Republican in Colorado voted against this mess, and they're right. This law is a constitutional time bomb. When it hits the courts — and it will — I expect judges to take a long, hard look at the exemptions and ask the obvious question: if some Americans have a constitutional right to do this, how can you stop all Americans from doing it?
Colorado just wrote a law that's going to cost them taxpayers a fortune defending, only to watch it get struck down. Classic anti-freedom overreach.