On Dec. 9, 2024, gun rights activists and Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson sued crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo illegally cutting off funding for his company’s desktop milling machine that can be used to build homemade firearms.
Wilson’s company Coast Runner Inc. filed the lawsuit against the crowdsourcing sites in a federal court in Midland, Texas.
Part of Wilson‘s argument centers on the companies’ alleged role in canceling promotional campaigns for his company’s milling machine because of Wilson’s political orientation.
Law firm Stone Hilton represented Coast Runner. Former Texas State solicitor General Judd Stone helped found this firm. Wilson’s legal counsel argued that Kickstarter and Indiegogo broke US and Texas antitrust laws by engaging in a conspiracy to deny Coast Runner
“access to the marketplace and to free trade.” Additionally, the lawsuit argued that the crowd funding platforms interfered with the company’s contracts.
Stone published a statement highlighting the aim of this lawsuit, “seeks to expose the anticompetitive practices that stifled innovation and harmed the market and consumers alike.”
Coast Runner’s CR-1 milling machine relies on computer code to make cuts. The lawsuit claims the machine uses a different software platform and power supply in contrast to another milling device, the Ghost Gunner, that was designed by Defense Distributed and used to promote gun parts.
Coast Runner’s lawsuit maintains that the CR-1 is “not specifically for firearms manufacturing or similar uses” and allows users to cheaply “fabricate complex and precise parts out of even the hardest materials.”
Wilson is one of the most daring pro-Second Amendment advocates of the last decade. Since founding Defense Distributed in 2012, Wilson has opened a new frontier for pro-gun sympathizers to tap into.
DD is largely focused on developing the digital schematics of firearms in CAD files. Millions of users can freely download these files from the Internet and use them in the 3D printing process to build “wiki weapons.” Effectively, free individuals with an experimental streak are using technology to disintermediate state-imposed gun control.
That’s the beauty of the new world of gun ownership Defense Distributed has charted. This world is molded by freedom-minded people who are willing to tinker and push the very limits of gun rights in a peaceful fashion.
Unsurprisingly, Defense Distributed’s activity has attracted attention from the feds, who are hell-bent on making an example out of people who try to expand gun rights in creative ways. On Oct. 16, 2023, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court prevented Defense Distributed and Blackhawk Manufacturing from sellings products that can be rapidly transformed into homemade firearms.
The Supreme Court granted a request by the Biden regime to block U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor’s Sept. 14, 2023 injunction preventing the enforcement of a 2022 ATF regulation designed to clamp down on so-called “ghost guns” aka homemade firearms.
Defense Distributed’s latest crowdfunding ordeal demonstrates how many institutions are opposed to its mission. It’s not exclusively the state that’s persecuting pro-gun organizations. The private sector, as in the case of Kickstarter, can just be as energetic as state entities in trying to make gun owners’ and gun organizations’ lives miserable.
This trend will likely accelerate during Trump’s second term due to how Gun Control Inc. will have a harder time passing legislation at the federal level. In turn, gun controllers will be using the private sector to carry out their anti-gun agenda.
Pro-Second Amendment forces will have to start using litigation and prudential state power to keep corporations in check. The enemies of the Second Amendment come in many forms, which requires activists in the gun rights space to adapt and use all means at their disposal to push back against these nefarious forces.
