3-D Printed Gun Advocate Cody Wilson Quits Company He Founded

Defense Distributed, the Texas company founded to distribute blueprints of guns that can be made by a 3-D printer, said Tuesday that it would continue without its founder, Cody Wilson, after he was charged with sexual assault.

Wilson, who is accused of paying a 16-year-old girl for sex in Austin, Texas, stepped down as Defense Distributed’s director on Friday evening — the same day he was arrested during a trip to Taiwan.

Wilson, a self-described crypto-anarchist, attracted an ardent fan base of gun rights advocates and First Amendment supporters when he sued the federal government in 2015 after it told him to remove online blueprints of a 3-D printed gun.

The government settled with Wilson this summer and gave him permission to post the blueprints. He was sued soon after by a group of state attorneys general who oppose downloadable guns, which are difficult to trace, as a threat to public safety.

Last month, a federal judge blocked Wilson from putting up blueprints until after the lawsuit is resolved. In response, Wilson said he would sell the files and mail them to buyers rather than make the blueprints freely available online.

Paloma Heindorff, who replaced Wilson as Defense Distributed’s director, said during a news conference in Austin on Tuesday that his legal troubles had not affected the business. The company has received 3,000 orders for gun blueprints and has been “shipping them out like crazy,” with 1,500 orders fulfilled so far, Heindorff said.

“We didn’t miss a beat,” she said. “No one blinked.”

The litigation with the attorneys general will continue, said Josh Blackman, one of Wilson’s lawyers.

Last week, the Austin police said Wilson, 30, was accused of paying a girl he met on SugarDaddyMeet.com for sex in an Austin hotel. Law enforcement officials said that a friend of the girl’s had tipped him off to the investigation, and that Wilson had failed to board a flight from Taipei back to the United States.

After he was arrested in Taiwan on Friday, Wilson was returned to the United States. Released from jail in Harris County on Sunday after posting his $150,000 bond, according to the county, Wilson faces a sentence of up to 20 years and could be blocked from owning firearms for life.