Background Briefing: July 31, 2018
Trump Appears Unaware His Own Government Made 3D Plastic Guns Available to Anyone and Everyone
With a federal judge having just blocked the distribution of downloadable 3D-printed guns, we will begin with Joshua Horowitz, the Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and author of “Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea”. He joins us to discuss the alarming release of blueprints to manufacture 3D plastic guns over the Internet by Cody Wilson, a self-described anarchist and gun rights fanatic who had sued the State Department for restraining him from making these home-made undetectable guns available to anyone and everyone. We will look into how someone in the Justice Department not only dropped the case but awarded Wilson $40,000 in court costs and whether Jeff Sessions or Mike Pompeo knew anything about this because President Trump surely did not since today in a confusing tweet, Trump questioned whether these blueprints should have been made available to the public.
North Korea Builds New ICBM’s Making a Joke of Trump’s Promises
Then we speak with Michael Fuchs, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He joins us to discuss leaked intelligence from spy satellites indicating the North Koreans are building new intercontinental ballistic missiles in spite of Trump’s claim that after the recent summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, North Korea was “no longer a nuclear threat”. With Secretary of State Pompeo admitting in recent testimony that the North Koreans were upgrading their nuclear enrichment site and stepping up production of fissile material, we will assess what the promise of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula amounts to.