California’s Plan to Criminalize Ideas

California has decided to test a new idea: that information should be treated like a weapon. Not the misuse of information. Not the act that follows. The knowledge, file, blueprint, the code. And once you grasp that premise, the rest of the case falls into place with an almost bureaucratic menace.

In a newly filed lawsuit, Attorney General Rob Bonta and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu argue that websites hosting firearm-related digital files should be regulated as though they were trafficking in physical weapons. Not selling guns. Not printing guns. Publishing files. Hosting instructions. Organizing information. The state insists this activity crosses the line from expression into unlawful conduct.

Many will shrug this off as just another skirmish in California’s long war with the Second Amendment. It isn’t. What’s unfolding is broader and far more corrosive. The state’s attempting to erase the line between speech and action, publishing and participating, and describing a thing and doing it. That line holds a free society together. Remove it, and everything that depends on freedom slowly comes apart.

The argument’s as deceptive as it is dangerous. Ghost guns are illegal. Ghost guns can be made using digital files. Therefore, the files themselves must be treated as illegal. The syllogism is simple to the point of parody. If harm can follow, then information itself must be sealed off like toxic waste. By that logic, instruction manuals, chemistry textbooks, and half the internet are public hazards.

Courts have long recognized that code is expressive. Instructions are expressive. Blueprints are expressive. You can dislike what they describe, and regulate the act that follows. But once the state punishes publication because of how third parties might later behave, the law becomes predictive and preemptive. You’re no longer judged for what you did, but for what someone else might do after reading what you shared. That’s a remarkable shift. And a revealing one.

California insists this is “groundbreaking.” That word should worry anyone who remembers that most bad ideas begin as breakthroughs. The state’s theory doesn’t require intent, coordination or harm. It requires only the possibility that knowledge could be misused.

The humor lies in the selective blindness. California tolerates online content that glorify self-harm, reckless criminal stunts, and social decay. Videos that dare teenagers to injure themselves circulate freely. Tutorials that celebrate vandalism or theft are waved through. Platforms built on outrage, humiliation, and imitation are treated as unfortunate but acceptable side effects of modern life.

But publish a file that the state finds politically inconvenient, and the tone changes instantly. Now the harm’s no longer indirect or speculative. It’s urgent, concrete and intolerable. Now the publisher is no longer a bystander but an accomplice. The same government that overlooks obvious harm becomes extremely sensitive the moment information challenges its priorities.

The contrast reveals a governing instinct less concerned with consequences than with control. Damage is negotiable. Dissent isn’t. And once that distinction is clear, the case stops being confusing and starts making perfect sense. The lawsuit goes further than simple hosting. Prosecutors point to submission systems, branded merchandise, and donation links as evidence of facilitation. Community-building itself becomes suspect. Organizations framed as intent. Engagement’s framed as endorsement. Infrastructure becomes guilt. This isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about dismantling ecosystems of disfavored ideas.

Conservatives should recognize the pattern immediately. It’s the same logic used to pressure banks to cut off lawful customers, to nudge platforms toward censorship, and dissolve the difference between moderation and coercion. The state rarely bans speech outright now. Instead, it reclassifies it. It reframes it. It regulates it until it fades.

Today, the target is gun-related files. Tomorrow, it will be something else. The mechanism is infinitely reusable. If information that “makes people less safe” can be punished, then safety becomes the trump card against every inconvenient liberty.

California claims to be protecting public safety while building a legal structure that treats knowledge as contraband. That’s the logic of regimes that don’t trust their citizens to think responsibly. It’s the logic of control dressed up as care. The state becomes the arbiter of which ideas are too risky to circulate.

And this is where conservatives should be alarmed. Not because of guns alone, but because this lawsuit sketches a future where rights exist only until they become inconvenient. A future where the First Amendment survives only by permission. California may or may not win this case. But the attempt itself matters. It signals a governing instinct that sees liberty as a liability and knowledge as a threat. Once a government starts regulating information because of hypothetical downstream harm, it‘s no longer defending order. In reality, it’s managing thought.