Washington State Bill Seeks to Add Firearms Detection to 3D Printers

The details in the bill mention inserting a "firearms blueprint detection algorithm" in either the firmware of the printer, or in the slicer, which can detect a file based on its presence in a database of known downloadable firearm files.

Are the people who drafted this bill aware that firearm parts can be modeled relatively easily in any flavor of CAD software, which would make a known list of files essentially pointless? Even someone who doesn't have CAD skills can just download another file in the endless stream of possible files, all with small modifications to differentiate the file hash.

And then there's the whole open-source side of 3D printing, which involves a significant share of machines, where this approach would essentially be completely unenforceable.

This is one of those pieces of regulation that doesn't actually prevent criminals from acquiring firearms, it just makes regular people's lives more difficult.

What they need to say is firearms that is unserialized.

But wait, its perfectly legal to manufacture a firearm for personal use. Those personal firearms are not required to have a serial number.

It uses a highly invasive, trivially circumvented rule to target two cohorts, while ultimately impacting neither:

1. High volume, low complexity: These are your glock switches (overwhelming majority of the illegal firearm parts trade), 80% lower kits, etc. You catch these at customs in the case of most temu switches, and at distribution time by creeping public IG accts for the ones that are actually printed. Blockers here aren't technical. Customs needs to deeply inspect small things, LEOs need resourcing to pursue the long tail of digital market vendors, prosecutors need to find the political will to hand a looottttt of 15 year olds to the ATF. This bill doesn't do those things.

2. Low volume, high complexity: this is your FGC9s, all-but-barrel printed guns, etc. This crowd is tiny, niche, slow, and basically unstoppable for as long as copper wire and magnets continue to exist. Overindexing on manufacturing here is silly, as there are vastly more regular illegal guns trading hands, and anything that works on those will work here too.

or you break the printing up into a number of smaller projects, with thier own zero point. and if required cnc away what will look like part of a firearm, so the printer wont see it.

and there is of course, the use of a template to finish by hand.

and then you would have to regulate blueprints, then diagrams, then X/Y/Z/ feed tables, then you would need to regulate the allowed precision of a measurement device, then regulate posession of machinists tools, like locksmithing.

i didnt mention false positives, thats a good way to hobble 3D printing in general, if too many projects trigger the "its part of a firearm" hook.

oh i just considered, they should do something about EM waveguides, and resonant cavities, pre-emptively so there is regulation before too many people realize just how simple a discombobulator really is to engineer and construct.