The dangers of California's legislation to censor 3D printing | Hacker News Reader

The dangers of California's legislation to censor 3D printing

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501 pointssalkahfi471 comments

Personally, I see this as an assault on 3d printing more than any real attempt to regulate guns.

I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.

So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?

So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.

Either way, this is bad legislation.

Not that I support any of these obviously stupid bills but:

> what's special about 3d printers?

They can make guns made out of plastic and metal detectors are kind of the primary way we try to find guns on people.

You are probably right about the lobbying group, I agree.

Edit: I'm not saying it makes sense, but this is the angle the congress folks are taking, sheesh.

> metal detectors are kind of the primary way we try to find guns on people

What are bullets and shell casings made out of again?

More importantly, what is the barrel made out of? Yes, I know there’s some fully printed guns… but my understanding is that those are basically 1-time use and even then it’s questionable how reliable that single use actually is…

If you want something resembling an actual gun (more than one shot, won’t blow up in your hand, some reasonable chance of accuracy, etc), then you’re going to be using multiple metal components (including the bullets of course) all of which would show up on a metal detector.

And importantly the barrel. Plastic cannot contain the pressure required to fire a bullet.

And I'd argue that shell casings are probably harder to manufacture than a fully working firearm. The equipment needed to manufacture working ammunition end-to-end is pretty serious.

All of these manufacturing equipment and processes existed more than a century ago.

If you have a capable VMC, you can make the die and other equipment necessary to stamp shell casings from commonly-available parts and machinery.

From there, with a modern Dillon or Hornady reloading press, you can crank out thousands of rounds per day without issue.

Primers are a legitimately difficult thing to manufacture, but (good-enough) bullets, casings, etc. are completely doable.

[Primers are a legitimately difficult thing to manufacture]

thats a problem that may not endure. if a firearm is reengineered to use an electrode to detonate charge rather than a chemical primer, there is no need for murcury fulminate, just a piezo electric spark generator, and a few square cm of cerebral cortex.

Electronic primers are a thing that already exists commercially. In the early 2000s, Remington sold electronically primed hunting rifles next to their non-electronic equivalent (see: "EtronX").

It is a mature technology. The main issue is cost and simplicity, since it often requires adding electronics to weapons that normally would not require them. The military uses electronically primed cartridges for things like chain guns and autocannons, since those require electronics to fire regardless of how it is primed.

yes ive seen them they are called exotic by most people around me.

yes the very nature of a chain cannon, makes electronic priming,the easier way to go.

so far we can still go to the store with 20$ and come back with a 200pk of 209s, someday that might be not so easy, and electronic is the better/only way.

What advantage do they have over chemical primers?

mechanical parts only move so fast, heat up and wear.

when you have a chain cannon rof 100 rnds per second, it gets intense.

a spark discharge solves a lot of kinetic issues with engineering the mechanism and its timing.

It completely eliminates the physics and durability considerations of firing pin design.

For chemical primers there is a non-trivial lag between the trigger breaking and the firing pin being accelerated to sufficient velocity such that it ignites the primer. The mechanics of maximizing acceleration of the firing pin is adversarial to durability, reliability, and precision in a number of respects. In automatic weapons it is made worse because the same physics must run in reverse to support the desired rate of fire.

With electronic primers, you mostly only need to worry about switching electric power fast enough (trivial). The relatively fragile firing pin mechanics don't need to exist. But you do need electronics, which has its own issues.

AFAIK, nobody uses fulminate of mercury in primers anymore.

its a good thing too, it not very stable, and mercury is not nice.

but its not difficult to manufacture, if we are in the scenario of shortage or absconderance of products.

lead styphnate is common use, but not everyone is happy with lead either. i have a couple boxes of non lead primers, they smell different when they go off but i havnt encountered noticible difference compared to lead primers.

Yes, those were abandoned a very long time ago. Mercury materially damages steel alloys. Using it in primers slowly eats your barrel.

I have no ability to make primers specifically, and wouldn’t even know where to start.

Imagine a flintlock 3d printed gun with hand cast lead balls: watch out redcoats!

In the movies, you hide the bullets in a pen or something, and it bypasses the metal detector along with the keys, phones and watches.

rabbits' foot, iIrc.

> What are bullets and shell casings made out of again?

Usually non-ferrous metals like brass, lead, and copper unless you live closer to Russia, then you may end up with steel-case.

That's besides the point though, the barrel of the gun will be steel.

Ferrous metals aren't required for any modern security-screening metal detectors: these materials are still highly electrically conductive, and therefore easily-detectable eddy currents are still inducible.

Oh, that's right! I remember reading somewhere about this a few years back. Might have even been here on HN.

For some reason I hear "metal detector" and my brain goes right to magnetism.

> They can make guns made out of plastic

So can many, many other things. Hell - something like this will do SO MUCH BETTER than anything I can print:

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/pipe/carbon-fiber-1~/?s=pl...

It's weird because 3d printed plastic is WAY down the list of things I'd prefer to trust handling the explosion from ammunition.

Frankly - even the hobbyist CNC I have is a MUCH better method of creating a plastic gun. FDM printing is not something I'd want to trust in this case, neither is SLA printing in most materials (some of the very high end ones like nylon in a formlabs printer... maybe?).

But my point stands - guns aren't that hard to make, and we aren't trying this legislation with any of the other myriad manufacturing methods. Hell - compare to a potato cannon... (also a plastic gun, btw...)

So what's different about 3d printers?

My hunch is this has fuck-all to do with guns, and a lot to do with something else, because 3d printers ARE different in that they let me manufacturer all sorts of other, much more complex, goods much more easily and cheaply at home.

There was a panic about plastic guns back in the 80s too when the Glock came out, and Congress passed the Undetectable Firearms Act.

But it was just as misinformed as it is today -- practically speaking, only metal is suitable for the high pressure components of a gun. A common 9mm cartridge produces upwards of 35,000 psi.

Aren't there metals that are undetectable/less detectable, like titanium or even stainless steel?

No, it doesn’t work like that in the modern world. The nature of the materials are pretty obvious to a remotely competent sensor.

using what physical process? How exactly do they detect any metal? A genuine question.

You can detect nonferrous metals by inducing eddy currents in them, then they become magnetic.

I don't care how good you are, you cannot 3D print a barrel that will withstand the pressure forces generated by a centerfire round.

Kind of interesting how many of these comments are confidently denying what the 3D printed gun nuts already pulled off 13 years ago. I would never in a million years want to be around one being fired, but there have been big internet communities pulling this off going back a long time https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/feds-get-in-on-3...

You just linked an article that shows that entirely 3D printed guns don't work.

If you're dead set on making a gun that will pass through a metal detector you don't need a 3D printer to do it.

whats special is speed and consistency.

when you manufacture a personal firearm, it is supposed to be yours, for your use. the 3d printer aspect, makes it possible for a group to print large quantities of receivers, under the radar, to be combined with "accesory parts" close to "drop-in" assembly style.

At issue here is that anyone can build a 3D printer. There's one in my basement a hobbyist built entirely from easily-sourced parts, and the controller is entirely open source. It never phones home and isn't really connected directly to the Internet at all.

Careful. Or they will try to regulate ghost printers.

Cool - you mean like the CNC I have sitting next to the printers? Which this legislation doesn't cover?

So no - not buying it. Hell, there's not even a real price difference. I can get a Nomad3 from Carbide 3D for the same approximate cost as an H2D from bambu labs.

And I can get super cheap temu versions of either for under 500.

> Cool - you mean like the CNC I have sitting next to the printers? Which this legislation doesn't cover?

Other states like Colorado have similar bills that define a "3d printer" as a computer aided machine that uses additive or subtractive manufacturing processes so CNC machines likely aren't safe either.

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb26-1144

i mean speed and consistency, compared to manually CnC [crank n curse] cutting, or printing.

if you set up your job so that you print a block of, lets say 4 lower receivers for a stoner style firearm. and you ran a number of printers, you start an arsenal, for a fire team, not just a lonewolf, and that scares people.

You know what’s even faster and cheaper than building a 3d printing gun factory?

Just buying a bunch of lower receivers. There are plenty available for less than $50. Hell, there are companies that sell them in 3 packs. If you are trying to build an arsenal you can just go to a gun store, there’s no limit on how many you can buy at once. If you don’t want the purchase to be background checked go to one of the many states that allow unrestricted private gun sales and go nuts.

the crux of fear is that "the enemy" may enter the country, hunkerdown, and anonymously construct the chattels of an assault.

in that threat model, appearances on camera buying anything related to a "mission" are going to be avoided.

no one, not even an FFL will see your face, if its all made from scratch.

this fear of takeover by a "hostile aliens" is quite alive, despite the promises of the GunControlAct

> any real attempt to regulate guns

Any real attempt would need to be at the national level, not that I would advocate for it, but it's simply a pipe dream to create a "gun free zone" in a country with 100s of millions of firearms. There are plenty of gun enthusiasts in California, they just don't flaunt it or talk about it.

I used to work in this industry and can confirm. California was by far the biggest cohort of consumers we had.

"regulate guns" does not equate to "gun free."

And "gun free" does not equate to "gun free" either, it equates to "only criminals have guns"

A gun-free zone is not such a good idea, much like an encryption-free zone would be, or an alcohol-free zone (the latter has been tried).

I would rather go for Swiss-stye mandatory gun training, and keeping a gun in (almost) every home. But, like the Swiss, I would require not just storing the gun in a certified safe box, but also providing an ID + a proof of mental sanity, and registering the gun. That would raise a much larger wave of protest though, both from the "left" and the "right". Even though, IMHO, it's the only sane way.

I have never lived in a country where people are allowed to keep guns. That scares the crap out of me.

Not just because of random strangers. I went through a mental health crisis, and there was a dark time where if I had had a gun I would be dead now. No amount of lockers or safe boxes or mental health tests would have saved me from that gun.

And wtf do you need a gun for anyway? I have never, not once, been in a situation where having a gun would have improved it. Why do you think giving everyone guns would be a good thing?

I'm sorry you went through a difficult time of your life, I can relate. I would like to point out a gun doesn't make destroying oneself any easier. They are heavy and cold and they have a particular smell, they taste like metal, and the hole in the end of the barrel so strongly implies destruction that even pointing it at oneself carries incredible gravity. Many people that purchase a gun for this purpose abandon the idea when they have the object in their hands.

Before crystallizing strong opinions about guns I suggest you spend some time learning to wield them. It's trivial to travel to a place that embraces guns and engage in a training session. A lot of people are surprised that the reality of it is very different than they imagined. It's not like in the movies. Kind of like how driving a car is not like in the movies. I have many friends who have no interest in guns who I have introduced to shooting, and even though they have not changed their opinions they told me they enjoyed the experience. With enough familiarity guns are not feared, but respected, similar to driving a car makes first time drivers nervous. We are surrounded daily by miriad tools we take for granted daily that have awesome lethal power within them, we'd all be wise to remember.

I joined the cadets at school. I've shot pistols, rifles, even a Bren machine gun, which was fun. I'm under no illusions that guns in movies are realistic ;)

edit: and the statistics on gun suicide contradict your point, which I missed earlier [0]

Which partly drives my curiousity around this (and I realise that my tone on the original question was harsher than I meant - this is genuine curiosity). I just cannot envisage a situation where a gun would improve matters. I've been in a few fights, have some scars. Even in those situations, having a gun would not have improved the situation, and might very well have killed me. So, yeah, I'm really curious about why you think making guns more widely available would be good?

[0] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/new-report-highlights-us-2...

Well said, I will also add that the source of all fear is ignorance, and that includes everything, from guns to disease to imaginary monsters. You do not cure it through avoidance, quite the opposite.

I'm not sure what the goal here is other than to give people, who probably shouldn't have guns, even more guns.

> And wtf do you need a gun for anyway?

One of the reasons that Switzerland, a country te size of Bay Area, with 9M current population, has not been overrun by the many wars in Europe for last 200 years is that every citizen is expected to fight back, without formally joining a military force for that. All men have to serve in the military for a couple of months to get the basic training, obtain and master a small arms weapon, and keep it where they live. (The ammo is not provided though.) Every few years the citizens should show up for several weeks of refresher training.

This is very close to the idea that an armed population is a backstop against tyranny, but much better implemented.

Per-capita firearm-related deaths in Switzerland are 7 times lower than in the US, and firearm-related homicide rate, 20 times lower. Truth be told, firearm ownership per capita is still about 4 times lower in Switzerland.

Maybe they also are doing something more right with mentally ill people, who in the US often receive little help.

> This is very close to the idea that an armed population is a backstop against tyranny, but much better implemented.

The last few months have disproved this completely. Literal plain-clothes masked thugs seizing people off the streets en masse, and there have only been a handful of cases of armed civilians resisting.

And I disagree that Switzerland preserved itself during WW2 because the forces that stomped all over the professional armies of Europe are afraid of an armed civilian population. That just doesn't make sense.

> has not been overrun by the many wars in Europe for last 200 years is that every citizen is expected to fight back

Lol this is so gun-brained, even for an American.

Switzerland has not been "overrun" because they are in the freaking mountains. Gun or not, good luck invading mountain cliffs.

Napoleon somehow did not have very much trouble doing just that back in the day.

But it's of course not limited to small arms distributed among the population. There are many more preparations done in advance, like rocks prepared to block roads if an explosive charge is detonated. Same with various bridges and railroad choke points. There's a large network of shelters and bunkers, kept in a good shape. Etc, etc.

The point is not that a huge army (like Hitler's in 1940) would not be able to overrun Swiss resistance. The point is that the cost of such an invasion would be prohibitively high. It serves as a good deterrent.

You proved my point. Doesn't really have to do with the gun owning population but to the unique geography of the country giving them a massive advantage.

>Per-capita firearm-related deaths in Switzerland are 7 times lower than in the US

If you break gun violence down in the US by race, you get results that are much closer to Europe.

>Nationally, the U.S. gun homicide rate (per 100,000 people) in 2020 was 26.6 for people identified as Non-Hispanic Black, compared to 2.2 for those identified as Non-Hispanic white and 4.5 for Hispanic individuals of any race.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10209993/

And indeed you can observe the gun homicide rate in Sweden has doubled since 2016 precisely because of demographic change.

Sweden:

2016: 0.301

2017: 0.398

2018: 0.423

2019: 0.438

2020: 0.463

2021:0.430

2022: 0.597

Not the money laundering, the mined bridges the fact that major international banks are based there or being a major supplier of weapons and formerly troops.

Just because you seem genuinely curious I will say this:

Yeah, it scares the crap out of me too.

I'm queer and very far to the left politically, and my neighbors all have a lot of guns and if you listen to what they say they think that queer leftists deserve to be murdered just out of principle.

I am not under any illusion that firearms make any situation with the government better; I have been assaulted by DHS (pepper spray) and in that situation I am certain that going from being "non-compliant" to "violent" would result in being murdered by the government in short, short order.

However, I am very worried about situations where my neighbors (who are all very well armed and very far to the right and very excited about 'interruptions in regular government') become violent.

There are many, many historical and current precedents for that situation.

So although the best situation would be unilateral disarmament, that isn't going to happen in the rural west of the US.

All that said, what do you think my position is? Owning "sporting rifles" and training on self-defense with my cadre of trans folks and anarchists seems to be the more realistic strategy than just hoping the US doesn't get suddenly worse, especially given the path it has been taking at the federal level.

Personally, I'd much prefer to be running around playing with my ham radios but here we are.

Hey, my sympathies on your plight :(

I don't know what I'd do in a similar situation. Again, I don't see how carrying a gun could improve the situation, except possibly that if everyone on the left was also carrying then the folks on the right might get scared and begin to think more rationally about gun control.

Statistically, though, you're safer than they are. Guns are much more likely to kill their owners than anyone else [0], so while it's obviously scary, maybe the thought that your neighbours are less likely to kill you than themselves or each other brings some comfort?

[0] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/160/10/929/140...

> Guns are much more likely to kill their owners than anyone else [0]

That article says no such thing, despite people often claiming it does.

What do you think it says then?

The easy observation is that it's far more likely that guns simply do nothing than they are to kill anyone.

I am about 50, and I can tell the difference between when my mental health was in a place where I might kill myself and where I am now.

That makes the math around gun ownership a lot more straight forward- hoping that the bigots will off themselves before they start lynching folks again (because it wouldn't be the first time) doesn't seem like the safer bet.

I am glad you live in a place that has never been touched by bigots excited by war- clearly there is no way that in Europe the bigots have or will ever (again?) require local resistance fighting (right?).

First, it's a bit of a silly cliché, but a true one, that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The way you've phrased it, even aside from the facts, makes it feel like FUD implying that someone's gun is going to creep up on them in the night.

Second, you can just take it from the horse's mouth, since papers give you an abstract stating their findings. An even briefer snippet of what they say themselves there is:

> Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns

> in the home of dying from a homicide in the home. They were also at greater risk

> of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person

> was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in

> the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in

> the home. Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from

> suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different

> method.

The first half of that regarding homicide says nothing about being killed by your own gun, only about being a homicide victim in your own home. It _could_ and likely does include some of that, but it's not captured or quantified, all we see is total homicide numbers. Nor does it have any statistics about anyone else killed, either outside the home, or someone else killed in your home, so there's no basis for comparison there.

The second half only claims to be true for males in the first place, not everyone. It also explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't deal with the likely confounder of people who don't have a means of suicide in the home committing suicide _outside_ the home, and thus not being included in their numbers.

Right, but the basic point - that people who have guns are more likely to die by guns is true, right?

The sophistry about whose gun killed them is kinda moot. They don't actually track whether the gun-owners died by their own gun or not, as you say.

But it's likely, isn't it? We're talking about people who either kill themselves, or kill their family members. It's likely using the gun that's already in the house, rather than a new, different gun being brought in from outside.

And if it is a stranger coming in from outside with a different gun, then doesn't that contradict the entire point of owning a gun? That you can protect yourself and your family from strangers with guns?

They demonstrate a correlation, but not causation. In fact they point out the reverse is likely true, too, that people more likely to die by gun might want to keep a gun at home.

What you call "sophistry" others might consider "not misrepresenting what research says to fit an agenda." There's value in using precise language to communicate what the numbers actually show.

And I don't even understand how the fact that a gun isn't a guarantee in any way contradicts that it _can_ be used in self defense.

Long ago, I had a friend who served in the Falklands war as a demolitions expert. He kept a few souvenirs, and had a few problems. One of the problems was that he couldn't sleep in houses, he could only sleep outdoors. One of the souvenirs was a claymore mine. His parents asked him to housesit for them while they went on holiday, so he wired up the claymore mine to their front door and slept in the garden. This appeared to him to be a perfectly rational response to the situation.

My point is that a claymore mine _can_ be used for home security. The fact that it would destroy the house that it was securing doesn't contradict this.

I'm fascinated by the concept of "proof of sanity". I suppose that when dealing with the Swiss, this might be an easier task than in the US.

> a proof of mental sanity

A "proof of mental sanity" would be a far more concerning overreach than 3D printer bans or gun bans, especially as we see things which are mandatory in a society become something tantamount to personhood. I don't really know how one would even envision implementing such a thing.

Can you get a driver's license if you're visibly insane? The same standard should apply to getting a gun. A gun is comparably lethal.

That is different than the proposed test for sanity.

Is a proof of lack of insanity a proof of sanity?

are you aware of the history of mental institutions and insanity charges being used to suppress political dissidents around the world? Most notably in the USSR but the west has also done this sort of thing.

To start with, "visibly insane" is a ludicrous idea.

Further, yes, you can get a license despite being "visibly insane". Some people consider it insane to believe in a deity, to not to, to smoke cigarettes, to have dyed hair, to have an electric car, to have a lime car, to own a Nissan, etc. During my test, the tester said nobody should drive if they hadn't gotten 10 hours of sleep, and I admitted I had only had six or seven. I still got my license.

Interpreted generously, maybe some small percentage of "insane people" are visibly so. Even then, looking at someone is not a proof of a lack of sanity.

Sanity isn't a thing you can test for, it's definitely not something the government should test for.

To make the implied question explicit: How do you envision positively testing for sanity? How would you feel if this test were implemented in 1940, 1900, 1860, 1820, etc? Would your feelings about that differ by the inclination of the politicians in power?

> Any real attempt would need to be at the national level

Exactly! Prohibition works really well.

Now if only we could figure out what state that coke, heroin and meth are still legal in!!

I stated that I wouldn't advocate for a national prohibition on guns mostly because I think it wouldn't work and I support gun rights. But if you were to try banning guns, it'd have to be a huge national effort and not just a few states.

I'm not on top of the current SOTA in 3d-printed guns, but the way it typically was done in the past is that you don't actually 3d-print all of what you or I would call a complete gun.

The barrel will be metal. In designs made for the US market, it will almost certainly be an actual manufactured gun barrel, since gun parts other than the receiver are not closely tracked in the US. In designs for Western Europe, the metal parts will be either milled or things you can buy at the hardware store[1].

The barrel and chamber being made of something tougher than you can get from an FDM machine is basically a requirement for making a gun that doesn't explode in your face when you shoot.

1: Here's an image of all of the parts going into a gun designed to be made in the EU. Per the wikipedia article, the barrel rifling can be added with electrochemical machining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9#/media/File:FGC-9_Compon...

yeah, but at some point you're just banning "manufacturing".

if someone wants to make a gun... they can. It's not complex to manufacturer simple firearms - we managed it as far back as the freaking 10th century.

So why freak out over this, for example, and not CNCs? Or Power tools? Or forges (CHF barrels are a thing too!)?

Because those aren't as trendy right now. This is similar to banning nunchucks and throwing stars in the 80's (yes, that was a thing).

> was a thing

Still a thing in Australia.

I never understood banning nunchucks. They kind of ban themselves.

If you've ever been a kid copying TMNT Michelangelo with home made nunchucks you've almost certainly smacked yourself in the face.

Y'know what's martially better than two sticks with a string between them? A single big stick.

Cuz ninja, of course.

The reason is slaves needed a stick for rice - putting a chain between two stick sill works fine for rice work - but makes it a much worse weapon.

That reasoning makes no sense. There was no significant production of rice by slaves.

But also, threshing flails were used outside of rice-growing regions.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Battage_...

Considering that they must be hundreds of times more expensive than long sticks with no hinge, I would say the reason must be that they're better at threshing.

Slaves was probably the wrong term, my understanding is more like oppressed farmers as opposed to slaves?

In the end though, I'm not an expert. I'm repeating what people who seem to be experts have told me and it makes sense - but I can't judge who is an expert. (either you random hacker news commenter, or whatever other "expert"). I'll gladly stand corrected if anyone can show they really are an expert.

>I never understood banning nunchucks. They kind of ban themselves.

I mean, that's a solid reason to ban them :-)

In countries where healthcare is socialized at least. As a cost-saving measure.

They're melee equivalents of footguns.

>If you've ever been a kid copying TMNT Michelangelo with home made nunchucks you've almost certainly smacked yourself in the face.

I've seen qualified users train with metal nunchucks as a kid in the early 90s.

Even then I thought, if I had those, I'd knock my own brains out so fast ಠ , _ ಠ

>Y'know what's martially better than two sticks with a string between them? A single big stick.

Also an order of magnitude safer for the user.

My state still has a ban on butterfly knives. As if doing some highly practiced hand flip move makes it more deadly than flipping out any other knife with a far more solid connection.

Getting mugged by a show-off is clearly much worse for my ego, I’ll have you know.

>yeah, but at some point you're just banning "manufacturing".

That's kind of the point. Look at the way industry is regulated in any "high touch" state. Beyond the most basic of home businesses just about everything industrial is "illegal without a license".

Like I can't just park a tub grinder on my property and start taking tree waste from tree services and landscapers and selling truck loads of chips to the local pulp mill. I need to bend over and spread 'em for a state license.

They would be overjoyed for all manufacturing to be like that. They would love to ban your CNC plasma table or laser cutter and then sell you back the right to use it so long as you shell out $$$ to some compliance industry (that invariably is owned by a bunch of people well connected to the legislature, if environmental and weed are anything to go by).

CNC milling is typically included in the bans being considered in various states.

While poetically consistent, it enlarges the crater around these bad laws if they are passed and enforced. Basically all new manufacturing setups will need to stop and reprogram to stop and start according to fluctuating rules designed by committee, and will need to be made brittle to prevent circumvention.

It is a debacle.

> need to stop and reprogram to stop and start according to fluctuating rules

Or just move to Texas. Or even Idaho or Dakotas. Which, under a certain angle, is good, it would lessen the wealth and expertise disbalance between states.

I still hope that California comes to senses before they would need to accept the moniker The Footgun State.

Machine shops like to be close to customers, moving might not be acceptable compromise.

They do for reasons, but if those reasons are not compelling they will move. There are already machine stops all over - many tiny near ghost towns have one (often not in city limits - farmers often have a side business and this is one option). If those machine shops can compete better because they don't have the regulation the customes will find them.

I think California already has a suitable moniker: the (fool's) gold state.

Manufacturing a firearm is already regulated by state law in California. (Be it by cnc, 3d print, or drill press)

It is also regulated by federal law and enforced by a whole ass branch of the federal government called the ATF. :P

Washington's legislation that just passed includes a vague ban on possession of any files/instructions on 3d printing and CNC/milling/basically any manufacturing. As far as I can tell it's potentially illegal to own a book on gun manufacturing processes in the state of Washington now if you're not a federally licensed firearms manufacture.

The law is vague enough that a states attorney trying to make a name for themselves could interpret it that way, yes. However, the law is very likely to be challenged on constitutional grounds. I would not be at all shocked if a proper 1A challenge effectively nullifies it.

Interestingly the ATF themselves have no issue with homemade firearms so long as you register a serial number

> yeah, but at some point you're just banning "manufacturing".

I mean I’m not in favor of this 3D printing law but manufacturing guns without appropriate licenses is illegal already. They’re trying to target consumer 3D printers for the same reason your paper printer refuses to print currency. Anyone with any engineering knowledge can see why the 3D printing analogy doesn’t work because there isn’t a fixed set of models being banned.

>Anyone with any engineering knowledge can see why the 3D printing analogy doesn’t work because there isn’t a fixed set of models being banned.

Also because you can manufacture the exact thing with a lump that you just saw off later (or with a hole you fill with epoxy), or slightly larger / smaller / bent / etc., and it'll be functionally the same.

A functional piece of counterfeit currency needs to be identical to legal currency by the definition of currency; being indistinguishable from the real thing is the only function (otherwise, what you have is a piece of paper).

That doesn't apply to anything whose function isn't "looking exactly like this specific thing".

If the legislation aimed to by museum-grade visual replicas of certain shapes (e.g. an exact scaled down copy of Michelangelo's David), it'd be a technically challenging, but feasible problem.

But the problem they're trying to solve amounts to detecting the manufacturing of pieces with a certain function algorithmically, and forcing that spyware into every machine.

To boot, any form of algorithmic inference of the sort will require much more computing power than a 3D printer ever had.

That's ignoring the feasibility of solving the problem of "can this be a part of a gun", or even the much simpler one "is this part functionally the same as this other part" without giving a false positive on everything (as the saying goes, anything thing is a dildo if you are brave enough; guns aren't much different).

What I'm saying is that zero engineering knowledge is required to understand that requiring machines to refuse to make exact visual replicas of objects isn't the same as trying to restrict function.

I.e. that checking if two flat designs look the same is not hard, but checking if two designs will function somewhat similarly if manufactured is a God-tier problem.

_____

TL;DR: the only thing you can check by looking is looks.

And while that's all that matters for currency, it's irrelevant for guns.

Hope someone explains it to them legal folls. Ain't no engineering knowledge required for it.

"It takes zero knowledge to" is sadly a statement that works only given common sense,

which too many people are sorely lacking

The only thing you need to make is the "lower" or whichever part the ATF constitutes as "the firearm" I've seen someone take a shovel and turn it into an AK. Once you have the "firearm" part of whatever gun you're building, the rest of the parts can be shipped to you in most of the country (idk about CA, and NY though) and you can easily assemble the rest of the gun.

Like you say, you just need to build a key metal piece, and voila, the rest is buying parts that can be delivered to you, in some cases fully assembled.

You could also just buy black powder guns directly to your home (idk about in CA or NY though) which are not treated as "firearms" by the ATF.

The only people shooting 3D printed guns are enthusiasts usually, who have other guns.

Didn’t Luigi Mangione 3D print his gun? There’s definitely an appeal for criminals

Allegedly. And was an illegal search as well, with the contents of the bag was prior to the court order.

He 3d printed the frame, but you need dozens of parts, milled or stamped from steel to complete it and have a working gun. Even the 3d printed frame needs steel inserts. It is like 3d printing a case, then buying a motherboard, CPU and RAM at Best Buy, and claiming your built a 3d printed computer.

There is some appeal to criminals, because the frame is the part that gets the serial number and is regulated. But if you want to attack this problem, the 3d printer is a backwards way to do it.

Especially with "80%" gun frames out there, which aren't too hard to get, and don't require any sort of background check in many jurisdictions, since its technically not a firearm, just a block of polymer you dremel down to spec.

While this is technically possible, it is not that easy. In other words, someone who is technical and experienced enough to manually create a lower like that is very likely to have extensive experience with firearms anyway (and likely owns many).

You'd be surprised how motivated someone in a gang could get watching a ton of videos on youtube just to get access to a gun police cannot "trace" in a meaningful way.

I would not be surprised at how motivated a gang member is to acquire a firearm, no. So, I guess point taken, however a) I was responding to a claim that's slightly different from 3D printing lower receivers, and b) I thought YouTube banned/got rid of content that actually taught you how to do this? I have not looked in a long time. In any case, milling out a block of material on your own to function as a lower is going to take a lot of time and skill, so my original point still stands.

Separately, I am always a little confused by the idea that you cannot "trace" these firearms. Maybe people do not widely understand what's going on here, but the serial number being traced is on this lower receiver, which can be swapped out (in most but not all cases). If a firearm with a 3D printed lower is used in a crime, I have to assume - though I am not an expert - that you could still connect spent casings to that weapon in the same manner. In other words, it does not matter that the lower doesn't have a factory-installed serial number plate or a stamped serial number. My guess is that this confusion is being injected intentionally in the debate by the people who support/push these badly constructed laws.

> Separately, I am always a little confused by the idea that you cannot "trace" these firearms.

It's presumably a misunderstanding of how investigations work. They're paperwork people so the assumption is that the serial number is of vital importance because it's what's on the paperwork, and if something could exist with no serial number then the entire system is in danger.

Meanwhile the serial number is overall not even that helpful. If you catch the suspect with the weapon in their possession then it doesn't matter that much what the serial number is, what matters is if the weapon they had matches the forensics. By contrast, if you don't recover the weapon then you don't have the serial number anyway.

The only case where a serial number would really do anything is if you recover the weapon after the perpetrator already tried to dispose of it and want to try to use the serial number to identify the original owner. But in that case the perpetrator can leave you without a serial number regardless by just filing it off. It doesn't really buy them anything for it to have never had one to begin with.

Serial numbers are security theater on the same level as TSA checkpoints at the airport.

That is definitely not how gang members are occupying their thoughts and activities. Real firearms are super easy to get in the US, legally or illegally, and it takes much more than "untraceable" firearms to get away with shootings.

> While this is technically possible, it is not that easy.

Isn't the same thing true for 3D printers? The first time someone tries to print something they frequently end up with spaghetti and less technically competent people wouldn't even be able to get the thing to attempt printing anything.

That used to be true, but no, nowadays they print perfectly out of the box.

Yes. For those unfamiliar with firearms, the above analogy is correct. One addition: in this hypothetical your “computer” is heavily regulated, but for the agency that does the regulating the only thing they consider the “computer” is the frame/case.

I’m not in favor of 3D printer controls but I feel like most of this comment section is out of touch with how far the 3D printed gun nuts have come along.

It was 13 years ago that the first major fully 3D printed firearm was released and even the ATF admitted that most of their reproduction attempts were capable of firing bullets at lethal velocities https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/feds-get-in-on-3...

I’m not an expert but even back then they could supposedly get 8-10 shots out of them.

So the claim that dozens of milled metal parts are necessary doesn’t appear to be factual

The liberator is the “hello world” of 3d printed guns. It is just barely functional enough to technically exist but practically isn’t of much use.

The barrel is so short and non existent that it basically does nothing except hold the (metal) cartridge in place. A liberator isn’t much different than simply holding a cartridge in a fixture and hitting it with a hammer.

In a conventional gun, the barrel serves to allow the projectile to build velocity and stabilize the trajectory by putting a spin on it. The liberator does neither, so the projectile will be moving quite slow and will be inaccurate.

And also, they do commonly explode, even on the first shot. It’s a gamble.

“Lethal velocities” doesn’t really mean much. A slingshot can propel a bullet at lethal velocities. And that would probably be a more suitable option for criminals as it would be more reliable and have more rapid fire capability.

Now it might be a viable one-shot gamble for a criminal in a place where guns are entire forbidden. But in those places, it is typically not easy to get a real .380 cartridge, so it doesn’t really change much. And in the US, there are much easier ways for criminals to get much better guns.

Isn’t the Liberator like 10 years out of date? The last 3D printed gun I saw was a submachinegun capable of full auto. It had a metal barrel but that was described as easy to acquire or make.

Yes but all of the better designs use metal components that aren’t 3d printed. The liberator was to “prove” it could all be 3d printed. Technically true but practically not worth it

you can buy all those parts on ebay. The companies that support gun buybacks for police or buy evidence guns from police destroy the legal 'gun portion' and then clean up and sell the rest of the parts on ebay. Search for glock parts kit.

They could, they could also more likely buy an 80% firearm lower that does the same, this is why the ATF under Biden cracked down hard on ghost guns, to the point that one manufacturer shut down entirely. I like to watch police bodycam videos when I'm bored, there's a LOT of people who have 80% or "ghost guns" as they call them, I don't think I've ever seen someone using a 3D printed gun. Luigi Mangione was a strange out of the norm exception, he intentionally did it that way.

In reality, a 3D printed gun is not reliable, the filament will melt and nobody wants to have a melted gun while in the middle of a shoot out with other criminals or law enforcement.

As far as I've been able to find, that's basically the only documented case of a criminal use of a 3d printed gun. His also malfunctioned every shot during the crime.

Legislators point towards the rise of "ghost guns" in crimes, but then you dig into that and they include every criminal who files off the serial number on a stolen gun in the stats, which is by far the more common circumstance along with being much easier, more reliable, and cheaper for a criminal than 3d printing a lower and assembling it.

mangione didnt understand the requirements for suppressor on semi-auto pistol.

there was no nelson device, he would have been better off with an empty soda bottle.

The appeal is strictly to certain sorts of dreamers, ideologues, and tinkerers. The vast majority of criminals are more pragmatic.

It's called the receiver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_(firearms)

> You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.

Why would you buy a pipe at Home Depot? A gun barrel is not a firearm, and is not required to be registered or serialized. You can drive to Arizona or Nevada and buy an actual barrel, with rifling, manufactured to meet well-known specifications, without showing an ID. Until this year, you could have a barrel shipped to your California residence without an ID. There's no need to build the Shinzo Abe contraption.

> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.

Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.

> Either way, this is bad legislation.

California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.

The device the parent is describing has a long history, and they're known as 'zip guns'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm

From Carlito's Way:

> Out come the zip guns. Homemade gun. You pull the hook back, catch that bullet square, ping. Hit you in the head, man, you got serious problems.

Yes and the response is telling you that you can build something orders of magnitude more sophisticated without any trouble. The point is, the firearm is not the tube the projectile comes out of. Firearm is closely defined and not intuitive to the general public.

Quite a page. Featuring the work of ted k and a toy pop-gun that's un-toyed

Like everything in the United States, it’s actually gun manufacturers that want to clamp down on this cottage industry which threatens their profits. I don’t buy for a second that this is some gun control attempt.

This is the most likely answer. Just as it was the large grocery chains that have funded all the plastic/paper bag bans.

The gun lobby has a long history of trying to ban low cost market entrants.

Is this not like a schizo conspiracy theory? Like why would the grocery chains fund the bag bans? So they can save a tiny amount of money on paying for bags?

But having to bring your own bags limits how much you can buy. If someone has a plan to just use their own bags, they will likely forgo purchases at a higher rate than if the bag is not in the equation for them.

It's not obvious to me that the buying limit effect sales decrease would not outweigh the savings on physical bag purchases. Maybe I'm not following?

The grocery chain campaign is well documented. Just search for it.

The short answer is that bags are a non-trivial cost for the larger chains. Now, they get to charge for them at an astounding markup and no longer have to compete with any grocery store on this point. All grocery stores are affected equally, which means it is disproportionately damaging to mom-and-pop stores and smaller chains.

How is this damaging to them at all? They literally get to cut one item completely off their expense list.

I assumed that the grocers would want to offer bags. Making it more easy to drop in and buy something is going to be significantly more money than the cost of bags per a customer.

Maybe they want you to spend an extra 10 cents every time you drop in and buy something? And they get to be pro environment. Win win.

What percent of the overall purchase profit is 10 cents, and how much does it reduce in sales by adding friction? Surely there must be data on this, has nobody looked into it in public?

Also, it’s been awhile but don’t plastic bags make it easier to carry more things at once because the handles are so thin and flexible? And I don’t remember handles ever ripping on plastic grocery bags.

If the math works out in favor of charging for bags it would imply that the margin is incredibly thin in the literal sense of the word incredible. Like the average purchase has so little profit that 10 cents per bag is meaningful? What is the average profit on a bag of items or on an average purchase? Surely more than 10 cents, no? Like I know grocery stores are notoriously low margin, but that’s among businesses it’s not almost 0 in an absolute sense.

Grocery stores _absolutely_ supported the bag bans, though they weren't the initial groups asking for them. Similar to how the cigarette companies liked the TV ad bans--if nobody could advertise on TV than the playing field would be level and their profits all went up from decreased costs.

Some of them supported them because they were pressured into it. Grocery bans of bags and payment etc. are a PITA for customers. No business in it's right mind would force that on their customer unless they were required to. Passing the cost on to their customer is not an issue. Supporting laws requiring payment etc. are cost benefit analysis. Is it worth fighting the bad PR etc or go along. But obviously they wouldn't have provided the bags in the first place if it was not a competitive benefit to them.

People here are talking about two kinds of laws: minimum bag charges and outright bag bans.

In some jurisdictions, a grocery store isn’t allowed to give you a traditional disposable bag at any price. In others, there’s either a bag tax or a minimum price, usually five or ten cents, a store must charge per bag.

This is a well documented Everytown campaign, you can't blame this one on firearms manufacturers.

Often, different groups align on certain issues. The one that actually causes the change to happen is the one with the most clout.

Look, the firearms industry has worked in the past to ban competitors but I really don't think they see 3d printed firearms as competitors. The market there is tiny. Meanwhile Everytown is a gun control organization that wants to ban all guns everywhere and again, is documented to be the one behind this push.

I think they don't give a shit about 3D printing, especially in CA. It's not like you're competing with a glock19 type hand gun and cornering this market.

3D gun printing has come a long way in a short amount of time. 3D printed lower receivers can weather several hundred rounds of 7.62 at this point

That makes it useful for a hobbyist, but it is by no means a replacement for a properly manufactured lower.

Hobbyist or not, this makes it useful for getting guns (and other gear) from other people.

What I'm saying is that no one is going to build a lower in this manner for a firearm chambered in 7.62 and do anything useful/important with it. Maybe the cartridge size here is a distraction, idk, but this isn't a specification that I would consider common and/or useful for 3D printing a firearm. Even if your nominal intent is just to "finish" a gun with parts you have laying around, it's not going to be something that's consistently reliable.

Can you not imagine any motives that a person could have for printing a gun where they don't care about long term reliability?

Sure, I can imagine any number of motives and Rube Goldberg mechanisms for procuring a firearm to service that motive. My point is that if someone who is desperate to get a firearm has to 3D print one they’re going to pick a simple pistol lower. Not something for a rifle that fires a higher power cartridge. Most rifles that fire 7.62 are not in the AR format.

You don't think someone like Oswald exists in the present day?

They demonstrably do, multiple of them, and none of them used 3D printed weapons.

So there are people who would have a use for a high powered rifle with limited durability.

> What I'm saying is that no one is going to build a lower in this manner for a firearm chambered in 7.62 and do anything useful/important with it. Maybe the cartridge size here is a distraction, idk, but this isn't a specification that I would consider common and/or useful for 3D printing a firearm.

The fact that no one was caught using such a weapon is irrelevant. You stated that there are people out there who would use it, so your statement that "no one" would want to is untrue.

>You stated that there are people out there who would use it, so your statement that "no one" would want to is untrue.

Huh? There is no evidence that anyone is using a 3D printed 7.62 weapon system to do crimes. Of the existing evidence, criminals overwhelmingly use conventional firearms. I'm not understanding your point. The would-be and successful assassins in the news the last couple years used standard rifles, ranging from 5.56 to .03-06 in caliber. I think you are assuming that criminals are less sensitive to equipment reliability than they actually are.

Let me put it this way. If 3D printed firearms were such a game changer, they would already be using them at scale. They are not, and these laws are part of a fundamental misunderstanding about how firearms function and how 3D printing technology works.

You are arguing against a point I am not defending. I am giving a retort against your statement that you can't imagine why anyone would want a high powered rifle that had a limited reliability window. You admitted that there was a use case for it, and I called that out. That's it. I am not defending nor opposing the ability to 3D print firearms.

I don't think I actually did admit that, and I think the confusion lies in your assumption that someone who wants to do a crime is willing to accept the reliability issues. Perhaps it's worth pointing out that these reliability issues aren't simply lower n-cycles before failure. The weapon could explode on you on the first shot. The probability of this happening is lower for the less powerful cartridges (as I implied earlier but perhaps should've been more explicit). This concept of a "reliability window" is not the right way to think about this. In other words, if someone handed me a 3D printed 7.62 weapon system I would refuse to fire it, and call the person who made it an idiot.

Look up the WW2 FP-45 Liberator. A bad gun you could use to get a better gun. Theoretically you only need to use it once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

I highly doubt that anyone who 3d prints a lower does so to “use” it (I.e. shoot someone) in order to procure a better firearm.

I would think they just print multiple guns and switch if one breaks.

The FGC-9 was used extensively in Myanmar for that exact purpose. The rebels would set up ambushes with FGC-9's and recover better firearms for future use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9#Users_and_use

I mention 7.62 specifically because most folks not familiar with 3D printed firearms are unaware that such a thing is even possible.

9mm 3DP guns have hit the news cycle repeatedly, less so for higher power cartridges. IIRC, there's a .50 BMG project well underway.

You call these project[s], which I think is very accurate for the higher power cartridges. You sound like you've seen a lot of the videos of 3D printed firearms, and from what I can tell they cluster around 9mm and 5.56. There's probably multiple reasons for that, one of which is that those round sizes are more widely available and cheaper, while another is that it is going to be easier to do than something with higher power. So to maybe simplify my point, the technical challenges and inherent safety issues on 7.62 are higher. Thus, projects they shall remain.

At this point with a 5,000 round endurance for a plastic AK receiver, I think it's fair to say the 'project' has reached maturity. Especially when this is all completed on entry level printers

5k rounds is impressive, I will concede the point if that's true. I would like to look at the design of this. Do you have a link to the CAD files, or whatever you have that explains how they deal with pressure issues.

Depends on what the intended use is. 3DP firearms have proliferated internationally and have been used against conventional militaries. Agreed they aren't a replacement, but practical use cases exist.

You can easily go through a couple hundred rounds in one visit to the range.

>You can easily go through a couple hundred rounds in one visit to the range.

Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.

Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.

This legislation is insanely, horrendously bad and harmful, but "3D printed gun components are useless" isn't a solid argument against it. They're useful enough.

The real arguments, as others said, are:

1. You can achieve much more already without 3D printers

2. The legislation won't achieve its stated objective as any "blueprint detector" DRM will be trivial to circumvent on many levels (hardware, firmware, software)

3. Any semblance of that DRM being required will kill 3D printing as we know it (the text of the law is so broad that merely having a computer without the antigun spyware would be illegal if it means it can drive a 3D printer)

> Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.

It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition, but it's not good enough to actually compete with them.

> Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.

Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record. Given his apparent political alignment, he presumably used 3D printed parts for trolling purposes since there was no actual need for him to do so. He could have bought any firearm from any of the places they're ordinarily sold.

>It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition

Does anyone actually believe this? Is there any funds for this theory?

Seems to be too far fetched to be even worth sitting.

>Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record

That really isn't the point (he still doesn't have a criminal record, by the way).

The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.

> The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.

I guess the counterpoint is that it's not actually useful to criminals either, so there is no incentive for any non-fool to want laws like this and then all incentive arguments are weak because foolishness can be attributed to anyone.

Luigi Mangione wasn't trying to get caught. Maybe he was worried buying and using a real gun would link him back to the murder.

Let's review the three possibilities here.

One, you succeed in never being identified or apprehended. Consequently you, rather than the police, have the gun you used, and you can file off the serial number and throw it into the sea or whatever. They don't know who you are so they never come looking for the gun you no longer have and it's just one of millions that were sold to random people that year.

Two, you get caught before you do the murder. Some cop thinks you look too nervous or you get into a car accident on the way there etc. and they find the gun. Having one without a serial number at this point means you're in trouble when you otherwise wouldn't be. It's a disadvantage.

Three, they catch you in the act or figure out who you are because your face got caught on camera somewhere after you took off your mask etc. At this point it's extremely likely you're going to jail. This is even more likely if the weapon is still in your possession because then they can do forensics on it, and it not having a serial number at that point is once again even worse for you. This is apparently the one that actually happened.

Whereas the theory for it allowing you to get caught would have to be something like, they don't know who you are but they have a list of people who bought a gun (which, depending on the state, they might not even have) so they can look on it to find you. But that's like half the US population and doesn't really narrow it down at all.

There is no criminal benefit in doing it so that leaves the remaining options which are either trolling or stupidity.

If he's a suspect but not confirmed, they'd know if he purchased a real gun, and a ballistics test would confirm it matches the bullet. Conveniently "losing" it would raise suspicion too. Or if that's not why, there has to be some reason people make ghost guns in general.

It comes back the same thing, there is zero evidence that gun manufacturers are lobbying for this while Everytown is very publicly and proudly announcing that they are pushing this exact legislation.

True. I used to do it regularly.

I stand corrected, the Plastikov V4 has endured 5,000 rounds

It looks like a Plastikov uses a lot of metal Kalashnikov parts that you'd need to get from a kit or machine yourself or something, so I don't think it's really fair to call that gun a 3D printed gun. It uses printed parts, but the barrel, trigger, etc... aren't printed.

That's the entire point. The only federally regulated part that requires a background check is the receiver, which can be made on entry level printers by virtually anyone that can read.

Rebels in Myanmar were using various 3d printed guns just after the military coup (famously the FGC-9), which is like a PDW form factor chambered in 9mm. The barrels are metal, and i think the chamber as well, but the whole fire control group i think is all printed and of course all the furniture is plastic as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K1qXxONls4

well, it's not because they shopped around and were like - yeah, we don't like these AK-74s and ar15s, let's just use FGC-9 instead.

Any gun company caught funding anything remotely anti-2A would be met with an unbelievably negative reaction from the firearms community and face boycotts and massive reputational damage. It absolutely would not be worth it for them to do this. I can maybe see the arguments that perhaps it’s really a proxy for the anti right to repair groups, but absolutely not the firearms manufacturers.

> Any gun company caught funding anything remotely anti-2A would be met with an unbelievably negative reaction from the firearms community and face boycotts and massive reputational damage.

This is not true. They currently fund people and policies that are 100% anti-2A without any pushback. It's just a matter of fooling the people into accepting the anti-2A stuff you do support.

Got an example or two?

I wish I could believe that but many people are perfectly okay with curtailing certain parts of rights so long as they aren't parts of a right they personally use or value. Plenty of pro-2a people were fine with gun control when it was being used to suppress the Black Panthers. And also many times to "fight crime" with specific firearm features and configurations being illegal despite not making anybody safer.

That was true, but largely is not true anymore. When Trump was pushing a blanket ban on trans people owning guns, gun rights organizations come out in force against (while anti-gun organizations like Everytown didn't).

Yep. That's what happened when Smith & Wesson decided to back a scheme that would require some kind of system to prevent the gun from working if someone other than the owner was holding it. The then-current owners had to sell the company before the sales returned.

> Like everything in the United States, it’s actually gun manufacturers that want to clamp down on this cottage industry which threatens their profits.

I have 0 reason to believe this.

That is some pretty wild speculation, and a terribly risky proposition for any company because they would instantly get blackballed by the 2a community.

I think a fundamental problem here is that people who don’t know any 2A/RKBA people think it’s like most political opinions. Oh, you’re a gun guy, you’re a Republican who like country music and hates them black folk.

It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music. It is a group that has decided that one issue is more important than anything else to them. And they vote. For you, if you are for them, but for your opponent, if you are not. They will primary you. They do not care if D or R is next to your name. In fact they love pro-gun D politicians, because it’s a chance to pull that party into respecting all constitutional rights.

The NRA is massively successful because of this. They do one thing, and everyone in it knows that. They don’t have to agree on anything else, because if you can’t have guns, the rest of the politics is irrelevant.

A company that made the slightest anti-2A movement would be dead by sunset the next day. No store would carry their product. No consumer in the know would buy their product.

I think it's actually mostly about school shootings and 'gang violence' that drive these regulations at least here in washington, which is a little paranoid. I don't think we've had too many school shootings. I know in seattle we had a shooting OUTSIDE a high school that killed a student, but I'm not sure we've had any columbine type situations.

We're unprepared to deal with world wide 24 hour media. With 350 million people even extremely rare and weird failure modes will happen often enough for the media to fearmonger a big chunk of the population into falsely believing they're significant threat. In reality firearm homicide among teenagers is a fraction of death from auto accidents, half that of suicide, and closer to deaths from drowning. But the latter three don't make for spectacular and fear inducing news coverage.

> homicide among teenagers

Which is, in itself, a manipulation. They largely aren’t 13- and 14-year-old innocents; they are 17, 18, and 19-year-olds who are engaged in criminal enterprises.

The murder rate in the US is far too high, but if you have no contact with the illegal drug trade your chances of being murdered plummet.

> I think a fundamental problem here is that people who don’t know any 2A/RKBA people think it’s like most political opinions. Oh, you’re a gun guy, you’re a Republican who like country music and hates them black folk.

> It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music.

But... that is what most political opinions are like.

I didn’t explain well here, so mea culpa, but the meat of my argument is later: regardless of their disagreement with a politician on any other issue, these will vote (or not) on one issue. Very few political opinions are that strong. Party is irrelevant. Other concerns don’t apply. Agree with this person on every else, but they are anti-2A? Not getting a vote.

They learned discipline the hard way. They may not vote for the other guy, but they aren’t showing up for you. Very few blocs work that way, that strongly. The ACLU is a great example of a group that was captured and turned to things that really have nothing to do with the core mission of protecting civil liberties. They protect the ones that a certain class of folk deem worthy. They sometimes defend a Nazi to show that they are balanced, I guess. They promote diversity - which is a fine opinion, but isn’t the mission. The 2A groups have a laser focus. Nothing else intrudes. So hippies and rednecks and rappers can all get along because they only have to agree on one thing, and the organization does not care about anything else.

Look up Everytown for Gun Safety, they are behund this...

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20251027/from-printers-to-pa...

For the adventurous, there may be a desire for all-plastic construction. Print a cylinder in high-temp filament, wrap it in CF tow, ream to size.

I'd guess the bring-back-DRM lobbyists are all automotive interests, whether it's OEM or the existing after-market people. Replacing mirror housings and stuff even for cheap cars has got to be one of the highest margin businesses out there, and lux cars? Insane

> California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.

California and New York have been done more for gun rights than anyone else by passing absurd laws that get struck down by the judiciary, setting precedent.

Tell that to the milllions of people in states like this that have spent most/all their life having their rights infringed upon.

I'm one of them.

However, due to the adversarial nature of the judiciary system, opposition is required to set precedent. It'd be great if the overstepping didn't ever happen but we don't know what is overstepping until SCOTUS rules.

California and New York have played a pivotal role in defining the edges of the second amendment.

Nope, it is the democrats led by Michael Bloomberg...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gun-safety-advocates-war...

Do you even realize what you just said? Oh hey why even go to a nearby Home Depot when you can drive over to an entirely different state instead. Really?

California now requires some parts of- like shotgun barrels to go through an ffl.

> Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.

Probably more accurate to say politicians are trying to take actions which will be seen publicly as fighting against gun crime. It seems like a stretch to say anyone earnestly believes that 3D printed guns are a real problem in the landscape of existing gun crime in America

yep, it’s all about manufactured consent and optics

> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing...

I'd say the real groups behind this are the anti-gun ideologues, the "do whatever it takes to stop my panic attacks over Bad Things maybe happening" left-wing control freaks, and the old-fashioned "big state" authoritarian crowd.

And the only reason they're paying attention to 3d printers is that some pro-gun ideologues and provocative makers have been talking up the concept of 3d printing guns.

Or the gun lobby isn't really happy that anyone can "print" a gun.

Yeah, no. I have shot 3D printed firearms with the head of the FPC, the most active gun lobby organization in the country.

Reminds me of the sUAS legislation crushing the R/C flying hobby. Vague allusions to "safety" are constantly being thrown around, but in fact it seems that big companies are lobbying to claim the airspace for drone delivery and similar autonomous BVLOS operations.

And as a result there are a bunch of sub 250g long range digital builds and RTFs that achieve the same as the drones people flew pre remote ID..

Flying BVLOS is still illegal (including using goggles without a spotter) and basically nobody in the FPV hobby (non part 107) runs remoteid or registers their drones, even if they're over 250g. IDK what the AMA club field guys are doing, but they've all got FRIAs anyway.

In the FPV hobby, interest in smaller drones has increased, but I'm not really sure whether to attribute that more to regulations or just the fact that more components are available now to build smaller drones that can fly in public spaces without interfering with other people's usage, or even inside your own home. Overall it feels like the main impact of the regulations is to keep people away from the hobby entirely, since people who get into it inevitably start ignoring the more onerous rules sooner or later.

I'm expecting it to get worse, anyway. And the guys who fly DJI-style consumer drones are fucked, sub250 or not.

Idk what law in particular, but if this is about flying drones at low altitude in places where other people didn't show up to hear drones buzzing, I'd want it banned whoever is doing it.

No, the regulations I'm referencing have nothing to do with where (in the local sense) you can and can't fly drones. Even if I owned a thousand square miles in the middle of nowhere and wanted to fly a 75mm tinywhoop in the center of my own property, these regulations would affect me exactly the same as they would some jackass taking video of women sunbathing on a crowded beach with an 8" cinelifter. Typically local laws provide the recourse you're looking for.

square tubes is the solution

Hmm, assuming it's part of somebody's bigger plans with an ulterior motive... The requirement to pass everything through a government watchdog module could be leveraged into DRM/copyright/patent overreach.

I think the real issue is that 3d printing is a direct attack on products as a service (think roomba parts, fridge parts, anything with plastic clip assembly) that are planed to break and they don't sell replacement parts.

lots of companies got fat and happy selling you plastic crap for a fortune, now 3d printers let you make plastic crap at home for pennies.

If they must pass these laws, it must include protections for printing consumer goods parts, if they won't add that I will not vote for you.

contact your state reps and tell them that.

No, contact your state reps and tell them you don't want these laws passed, period - they should vote against any such laws if they want to have a chance at being voted in. They won't do anything for the stated purpose while they will cripple a thriving sector.

It's total bullshit; I should be able to print all the guns I want. Prop guns, plastic replicas of my guns; I shouldn't have to go though this BS.

> I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.

I agree that this legislation is not good, but you apparently aren’t aware of the large communities dedicated to 3D printing guns.

The first 3D printed gun was making headlines 13 years ago and since then it’s turned into a semi-underground fascination.

You aren’t going to be fashioning a gun out of a pipe from Home Depot more easily than the designs these groups are playing with.

Many of the subreddits, Discords, Facebook groups and other communities have started to get shut down since a 3D printed gun was used in a high profile murder recently.

There are a lot of comments in this comment section from people unaware of how big these communities are. I’m not supporting these legislative attempts to interfere with 3D printers but you really should know some of the context.

wasn't luigi's gun 3d printed? (if i remember right it was a glock built from ebay parts and a 3d printed frame with a can. All of those combined meant that it did not cycle properly after the initial shot)

> what's special about 3d printers?

They are typically stocked with material and ready to deploy at a moment's notice. When the time comes that you need a weapon, casually walking into Home Depot won't be an option.

Most of the '3d printed' guns out there in the 2a community, and all the ones that actually work, require some kind of metal barrel, which might be a pipe, rifled or not.

What they actually hate is people who buy bags of glock parts from ebay (contains everything but the frame) and then print the frame. The frame being the handle part, everything below the slide but none of the internals. That's the legal 'gun' when it comes to most glocks and clones. The new ruger rmx, a newer glock clone, is different, the firing group (trigger and all the associated bits there) is the serialized part. The frame is, of course, very easy to print.

All the regulations around firearms are super fucking stupid, the way they classify different parts and try and make them illegal. Like.. in a lot of states if you have a rifle (ar or otherwise), you are not allowed to have a vertical foregrip for stabalization. However if your foregrip is like 5 degrees off pure vertical... legal.

This 3d printer 'ban' is unenforcable, it's a fucking tool, you can build anything with tools. Sure it's easier and takes less skill to download a glock 19 frame model off the internet and hit print, but there is, apparently, a lot of work that goes into making the gun work with that frame well enough for the gun to actually cycle.

If you're a California constituent and inclined to take action you can find your California Assemblymember and Senator here ( https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/ ) to voice opposition to California bill A.B. 2047 "Firearms: 3-dimensional printing blocking technology."

Alternatively, you could leave California and avoid a whole host of bad policy and legislation. Not that advocating is bad but of the two options one is guaranteed to be successful while the other is unlikely to help.

Your 3D printed gun still needs that metal pipe. A 3D printed gun is just a frame for those metal parts.

Home depot can do better than a pipe:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ramset-MasterShot-0-22-Caliber-P...

Although people point out the occam's razor or whatever, i dont think this is true. As it happens with "protect children", "protect people" is the next blabbering speech to trick people accepting lobbied practices. Someone needs to track who is financing this stuff and I think it will make it much clearer. PS: I wouldnt be surprised if it was disney or something

I mean, the entanglement between technology and politics is difficult to unsee, once one sees it. And the analogy between solar power and grid power, maps cleanly onto 3d printing and manufacturing (trad-printing?). Politics is _most frequently_ about money and the economic surplus, and only rarely about justice or ideology. The funny thing is, that the adjective that is most frequently use to describe markets is "efficient". Yet, whenever technologies that threaten to erode someone's business model appear, the market starts abusing the political infrastructure to introduce inefficiencies and frictions into the adoption of the technologies.

Even though lobbying is not _technically_ illegal, we should probably learn to treat companies that engage in it (to the detriment of society) as if it were. Avoid their products if you can, and get your friend-group to do it as well. Build off-ramps. Maintain and share lists of executives who work at these companies (to put pressure on their reputations -- after all, what is wealth worth, if ordinary people refuse to take your money, or to give you any of their attention?). The market's distinctive feature is that it makes things fungible: currency, goods, and even people. Eliminate or reduce fungibility, and you get a very different kind of dynamic, one that has the potential to reverse the trend of rising inequality (and rent-seeking behavior, and unfair one-sided arrangements, etc) over night.

In fact, the strategy of any company is to find a way to make an entire class of companies/merchants (not competitors) fungible, while making themselves non-fungible. Most moats are built out of the pieces or remnants of someone else's moat.

Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too hung over to tell.

https://matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/winner-art...

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

I believe such forces are the indirect result of the structure of society and economy.

If legal arms dealers want the state to step in because of some decentralizing technology, then for the government it would be yet another cost center to combat this phenomenon. So lobbyists need to come up with a kind of reward, and design more "palatable" proposals, so that income can be derived by somehow initiating government control into the whole decentralized technology instead of just the illegitimately decentralized subsection...

but punishing "the rest" for actions of a few would mean financing it with taxes, instead of scapegoating the legitimate majority of 3D printer users.

Using this logic, we never address any problem until we address all problems.

Do we never patch one security hole until we patch all security holes?

(I'm not defending this particular legislation, just saying that this isn't the way to defeat it)

Watching what bills show up in my state's legislature, several of them are addressing "Hollywood plots" rather than real-world issues.

For example, one legislator always sponsors a bill (which goes nowhere every year) to outlaw chemtrails. This year's version[0] includes the plot from the SF novel Termination Shock[1]. The word "artillery" was not in any previous session's version, nor was sulfur.

Links:

0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb60.html

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)#

Some expert can make a gun from the hardware store alone, but evidently people find 3D printing way more practical.

First, I agree with you, though I don't call it "bad legislation", I call it lobbyism. But there is one tiny nitpick to disagree with, aside from another user pointing out that there are even simpler ways for obtaining firearms.

> If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm

While I totally agree with you that this is all about lies, there is still one difference in that most regular firearms are metal-based. With 3D printing one could print plastic or similar materials.

Again, I am not saying this is a reason to explain this lobbyism here, but we also need to be objective when debunking the lies of the other side. For instance, one difference is metal detection (naturally plastic-based weapons would also tend to break more easily, so this whole legislation is a total lie to begin with anyway; California is currently broken. I am surprised about that, usually you'd think other US states are more broken, but California is now in the top 3 lobbyist-controlled states - and from there the disease spreads slowly).

> The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts.

"state-certified algorithm" has a really nice tyrannic ring to it. I am sure once this has passed the rich people can finally sleep at night knowing they are safe from roving gangs of armed Mangiones.

A 3D printer, at least of the Prusa variety, is really just a bunch of stepper motors and a dumb motor driver executing a series of effectively "rotate by X steps" commands, which is what the gcode file is. It doesn't know what it's printing. It doesn't even know that it's a printer.

If they wanted a gate on designs it would have to happen in slicing software, not the actual printer.

Indeed. I grew up in a a machine shop than ran both manual and CNC machines and spent my summers in front of mills and lathes running jobs. I now do industrial automation and machine repair. With that being said, yeah, no way will this work. Ever.

And software? My Bridgeport and Logan were built before computers were available to the home consumer. Good luck stopping someone like me.

Yup. Wait till our genius lawmakers figure that out! Then we'll have all software that can be used to do that job require registration and inspection to certify that it "won't print gun parts." Or maybe "all software" for good measure, in case any sneaky so-and-sos try to make an IRC client with a secret "slicing easter-egg." Better yet, all software of any kind has to be sold through an App Store so we can have Google, Microsoft and Apple gatekeep. That'll work. Gun problem solved.

They'll still need some DRM in the printer so it will only accept signed gcode that came from the the slicer.

Otherwise it's pretty trivial for someone to just bypass the slicer and hand write the gcode.

Unable to find the article quickly, but, I read a compelling perspective recently: DoD vendors seeking to restrict use of 3d printed replacement parts that they would normally supply. There was some speculative tie-in with the recent wave of consumer level regulation.

Meanwhile, the US Army has delegated authority to 3d-print replacement parts to commanders in the field:

https://breakingdefense.com/2025/09/army-allowing-commanders...

“We’re basically saying, ‘Hey colonel, hey general, you have to make the decision. If a door handle is broken on an ISV, you need to get it into the field. If you think that replacement door handle is sufficient, send it out.’

“A lot of howitzers are down right now for very simple pieces that we could 3D print and have known how to 3D print, and actually have the design files to 3D print, but we haven’t done it,” Driscoll said. “So we, the Army, have kicked off a very aggressive approach to that.”

If you put the DRM in the printer I can hard wire the stepper motors to some H-bridges and an Arduino and run the unsigned gcode.

I have no intention to print weapons, but just saying that this law does nothing.

Straight out of 1984.

"Error, you cannot print toiletpart.stl because there is no open permit for the the address at which this printer is registered, contact a licensed plumber during normal business hours"

Don't laugh, this sort of regulatory capture type crap is exactly where it'll trickle down to if they get what they want for guns.

Also: "I see you are trying to print a hollow cylinder. Sorry, you can't print gun barrels"

Also: "The Letter_C.stl can't be printed because it is an 88% percent match for a gun trigger"

I remember the hysterical "ban algorithms" type legislation that kept showing up in states for a while.

But like all humans we're often ok as long as it is "our guy" or "our algorithm".

To be fair that's more or less how we prevent printers from printing counterfeit money.

Lets imagine a similar situation but instead of with an additive manufacturing process they try to regulate a subtractive manufacturing process: a traditional CNC machine. There is no way to prevent the CNC system from machining gun parts as along as the machining is done in discrete steps with the same work piece. The software can't know what sitting on the CNC table.

In additive manufacturing it is more difficult but not impossible to print a bunch of pieces that look nothing like a gun part but and in the end be assembled into a gun.

In both the above cases there would need to be sophisticated surveillance software to even come close to detecting "gun-ness."

While I don't have a horse in the gun control race, I do have one in the open-source, running a local OS, running what software I want, and controlling what that software does races.

Some of these bills are written in such a way that they would apply to CNC manufacturing, such that they could even make building your own machine from scratch illegal. They are terribly oppressive and short-sighted.

> oppressive and short-sighted.

Which usually means "we're willing to ignore short term damage to get long term results for our political patrons."

“Short-sighted” implies that those in favour of this would see it as a bad thing, when in fact, that’s likely the real objective. This is just another shot in the war on ownership.

Well I'd imagine these same people decry the loss of manufacturing in the US. But these types of bills would add undue burden to small businesses as the future of fabrication is CNC based.

WA state's legislation includes subtractive methods, CA's omits it so that they don't have to deal with the wrath of Haas.

Omitting subtractive methods makes it rather toothless, since there have been places you can go to push a button to start a mill making you a receiver (which is the part that is considered "the gun" to address ship-of-theseus questions aboug guns), then you can add the other parts yourself.

I believe these events/places where folks were pressing a button to go from billet to receiver were shut down by BATFE some years ago (see ATF Ruling 2015-1 - https://www.atf.gov/media/19161/download)

> An FFL or unlicensed machine shop may also desire to make available its machinery (e.g., a computer numeric control or "CNC" machine), tools, or equipment to individuals who bring in raw materials, blanks, unfinished frames or receivers and/or other firearm parts for the purpose of creating operable firearms. Under the instruction or supervision of the FFL or unlicensed machine shop, the customers would initiate and/or manipulate the machinery, tools, or equipment to complete the frame or receiver, or entire weapon. The FFL or unlicensed machine shop would typically charge a fee for such activity, or receive some other form of compensation or benefit. This activity may occur either at a fixed premises, such as a machine shop, or a temporary location, such as a gun show or event.

> A business (including an association or society) may not avoid the manufacturing license, marking, and recordkeeping requirements under the GCA simply by allowing individuals to initiate or manipulate a CNC machine, or to use machinery, tools, or equipment under its dominion or control to perform manufacturing processes on blanks, unfinished frames or receivers, or incomplete weapons. In these cases, the business controls access to, and use of, its machinery, tools, and equipment. Following manufacture, the business "distributes" a firearm when it returns or otherwise disposes a finished frame or receiver, or complete weapon to its customer. Such individuals or entities are, therefore, "engaged in the business" of manufacturing firearms even though unlicensed individuals may have assisted them in the manufacturing process.

Thanks for the correction. I haven't really been following this stuff closely.

The 3d printer gun legislation has been rearing its head in a bunch of states this year, and generally with very similar patterns. I suspect some of the pro-gun-control groups have been pushing it to lawmakers given most legislation is basically copy-pastes from lobbying groups at both the state and federal level. Colorado, Washington, New York, and now California have all floated legislation attempting to make device-level restrictions around the issue. I only followed Washington's in depth, and they ended up removing all the requirements on manufactures, but did criminalize possession of files which I suspect won't hold up to a first amendment challenge.

I really think all of this is the result of Mangione. Regulating 3D printers has been talked about for years with no action. Then a year after the CEO of a large well known company is killed with a 3D printed gun the states are suddenly pushing highly invasive 3D printing laws. It's no coincidence NY was the first to push for such a law, the state where said CEO was killed.

No, this is Everytown USA model legislation. They wrote it, and are lobbying for it.

https://everytownsupportfund.org/press/new-everytown-report-...

Yes, third paragraph: "The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson ..." who was killed by Mangione with a 3D printed gun. Did you forget who the killer was?

This is not the result of Mangione, Mangione is just their excuse for the push.

I think there is a misunderstanding as you are stating the same point I am making. Either way, no point in further arguing this. There wasn't enough fear before the Thompson killing. If a ghost gun killed some plebeian nobody, meh. But a business magnate? Horrible! We need to do something! NOW! The wealthy have immense power and this is that power being projected in form of fear of the armed common man.

CEO's are scared, and not just the ones in health insurance. Look at what recently happened to Sam Altman where someone hurled a molotov cocktail at his home. After the Thompson killing I was in a meeting with a CEO who's net worth is in the upper 9 digits who was himself concerned for his safety (not in health insurance). He mentioned talking to a security firm and spoke of others in his circle who are also concerned and increasing security as well. They are scared. They are taking action.

>who was killed by Mangione

Isn't there presumption of innocence in the USA?

You’d think they’d regulate guns instead.

Guns are nationally regulated and further regulated by every state pushing this drivel.

I’m sorry, is it your opinion that guns aren’t currently regulated?

Not enough judging by the number of people killed with guns in the US.

Not what the parent comment said

LM has a whole series of videos that touches on this (as well as some related topics): https://www.youtube.com/@LoyalMoses/videos

Louis Rossman also touched on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-9ISzMhBM

I've seen more by others but can't recall them all. Without going too far down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, the momentum for this seems to be coming from a variety of sources:

    * New York being New York and trying to make thinking about guns a thought crime
    * There's European company (forget the name) that makes specialized software that can do this.  They're lobbying so they can inject themselves for some tasty rent seeking.
    * A variety of companies that see right-to-repair (and thus home 3D printers, CNC-milling, etc.) a threat to their bottom lines.
    * General ignorance by our law makers

Edit: And I personally think instead of doing stupid bullshit like this, we should be giving EVERY kid who wants one a free 3D Printer so they can learn to tinker, be creative, and build things. That's how we create that spark that leads to the next generation of makers. Without that our country will continue to be the country that can no longer build things.

Literally giving children the means of production is way out of line. To the corporate owned gulag with you! /s

> we should be giving EVERY kid who wants one a free 3D Printer so they can learn to tinker, be creative, and build things

Totally agree. Ironically, I think it'd do a lot more to reduce gun violence than any of these laws given the primary factors in gun violence are 1) being poor and not having good options out of poverty and 2) being a man between the ages of like 15-25

I'm just young enough that I had a high school teacher who was able to get some level of support from the district to run an elective engineering course and had a few of the very early consumer-grade printers that were terrible compared to a modern printer. I was already down the programming rabbit hole at that point, but it was absolutely foundational in me realizing that "you can build things" didn't only apply to the digital. I really wish we'd have similar in just about every school. So many of my peers think that the ability to fabricate basic things and work on anything physical is substantially harder than it actually is (to the level of thinking they'd need similar effort it took them to learn to code to learn to work on their car), and so never do it.

If you can reason about a C compiler, you can definitely learn to do a brake job on a car or 3d print a basic coupler for a home project.

>I suspect some of the pro-gun-control groups have been pushing it to lawmakers given most legislation is basically copy-pastes from lobbying groups at both the state and federal level.

You would be correct.

https://xcancel.com/2Aupdates/status/2036437116456940001#m

As an unabashed American, guns are amazing and an insanely important part of our national culture. Any attempt to diminish this is an attack on the culture of America. We are a nation of dangerous freedoms and matching individual responsibility. In order to maintain a functional country without ruining what makes America special, we need to simply actually enforce laws and I'll take apart in making our national culture one to be proud of again.

I have been watching footage from the Apollo programs recently, and while the types of people who made that possible are very much still around, we need to encourage that sort of thinking once again. Dangerous freedoms, radical Liberty, complete responsibility.

Put down the Kool-aid.

I wouldn't be proud of having so many guns and the highest rate of gun deaths by far in the developed world (except maybe countries currently at war).

"Guns are amazing"? Really? Nevermind, I know someone just like you. He refuses to fly on an airplane because he can't bring his precious guns with him on the plane. So he's really never been anywhere outside of the midwest. He has no idea how other countries are. And I've never felt safer than when I lived in Europe for several months, away from all the gun maniacs.

The combination of rampant mental illness and entitled assholes and guns in America is a toxic combination. School shootings and mass shootings are things that happen all too frequently in the US, and not too much anywhere else.

But I suppose you'll handwave away all of it, and everything, so you can continue to cherish your "Amazing guns" without ever considering that maybe even more guns is not better for us as a country.

That said, I do NOT endorse this ridiculous 3D printer bill that California is trying to pass. And not because it's about guns, but because it isn't necessary.

You may be surprised, but there are countries in Europe where gun ownership is relatively wide spread and it just works. Czech Republic for example has it access to guns guaranteed in Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms[1].

One of the reasons why it works, is that there are reasonable conditions. For example, regular health checks, strict registration, passing gun safety examination and, last but not least, not being a criminal. And it works. Despite steadily rising number of guns among people, it is one of most safe countries in the world.

Canada, Finland, Austria and many other countries, prove, that you don't have to impose blanket bans to have a safe country. You just need sensible laws.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic

I wouldn’t call a ban on assault weapons reasonable when you can get the same “scary black rifle” in different trim and they have no issue with it.

Yawn. We're a remarkably peaceful country. We should kill more of our criminals, though.

>We are a nation of dangerous freedoms

Sell some AI chips to a chinese company lmao. America wasn't even this back when everyone says America was this.

America is a bunch of slave and non slave states in a big trench coat, sharing the costs of bullying the rest of first the continent and then the rest of the planet.

Yeah some of you have guns big whoop.

Big "those grapes are probably sour anyway" vibes.

"Sure you have grapes but you have nothing else"

From the limited amount of business I have done in both countries, in terms of overall freedom I absolutely stan Canada. The difference is they dont advertise it.

This is the organization behind this...

https://everytownresearch.org/report/printing-violence-urgen...

>Lawmakers can take aggressive action to spur change in this area and help prevent the printing of 3DPFs. The most comprehensive solutions would apply nationwide, and Congress should work immediately to pass the innovative laws described here. But even without federal action, state policymakers can take meaningful action to curtail 3DPFs.

One of Michael Bloomberg’s groups. He has four groups or so and is the single biggest funder of anti-gun propaganda, policy, and advocacy in the world.

He does not give 1/2 a shit about the issues that would effect 3D printing industry. I love it because he was trying this before 3D printing and the genie is just so far out of the bottle that it must infuriate him that he didn’t see it earlierZ

I used to do cosplay. Many costumes from movies, TV-series and anime are of characters that wield guns, often unique or at least quite distinctive guns. Carrying the correct gun is sometimes a thing that identifies the character, and therefore is an integral part of the cosplay.

For example, I used to cosplay for charity in the Star Wars costuming club 501'st Legion [0], where for most costumes a blaster gun of high likeness to the original is required. It has hundreds of members in California.

These days, it is very common to make cosplay accessories through 3D-printing. A ban on replica guns parts would hit the hobby hard.

[0]: https://501st.com/

So that law would also diminish the glorification of weapons in pop culture then. I guess that would be seen as positive side effect for the people supporting this ban.

I really want to highlight this comment to everyone who's on the fence on gun rights or still believes that compromise is possible. This is the position of hardline anti-gun people, their billionaire funded NGOs, and the politicians they finance.

It's not about reducing excess death, it's not about gun violence, it's about abolishing all civilian firearms ownership and removing any positive association of firearms or self defense from the culture. There is no compromise possible because they will never be happy with anything less.

Thanks for this comment-- I had a similar thought and couldn't have expressed it as elegantly.

I firmly believe it’s a disinformation campaign run by Russia to make a potential invasion easier, and anybody peddling “gun control” is really just a useful idiot.

Sorry if it is a dumb question, but why in USA people try to regulate 3D printing instead of banning sale of bullets without a firearm owner license? What stops people from buying Chinese printers or components on AliExpress? Or using an open source printer? At the same time, if you cannot buy bullets, your plastic gun is worthless.

> but why in USA people try to regulate 3D printing instead of banning sale of bullets without a firearm owner license

I mean we're talking about CA, so they kinda already tried to do that

https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/ammunition-regulat...

But, it may not be constitutional:

https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/07/gun-law-ammunition-ba...

So the real reason is that the ultimate law on the books on gun regulation was written by a band of, you know, armed revolutionaries, who were pretty big fans of the whole armed revolution-ing thing. And it still hasn't been amended.

I bet if you went with a simple majority vote today, you wouldn't get the 2nd amendment. But amendments are pretty difficult to pass, much higher requirements than a simple majority.

US basically has a firearms license but by exclusion. Anyone with felonies or DV violations can't have guns, neither can illegal immigrants, neither can drug users . There are probably fewer Americans that can legally buy ammo and guns than Canadians by %.

If you use the ATFs guidelines on what is considered a prohibited person, it likely applies to about half of all US adults that are prohibited from buying ammunition. This when you consider ~30+% of US has used cannabis/fentanyl/etc or misused a prescription drug in the past year, the insane number of people we've made felons, the fact that restraining orders are now practically part and parcel of divorce negotiations as leverage (permanent restraining order bars you from owning guns), and then the fact that DV convictions are incredibly common in USA (police automatically arrest someone if they show up on a domestic complaint), then add the illegal immigrant population on top of that.

> US basically has a firearms license but by exclusion.

The essential quality of a license is that you have to affirmatively apply for it, so it operates by inclusion, not exclusion. You're like saying "We basically have an opt-in system, but it operates by opting out." I get your point that it has a similar effect, but words have meaning.

Yes of course. My point is we've gotten around the contentious aspects of calling it a 'license' by basically doing a similar thing but evading challenge by disqualifying anyone that wouldn't qualify for the 'license.' If you exclude everyone that wouldn't qualify for the 'inclusion' you can emulate a license with pretty good approximation.

You can make bullets yourself just like you can make the gun. You may remember the assassination of Shinzo Abe.

In the US low powerd black powder is super easy to get you don't even have to take fireworks apart or do home lab chemicals stuff.

But you need something better than a 3D printer for bullets. So if bullet sales are regulated, there is no need to regulate 3D printing.

Making bullets is trivial. It's black powder, a case of metal (brass, aluminum, etc), and some molten lead.

This doesn't even address the constitutional right. You can't ban the printing press and claim it doesn't affect the freedom of speech.

How about blasting caps? Those are integrated into modern brass cartridges, and I think making them that way would require more precision than you'd be able to achieve with simple hand tools and an anvil.

19th century revolvers tended to require separate blasting caps, but you still had to buy them even if you could make the bullets.

Electronic firing is an option. It’s well proven on aircraft autocannons.

Tiny objects are harder to regulate. Many drugs are illegal but are still easily accessible due to their small size and transportability.

The correct action at this point in a society that wanted to keep guns legal but better regulated would be regulation of barrels. They are the only item left that are truly difficult to make in quantity and hide easily.

Shotguns don't need rifling.

Aside form high powered stuff you can get away with pure lead bullet.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771707 for the rest.

They do that too, but they still let people buy motor vehicles, with which they can drive to Nevada or Arizona to purchase ammunition.

You can re-use the shells, so all you need to do is cast the bullet, which is really easy, then load the gunpowder into the shells and use a simple machine to crimp the bullet on, and you're done. There's lots of off-the-shelf hardware to do it that is pretty common throughout the US.

Many people already load and reload their own bullets in the US because it is significantly cheaper. Good brass can be used many times over and loading equipment consists of an arbor press and some dies. Regulation would make getting it harder and more expensive, but all you would be doing is creating an ammunition black market that funds criminal enterprise with a supply still too large to do much in hampering gun crime.

Responsible gun owners and hunter who practice regularly would be harmed the most because they use tons of ammo. Criminals won't because they might only shoot a few bullets in their life and usually from close range.

California already has background checks for bullets, you typically can't buy ammo if you haven't bought a gun at your current address.

Thankfully that was recently overturned.

Some states do already and it's not enough, you can manufacture cartridges as well it's just annoying.

> What stops people from buying Chinese printers

Exactly the same thing that stops you from buying a generic inkjet printers.

Go check Amazon. There are none.

Some say the inkjet printer head is the secret sauce, but then yousearch for generic laser printers and there are none either.

Is every printer technology an uncrackable tech that has resisted decades of reverse engineering?

To any legislators watching, if you successfully pass this I am going to give public workshops teaching people how to make 3D printers from parts found at Home Depot out of pure spite, and separately, how to make a 12 gauge shotgun with almost 0 effort from basic parts also found at Home Depot without even using the 3D printer.

Put DRM on plumbing pipes, I dare you.

>Put DRM on plumbing pipes

While I generally agree, we've already reached a point where an ID is required to purchase pseudoephidine and/or facemasks.

And all the copper is already locked up, requiring an associate to help you while you loiter minutes lazenly under dozens of facial-recognition cameræ.

We live in worlds of parallel constructions.

I'm so glad I left California 6 years ago. They are going to regulate and tax their startups and innovators away to other states. This is supremely stupid.

This is the inevitable result of having a single-party government which is no longer accountable to regular citizens.

No it’s not. Xi has power as absolute as Newsom and manages just fine. When your country has large, but solvable problems, absolute power works great for quelling unrest by fixing problems quickly and efficiently. Newsom is just generationally incompetent.

With all do respect, I do not want to live in anything remotely close to the Chinese CCP. (laughs in Free Floridian)

The issue is that you don't know what free actually means. You rely on a lot of government support for your perceived notion of freedom, its just invisible to you because its never been taken away. And if you ever get to experience a life where its been taken away, you sure as shit will be in favor of more authoritarian government.

The argument isn't that authoritarians can't solve problems.. It more about how they do it.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/08/china-still-n...

Unfortunately, America is just as bad, without the benefit of solving problems.

https://truthout.org/articles/ice-agents-are-using-family-se...

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/01/1166816

> America is just as bad

The Human Rights Index for the United States dropped from 0.93 to 0.83 in 2025, which is concerning. Meanwhile, China scores 0.18, which is significantly worse. For comparison, countries that score higher than China include Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.

Globally, China is 6th percentile on the Human Rights Index. The United States is 65th percentile. That puts the U.S. well below most developed countries, but it's nowhere close to "just as bad."

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem?t...

So this index is just a joke, how Iran, Russia, and Venezuela higher than China?

I would expect China limiting the movement of their rural populations from moving into cities might be a big factor.

Also it seems to end in 2025 before Iran started killing protesters in mass. Glancing around the index in question is very focused on civil liberties vs financial and life attainment in others.

Iran was not a haven of freedom before 2025. Women could get stoned for not wearing a burqa or attending men’s volleyball matches. Scoring Iran higher than China at any point in the past couple decades is ridiculous.

- The detention of 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, forced labor, and mass surveillance in Xinjiang. The destruction of Tibetan society and culture. The only comparable violation of human rights on this scale in the other countries is potentially Russia's war in Ukraine.

- China does not have competitive elections or an independent judiciary. The other countries do have these institutions to some extent, though deeply flawed and authoritarian.

- There is no freedom of religion in China or Iran. Russia persecutes some religious minorities, but tolerates different religions. Venezuela has constitutional protections for freedom of religion.

- There is no freedom of association in China. Independent trade unions, NGOs, and professional organizations are heavily suppressed and censored. These exist to a greater extent in the other countries.

- There is no freedom of speech in China. Political dissent is forbidden. All major media outlets are state-owned. Large parts of the internet are censored. Private conversations are monitored proactively. The other countries persecute speech, but in a less comprehensive, more retroactive way.

Yes but Newsom isn’t even solving problems. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Every argument against California can be easily disproven by the fact that people aren't moving out in droves like everyone says, and house prices are still very high because people want to live there.

Covid should have dropper the house prices drastically in Cali since people had the option to do remote work in a cheaper cost of living state, but all it did was just move the rate negative for like one year - everyone who couldn't afford it was able to get out, only to be replaced by people who can afford to live there.

What you describe as "single-party government" is in fact a democracy where one party is more popular than the others. Or are you trying to imply that California's elections are not free and fair? If voters want to hold politicians accountable, they can vote out the incumbent.

I see it as a problem primarily with education and public opinion. Regular citizens routinely support bad policies across the ideological spectrum. Often we have to live with the fact that bad policies are popular; that's democracy in action.

It's also a problem of having no good alternatives. There are historical reasons, going back to the 1960s, why the Democratic party is perceived as the lesser of two evils when it comes to civil liberties.

I never claimed that the elections were fraudulent.

You don't follow politics in CA very closely if you think that. The way it works in CA is that the party makes sure that only 1 candidate runs in the Dem primary. Then they gerrymander the districts to make sure that they know which party will win in which district. The result of this is that the party insiders choose the politicians, not the voters.

PS Nobody in their right mind thinks the Dems support civil liberties. You just wish that was true and/or live in a bubble.

According to the Princeton Gerrymandering project, California's districts are better than average, with some bias. You can see a map of the entire U.S. on their front page.

https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/

Before the recent wave of gerrymandering started by Texas, California had an independent, non-partisan redistricting committee.

Could you provide a source for the claim that before 2025, there was significant gerrymandering in California?

As I said about civil liberties, there is a perception that Democrats are the lesser of two evils, given the realignment of the parties around segregation and civil rights in the 1960s. The Dixiecrats who were in favor of segregation left the Democratic party, while Republicans who favored racial integration joined the Democratic party. Then the Republican presidential campaigns of Goldwater, Nixon, and Regan shifted the party line to appeal more to the former Dixiecrats in the South. I'm agnostic about which party is better on civil liberties in 2025; I'd be interested in any research on the topic.

When you hit China, stop digging...you clearly have never lived in CA and know nothing of its politics.

I don't know how this value is calculated but a glance at the districts immediately tells me that it's full of shit.

https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/...

It doesn't matter how a single party came to run the government, but being the case that it is, there's few checks and balances on the party, so it makes bad decisions it wouldn't have made if it had competition.

Chances are it will eventually be run so poorly that it is no longer unopposed, but the system doesn't guarantee that it is quick.

> Or are you trying to imply that California's elections are not free and fair

Among other issues California is extensively gerrymandered, and recently voted to temporary disable the anti-gerrymandering constutional provisions to allow it to make changes that would have been unlawful under the state constitution and become one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation for congressional districts (in terms of ratio of party seats vs party registrations).

While departing from California deregistering from both health insurance and my drivers licensed triggered voter registration even though I'd specifically indicated that I was no longer a California resident. Vote by mail makes it easy for someone to drive a neighborhood and steal ballots, makes it trivial family members to coerce votes out of each other or simply take their family members votes.

The freeness and fairness of California elections are not difficult to take issue with.

> There are historical reasons, going back to the 1960s, why the Democratic party is perceived as the lesser of two evils when it comes to civil liberties

The democratic party of today is a very different one that the party of the 1960s or even 1990s and is much less well aligned with civil liberties than it used to be, lesser or not depends on what aspects you prioritize but whichever way you slice it today it's a party which is generally opposed to civil liberties including the most critical of them: freedom of expression.

> Often we have to live with the fact that bad policies are popular; that's democracy in action.

The US was constructed as a democratic republic specifically to avoid the tyrany of majority rule.

> If voters want to hold politicians accountable, they can vote out the incumbent.

Or-- more effectively-- move to a state with more competent policies.

Oh, you don't miss paying $800/year for the privilege of having an LLC that does literally nothing?

Guns are legal, in fact building your own gun, may be the most legal thing in the history of the 2A - there's an enormous amount of "historical" context to back this

It's such a waste of time and resources - you wanna handle gun violence? handle normal violence with proven mechanisms (education, social welfare, etc...)

Everytown doesn't actually care about gun violence, they want to end civilian firearms ownership entirely.

> California's proposed legislation to put the burden of blocking 3D-printed firearms onto printer manufacturers

I can only assume California has solved all its major problems if policing 3D printers is at the top of the agenda. It's like when someone complains their neighbor can afford two yachts and they can only afford one, you know they are doing pretty well if that's their major concern.

So, I cannot 3d print a squirt gun or a nerf style gun either? This print looks "scary" you cannot print it.

I don't think anyone really knows. Might be something like the slicer is checking the file hash against a (online) list, slices it, signs it and the printer checks the .gcode file if it's signed by a known slicer. A blacklist of very specific models. Make a small change and it will not be detected any more.

Maybe the slicer is also required to upload the 3d file and some kind of "looks similar" algorithm will block your nerf gun from being sliced.

The irony, is almost anyone with a machine shop can probably fabricate a more effective weapon than a 3D printer, where you might as a gun get one or two less than accurate shots in.

Why don't these bills go after ammo or gunpowder access? Seems as long as you have access to a cylinder, and ammunition, you can make a gun.

I don't know the situation with the actual charge, but if you can make a gun, you can certainly make ammunition.

I guess you are right, both are pretty easy to make.

> if you can make a gun, you can certainly make ammunition

theoretically true but having re-sleeved ammunition, the chances of injury is tremendously different. That said, a lot of people in California are having to resort to re-sleeving ammunition, not out of choice but because for all practical purposes, California has made buying ammunition impossible.

While you can crawl and bite your way through getting a horribly castrated gun in California, the real struggle begins buying affordable ammunition.

For regular people to own a gun that you can actually use in California, (not LEOs or certain other people), you either needed to have inherited them or bought them from the cartels. Otherwise you own something of limited use that insanely expensive to operate.

> For regular people to own a gun that you can actually use in California, (not LEOs or certain other people), you either needed to have inherited them or bought them from the cartels.

or, you can just break these stupid, unenforceable laws and buy out of state or just "uncastrate" it yourself.

no idea why so many people get their panties in a twist everytime California passes an unenforceable law. they're unenforceable.

They’ll be selectively enforced

Can't you make a blunderbuss pretty easily with some rocks and scrap? I wonder how straight shooting a musket you could make? Probably pretty straight if you happened on something manufactured that already happens to fit pretty precise into your cylinder I'm guessing. You could probably get pretty far with airguns too. I mean a pellet gun is already enough to kill a bird or squirrel outright and pretty damn accurate. I probably wouldn't want to take one of those to the neck or soft part of the head.

pellet guns use the "diablo" profile to the pellets.

pellet guns have low spin per inch, and use drag to add extra stability. and keep velocity below that trans-sonic shock range.

if you went to a reloading shop, and purchased some .177, or .22 projectiles, trimmed them down, or core them to about half wieght, and it will perform like a small rifle.

>pellet guns have low spin per inch, and use drag to add extra stability. and keep velocity below that trans-sonic shock range.

They are strong enough to embed the pellets into wooden fence boards already though. I think that is plenty enough velocity to blow out your trachea, enter your brain through your eye socket, and probably also penetrate the soft part of the skull.

definately not a kids toy.

i have couple of pellet rifles that will penetrate [2] gallon milk jugs full of water at 50 yards and leave pellets on the bottom of the third, 6" grouping with quick reload shooting.

dont get me started on souping up the piston, ive already talked about alternative projectiles, but yes it can be made even more powerfull so it will yeet signifigant grain wt.

you need tight tolerances for modern ammo, a shotgun, or muzzle loader is more forgiveing. reloading materials are not federally regulated as firearms, you just dont want to have more than 2lbs at a time, or that could bring trouble.

you want to be able to KNOW and SEE the difference between a blackpowder, and a smokeless powder, and what not to put it in.

one thing that would add a lot of friction is if the primers are regulated.

thats the funny thing, felons cant possess firearms or ammo, however you can possess reloading materials, and be fine there until you start actually reloading, then you are in possession of ammo.

For maximally effective commercial ammo, yes. If your goal is just to propel a projectile it's super easy.

People would probably use smuggled primers if arms were outlawed. The rest of the chemistry is easy enough to work with and the primers are small enough they'd likely flow along with fentanyl with the cartels anyway.

That was tried in Lexington and Concord circa 1775, it didn't end well for the guys trying to seize the powder.

Happy Patriot's Day this weekend (April 19th)!

The guns needed for the U.S. revolution came from the French. Most U.S. farmer guns were shit for actual warfare.

That's true, but the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy (And by extension, arguably the entire Revolution) were literally started by the Brits trying to confiscate their materiel. This was long before the French became involved.

because gun control isn't about guns, it's about control

blackpowder is just barely chemistry, more like engineering.

carbon, sulphur, and potassium nitrate, in a particular ratio.

potassium nitrate is watched, and reported in large quantities, or particular form, but can be manufactured by most people that can follow a recipe.

regulating the propellant cant stop it from being made.

also someone really didnt think it through by regulating "receivers"

they regulated what is most often the easiest part to manufacture. the core parts [barrel, bolt, chamber] are difficult to build, require tech to build from stock, and are sold off the shelf, while receiver needs 4473 as if it was a fully functional firearm, and that is the part that can be built, from a 2x4 or a billet of material, depending how long you want it to last.

Black powder guns, at least ones of antique design (but modern production), are federally ~unregulated already anyways. A 6 year old in North Dakota could order one mailed right now to his house, no background checks, right off the internet -- legally.

There is also the "felon carry" as its called late 19th century black powder percussion pistols, you can also order off the internet, regardless of criminal history and with no scrutiny of the chain of custody.

Making a bullet is definitely more difficult than printing a plastic gun handle (you need the bullet itself, and the cartridge fit it perfectly), and you have a non-zero chance to lose some parts of the body if you make a mistake.

Lead melting is not difficult. The brass case you can just collect used ones. The primer would be harder to make (you can buy them online ofc) but with access to fireworks it is possible with no knowledge of chemistry and no realistic risk of losing body parts.

The guy who killed Shinzo Abe didn't need any of these things and still shot him.

I invite you to examine the construction of a shotgun shell.

Good luck banning that in any meaningful form.

Sigh. None of the ammunition used in modern (i.e. made in the past 125 years) uses black powder propellant.

black powder is cheap and easy to make, its also dirty, slow expanding, very smokey. but when there is no powder available, blackpowder is the most expedient thing.

its also low gas pressure so if you are manufacturing from tentative material, you really should load with black powder, and use enough that it wont squib.

there are a few videos still around, where people load with smokeless powder in a musket, or muzzle loader, instead of blackpowder.

this will blow your barrel open.

I've always felt that it you want to really impact gun violence, tax the hell out of ammo and gunpowder. Like $20/bullet. For those who believe in self-defense, a handful of bullets is all you need your entire life, and ideally they'll go unused.

Could probably create exceptions for bullets used at the gun range, so you can become proficient and safe.

Tricky part would be hunting, but restricting such a tax to ammo used for handguns is probably an 80% solution.

I've always felt if you really want to impact election fraud, tax the hell out of votes. Like $1,000/vote. For those who believe in democracy, a handful of votes over a lifetime is all you need, and ideally the right candidate wins anyway.

Could probably create exceptions for local elections, so you can still participate in your community.

Tricky part would be general elections, but restricting such a tax to federal races is probably an 80% solution.

> I've always felt if you really want to impact election fraud, tax the hell out of votes. Like $1,000/vote.

You don’t even have to go that far. $10 and a trip to the DMV is apparently an insurmountable barrier.

States that already have a voter ID law haven't had any issues. The bigger objections are to those who say that the ID you can use to drive, board an airplane, buy ammo, etc, aren't good enough for voting.

The states aren't very logically consistent on ID laws. Illinois requires an FOID to bear arms but not an ID to vote. Arizona requires an ID to vote but not one to bear arms. Vermont is probably the most consistent non-ID state, not requiring an ID to vote and also not requiring an ID even to conceal carry a gun.

I can sort of buy the ID argument from places like Vermont but the arguments in many/most states are just complete bullshit where they've worked backwards to rationalize it and that's why there is no consistency for ID gating of rights within even the same state.

Difference being that if you need ammo, you're already paying for it.

> Could probably create exceptions for bullets used at the gun range, so you can become proficient and safe.

Amusing to imagine the red diesel of sport shooting - better hope the tax authority doesn't find any combustion-proof dye on the self-defense shell casings!

To be honest I was thinking more along the lines of you either store ammo at the range, with a checkin/checkout process, or you can receive a tax receipt for number of spent casings.

It's legal to go target shooting on most public lands, and on private property in rural areas (assuming you own it or have the owner's permission). People can easily burn through 1,000 rounds in a weekend in such places. Are they going to get a $20k loan and collect every casing for a refund? Of course people should pick up their brass on public lands, but if you have a private range, there's no need to keep it pristine constantly.

Also brass is often ejected forward of the firing line, meaning cease fire must be called frequently for individuals to collect their brass. And if multiple people are shooting at once, how do they determine who shot which casing? Considering the financial incentives, I could see frequent disagreements over brass ownership.

Then there's the issue of implementation. A proposed law and its implementation are often quite different. For example, California requires a background check when purchasing ammunition. Only California residents can buy ammunition in the state (which creates a problem for out-of-state hunters). This system is plagued with false positives. When I lived in California, I purchased multiple firearms but was unable to buy ammunition due to being incorrectly denied. This happens to 10-16% of legal firearm owners in the state. My assumption is that any sort of ammo tax/refund scheme would be similarly fraught with issues.

Honestly, I think such restrictions are a fool's errand. Both smokeless powder and automatic actions have existed for over a century. Given current US culture, effectively restricting such simple technology would require draconian laws & enforcement of those laws. This is actually a more difficult problem than previous failed attempts to restrict alcohol and other drugs, as the government needs a constant supply of firearms and ammunition.

If you care about self defense, you practice using a gun semi-regularly.

The trick is to just tax murder so people can't afford it anymore.

Because the 2A and related jurisprudence exists and so that will be struck down in court in about 10wk whereas a "novel" convoluted regulation like micro managing printers will take 10yr.

Gun Control legislation is plenty slow to move through courts as well. The California magazine limits passed in 1999, it is sitting at the Supreme Court, waiting now 26 years later.

The Sullivan Act was passed in 1911, and it took 111 years to overturn (Bruen). So gun control cases move slowly like everything else.

California already restricts access to ammunition. Only California residents can purchase ammunition in the state, and only after going through a background check. It is also illegal for a California resident to buy ammunition out of state and import it without a background check. It is legal for a non-resident to take ammo into the state, but they cannot transfer it to a California resident, and California residents cannot transfer ammo to them. This creates lots of issues for hunters. The laws are so byzantine that hunting organizations have guides about what is and isn't allowed.[1]

Even though I'd bought multiple firearms in California, this background check always rejected me, probably because my name doesn't fit in their databases. Somewhere between 10% and 16% of legal firearm owners in California are denied ammunition due to this faulty system.

1. https://calwaterfowl.org/navigating-californias-new-ammuniti...

A. What if some part looks like some other non-gun part? B. What if they can further break down the pieces to avoid detection?

I live here in CA. If it is something that gets attention at all, whether AI or 3d printing or anything else, politicians here feel it is their duty to regulate it. If it should be regulated like politicians spending our money or insider trading, they want nothing to do with it. Less power for us, more power and money for them.

Why isn't EFF calling out Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for pushing this across the US?

I just laugh whenever I hear “ghost gun”.

> On January 13, 2014 a certain State Senator (no reason to name names) held a press conference where he held a modern rifle in his hands and stated, “This is a ghost gun. This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”

Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense, and it was appropriately memed into oblivion.

Most anti-gun activists and legislators seem to have no more knowledge than this - which is to say, none.

> Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense

Most people in California who vote on these matters have not held a BB gun, let alone a semi automatic.

They have 0 idea that you just cannot buy actual guns from a grocery store in California anymore!

They think you can just buy a gun at Walmart like you can buy a can of Coke. I was able to pull up clips made in 2023 and 2025 that were literally claiming that. Hasn't been true since atleast 2009, likely even earlier.

A few years ago a local Walmart was clearing our their air gun and rifle selection after there had been a shooting on the east coast that was all over the news. Since ammo have become really expensive, I bought out the whole shelf of air rifles so I could continue to target practice with a focus on my breathing.

People called the cops on me. Multiple people verbally abused me as a gun nut and recorded me buying them on their phones. I had air guns - *children* *toys*. They thought it was the real deal!

The local sherrif's department received nearly a 100 calls that hour when we spoke. When I asked them why they even bothered to turn up because they know no Walmart in a 300 mile radius have ever sold a rifle in the last 20 years as was described to them over the phone, they just shrugged and said "politics".

Hence "assault weapons" which are not a particular type of gun but a list of scary characteristics associated with military weapons—bayonet lugs, folding stocks, and the like—used by legislators to FUD their way into being seen as "doing something" about guns.

In the United States we even have a word for an assault weapon on four legs—pitbulls. Most breed-specific legislation, where it exists, targets pitbulls which are not a single breed nor group of related breeds, but basically any large muscular dog with a short snout and blocky head. The American Pit Bull Terrier is one such breed but far from the only one targeted by BSL.

I think it was Toyotomi Hideyoshi who said something like, the law is not obligated to logic, but it still must be followed.

In Canada a gun might be banned as an “assault” weapon when a slightly different version of the same gun is still legal with the only difference being that one of the guns is painted black, and the other (still legal) has a wood coloured stock. One looks like a “military” gun while the other one is a “hunting” rifle when in reality they are exactly the same weapon and the only difference is cosmetic.

I am all for sensible gun regulations but that is almost never the case in practice.

I dont' see similar restrictions on Lathes. probably because lathes cost more (but not by much) and need some skill. unlike a 3d printer you can actually make a proper gun on one of those to much higher specs. The hypocracy is unsettling.

This is all at a time when the US desperately needs innovation. China basically owns us on raw manufacturing capability. 3d printers represent an excellent entry point for getting people into hobbyist manufacturing which will be where new ideas ultimately come from. This is just contributing to making is fall behind as a country.

It's ridiculous that this is even being discussed. The people proposing the bill must have zero understanding of how a 3D printer works.

It makes as much sense as requiring saw manufacturers to implement protections that restrict what can be cut out with a saw.

Or pen manufacturers being required to enforce copyright.

Any form of this bill will 100% fail to attain its stated objective, while having horrendous not-quite-unintended consequences.

And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints? That's how the industry literally began.

(Not to mention: what do they think would happen to the hundreds of millions of existing "dumb" 3D printers? They won't disappear because there's a law).

Sigh.

> what do they think would happen to the hundreds of millions of existing "dumb" 3D printers?

Hey, my printer might be going up in value.

Too bad you wouldn't be allowed to sell it without catching a misdemeanor or a $25,000 fine.

> Any form of this bill will 100% fail to attain its stated objective, while having horrendous not-quite-unintended consequences.

California gun laws in a nutshell.

California laws in a nutshell.

>And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints?

You really don't have to go that far. A very high quality control board (eg. an original Prusa) is like 90$ and cheap ones go for 25$.

You could buy the licensed printer and swap the board. Or maybe even just flash the firmware on the licensed printer

>Or maybe even just flash the firmware on the licensed printer

Yeah, that would also be a crime under this proposal.

Which is one of the big reasons it's problematic.

Its a reeling of the lawmakers against reality itself. If you read Jules Verne- you always could find and make dangerous chemicals from natural substances and thus by the power of chemistry - you where suddenly a owner of nitroglycerin and owner of a dangerous "substance".

So, the danger is in pre-emptive policing- aka capability reduction. In its extremes it results in what china does- which is producing dangerous objects on mass (every shop has a lathe that can make a gun) - while constantly looking over each other shoulders to see who might ferment revolution or amok. Same with chemistry. Same with software. The panopticon as patchwork counter measure to accumulating dangerous capabilities.

But it can not go much further. If you have a psychological normal individual that buckles under stress and hand it a photon torpedo- the spaceship goes boom. You need "unrealistic" humans, the angles of star trek to be able to handle that sort of capability. Its a whole group of problems, which started with nuclear power. Basically, the material science on humans and organizations is lousy - and the stress tests showed that we fall apart under duress.

Which is why california tries to limit it, while at the same time idealizing human nature as benevolent and at the same time driving onwards technologies, which wind up the lethal mouse-trap of capabilities with ever more potent dangers. Which as paradox as it is, is a expression of a inability to deal with reality.

Not long ago, California rushed forward to force age sniffing, aka age verification. See systemd riding along the wave: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

3D printing is also on a current hype run; I think a lot of this has to do with how cheap it is to print some things. So naturally some companies with overpriced shit, get nervous. So suddenly, California AGAIN, wants to censor and restrict people here.

Now - I think this will fail, 3D printing already won (IMO). It is similar to the right to repair movement. Though at an earlier stage. I am getting tired of all those lobbyists being active in California. And this is a problem that happens a LOT in the USA. This kind of lobbyism needs to go.

It is time to look at which folks act as lobbyists here, at the least at the surface level. All their communication with other organisations or companies, must be made open, so that people can look whether they are lobbyists or not. (This will not cover all lobbyists, but it will cover about 95% of them, because most lobbyists are stupid - see how EU OLAF caught some stupid EU lobbyists here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th... - so the EU is similar to the USA here, all built by lobbyists. See also how Meta bribed people for age-sniffing and similar spying tools or Jeff Grey from honor your oath point at the problem of non-stop monitoring of everyone in cars at all times)

They can just make it illegal to create firearms without a license. They aren’t legislating pens and paper for illegal artwork about children. Same for this.

They can't, because of federal supremacy. Chances are that their regulations on 3D printers won't be allowed because federal supremacy, but they're hoping they've found a loophole.

Reminds me of when we built a potato gun from pvc pipes as kids. Another villager noticed us shooting in the fields and when he saw the mechanism he called the local hardware shop and they then required you to be older than 18 to buy pvc pipes.

Ugh. Imagine if HP were the only "legal" 3D printer manufacturer for Californians.

I could ask LLM to find me "legal" parts that are 1:1 with gun parts or even better find metal parts in craftcloud3d.com or sendcutsend.com. With big enough database it could find right items on Amazon. It's impossible to legislate.

true but the government will inevitably demand their own stanza of (blocking) system prompts in the major AI services. then they will ban local LLM and foreign ones.

I wish to know if politicians pushing this agenta know that it would be absolutely ineffective and they are doing it solely to appease to their voters or they actually believe this would have any effect on criminals.

Clearly there are not enough meaningful tasks available in society and all that's left is people in different positions of power trying to look busy.

Follow the money here. Who is actually asking for this?

This law (along with similar ones in Washington & New York) is probably due to lobbying from Everytown, a gun control organization co-founded & mostly funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg. They've sponsored summits to gather politicians & other influential people to restrict 3d printed firearms.[1]

1. https://everytownsupportfund.org/press/everytown-to-convene-...

Yup.

Everytown and Moms Demand Action which operates under Everytown also provide the white papers, testimony, polling, and public pressure.

These bills across multiplenstates are 100% democratic developed, sponsored, and pushed. In fact the NRA denounces Everytown and it seems unlikely they would be in cahoots behind this push.

Easy way to explain the absurdity of the idea is to picture how could a law be made restricting 2D printers from printing schematics of guns.

How the printer could detect it, where the censoring circuit or program would live, how effective it would be and what it means long-term.

> Easy way to explain the absurdity of the idea is to picture how could a law be made restricting 2D printers from printing schematics of guns. > > How the printer could detect it, where the censoring circuit or program would live, how effective it would be and what it means long-term.

Maybe instead of stopping you the printer could add some small almost invisible dots in a pattern to identify which printer printed the schematic.

Why would the EFF use a AI generated image of a Dymo label printer when talking about 3D printing?

One thing not mentioned.

Forget about printing that copyrighted part for your no longer sold or supported gadget at home.

I guess you'll be forced to replace the whole thing.

waste of time and resources. you aren't going to win a fight against 3d printers. might as well outlaw the printers completely.

AFAIK If I try to scan a dollar bill, both the hardware and the software won’t let me be.

How is this different?

Edit: I appreciate the responses! Thank you

One practical difference is that you can make dollar bill detection relatively robust. Sure, you could cut it into 4 pieces and scan them separately, but you'd still get stuck when it comes time to print them. There are only finitely many dollar bill shapes. But there are infinitely many plausible gun components, and infinitely more ways to divide them into sub-assemblies.

It would be interesting to test what the minimum detectable piece of US currency is. (I wouldn't want to do it on a network-connected system, though.)

There is a pattern of yellow dots on the currency. I do not know at what size they tile across the paper, but the piece of currency would have to be smaller than that, most likely.

Far easier to dump the firmware and NOOP out that algo.

> but you'd still get stuck when it comes time to print them.

It also seems a lot harder to DIY an inkjet or laser printer. The parts needed to DIY a 3d printer are a lot simpler.

US currency has machine-detectable identifying markings incorporated in the design. "Ghost gun" parts do not.

You cannot defend yourself from a hungry coyote or surprised mountain lion with a dollar bill but you can certainly protect yourself or your child from one with a gun

Photoshop does that voluntarily; it's not required to by law. GIMP doesn't do it.

This is akin to trying to require all image editors to detect currency and refuse to process images of it. Making open source image processing software would probably have to be illegal because end users could trivially modify it to illegally process currency, or having general-purpose computers that can run software the government hasn't approved would need to be banned.

A dollar bill is exactly the same (roughly) always. Banning models of gun parts (or anything 3D printed, for that matter) is like trying to ban the patterns of dust in the wind. There are millions of permutations and ways to slice the problem.

> slice the problem

Pun intended

Having never seriously looked into 3D printing and knowing essentially nothing about firearms, a few mostly-unserious questions come to mind:

1. Is there any value in 3D printing the inverse of the shapes one would need to use as a mold?

2. How many subdivisions of gun-shaped part I wonder are needed before the ultimate intended shape is obscured without impacting the functionality

3. Given 2, is there even any value in 1.

Some critical differences between the situations that come to mind:

- The problem of counterfeit currency is well acknowledged and has roots in antiquity. Reasonable people agree that currency genuinely cannot do its only job if counterfeiting is possible, and have had that agreement for thousands of years. In addition, the sole right to print currency is given to the US government in its constitution (almost certainly for this reason). These two things grant government control over printing currency both a moral and a legal legitimacy that government control over printing gun parts doesn't have.

- Because the government has control over the design of legitimate currency, it is actually practical to prevent software from reproducing it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation . Gun parts have no such distinguishing characteristic, and cannot be made to have one, since there is no authoritative body responsible for all of them. Having such a marking could be made legally mandatory, but it is not actually required for the function of the part, whereas currency needs to match the authentic design in order to be useful. It is therefore much less practical and effective to mark gun parts to prevent replication than it is to similarly mark currency.

- Creating your own guns specifically (and weapons, generally) is widely seen as a natural or God-given right. I would go so far as to say that it is intrinsically human, and that losing access to it would be as painful to some as losing access to rock 'n roll. I would say that due to this pain, losing that right is one of the chief signs of an enslaved people. While not everyone would agree with me, many would, which gives the issue a divisive moral edge. By contrast, creating your own currency might be seen as some sort of natural right by some people, but creating your own US Dollars certainly is not seen that way by anybody. Well, I'm sure you could find someone, but you know what I mean.

- As far as I know, there is no law compelling printer/photocopier manufacturers to use anti-counterfeiting software, and compliance is voluntary (but apparently pretty widespread -- though I doubt it's universal). A similar voluntary setup with 3D printer manufacturers would be less objectionable (though also much less likely to succeed). Introducing any sort of mandatory compliance regime introduces friction, slows innovation, and invites corruption.

- Manufacturing gun parts is actually pretty easy, and could be accomplished via many methods accessible to hobbyists, ranging from whittling by hand to duct taping hardware together to lost wax casting to desktop CNC to a desktop injection molding setup to metalworking on a lathe in a garage machine shop. It is in no way limited to 3D printing, though that admittedly lowers the bar a bit. Learning to work on guns is not significantly harder than learning to work on cars, though perhaps fewer people know how to do it. Thus, a focus on 3D printing seems much more driven by sensationalism, paranoia, and ignorance of this fact than it is by practical assessment of the issue. By contrast, creating even minimally recognizable counterfeit currency without the assistance of a computer is practically impossible and certainly cost-prohibitive. In manufacturing gun parts, it is perfectly practical in some cases to do the equivalent of drawing a dollar bill with a crayon -- something much less successful in the counterfeiting world.

- Adding broad pattern-recognition controls to a 3d printer is a novel and difficult problem that will likely impact innocent people doing legal things. Preventing the printing of accurate-looking currency has a much more narrow impact, and is much more focused on people doing illegal-adjacent things.

Without meaning any malice toward your question, I mention that I write because you have stepped on one of my pet peeves: it seems to me that an inability to see the difference between things that are, in fact, different, is one of the major failure modes of modern society in general. We need an appreciation for texture and nuance if we are to navigate the world rightly.

G0 X4.000 Y1.250

G1 Z-4.000 F100

G0 Z0.250

Here is some g-code to drill a hole. It could be drilling out a gun barrel. How can you tell?

What happens if I order an upper from send cut send? does a human look at it and say oh no. or does a computer?

Uppers aren't regulated as firearms. Only lowers. In CA SCS might be required to ask for your ID to make sure you're not a felon to comply with AB 1263.

The saddest thing about regulators is often a small payment to the regulated would be more effective and less costly in achieving the same desired result.

They should simply pay people to register 3D printed guns, up to a specific amount, at which point: they should investigate them for illegally manufacturing guns.

Similarly, they should severely penalize possession of a 3D printed gun which has not been registered.

Problem solved. Good luck pretending these people are capable of regulating the compliance of 3D printing software.

What a joke.

California already requires a license to 3d print firearms.[1] This is the same license needed to mass produce firearms, making legal individual manufacturing incredibly difficult. Also all firearms (even 3d printed ones) in California must have a metal serial number tag embedded in the frame. Given the number and manner of restrictions, I’m not aware of anyone in California who has legally printed a firearm since these laws came into effect.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

You used to be able to print the CAG19 carbine but now you have to carve it by hand from a block of wood. Doesn't have the same ring to it.

I don't know the details but it is a very good idea to restrict people's access to guns.

Guns, fireworks, explosives, sulfuric acid, all sorts of bio-hazards, ... every civilized country restricts peoples' access to these things. It is a no brainier, but Americans obsessively wrap it in ideology.

Don't speak here.

We are sorry, but your print resembles random princess from Disney too much (actually, we won't tell you which). Just following the law you know..

I'm a lib, but enough is enough. Let gun owners have their guns. Let 3d Printers have their prints. Neither group is the problem.

would that someone were inclined to get ahead of such legislation, what are some of the most dangerous 3D printers, just so i know which ones to avoid...

Reason #5382 to not live in California.

Next up flinging rubber bands with your two fingers to be banned.

This is why republicans get votes.

If you pull nonsense like this in a two party system, there are enough people with blind spots that it tilts the results against you.

My favorite example of such a blind spot is a friend being flabbergasted that someone funny could be evil.

Why not just ban people communicating with one another so bad ideas can’t be exchanged. /s

I don't understand the problem solving mindset that thinks banning guns would solve the problem of a person intent on causing harm.

In the U.K., where I feel guns are only showpieces (do even cops have them?), stabbing is a known problem.

In India, where ammo is way more expensive than machetes and knives, people are literally murdered with them.

The only argument I can understand, when it comes to banning guns, is that it reduces the blast radius that an evil person can have.

So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?

If that's the proposal, what's my plan when coyotes and mountain lions attack my child and I on our regular walks on rural property?

guns democratize mass murder. With a gun, I can kill a bunch of people before police can stop me. A knife? At best I can kill one or two in a public place before people run away and eventually a different group is going to stop me pretty quickly.

- can you build bombs to blow up an apartment complex full of 1000s of people?

- can you poison the water supply of an apartment complex full of 1000s of people?

- can you drop a harmful substance using a $50 drone onto an open area where of 1000s of people have congregated?

We also restrict the components of those pretty heavily, though. Try buying too much fertilizer without a farm and see who shows up.

This isn't a judgement on your general point, but I think bombs and bioweapons and etc are very bad examples for you here.

While quasi regulated they just raise the bar of expertise required. Poisons, bioweapons, and explosives are pretty easy to make at scale without using suspicious inputs.

At the moment the 3D printing crowd are pretty savvy I’m sure many could hook up a new controller or flash their existing one.

The “Oklahoma City Fertilizer Bomb” style bomb is heavily watched. ANFO just isn’t a good vector for a lone wolf anymore. With that said, any GWOT veteran with explosives training could make enough HME to make a mass casualty event à la OKC all over again. Maybe not all at once, right this second, but it’s a real threat vector. Worse, these training manuals available open-source and easy to replicate.

My neighbor is retired EOD, he has all Federal licenses manufactures explosives for the purpose of stump removal, if you can believe it, I’ve seen the process. It’s so easy a caveman could do it. Thankfully, no one really seems to do so. Mostly because manufactured firearms are easier to get ahold of. Or in Europe, smuggled weapons.

We cannot forget what insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan did. It’s hubris to say “can’t happen here.”

I don't think the licenses are hard to get anyway. The hardest part is satisfying the storage requirements.

As a bit of trivia, when congress defunded the ability for felons to restore their firearm rights, they actually forgot part of it. By an accident of history, felons can still get an explosives license.

Explosives are a weird case because Americans can just buy industrially manufactured high explosives. Attempting to DIY an explosive that is almost certainly inferior to what you can buy commercially is a red flag.

Before 9/11 caused them to tighten up the rules, buying high explosives in the US was cash-and-carry. You could walk in and select different kinds of high explosives from a giant menu. If you wanted something unusual they could special order it. The only real requirement was that you had a non-sparking container for it (basically, no exposed metal) when you carried it away. Most people aren't familiar with this because most regions of the US don't have much need for these types of stores.

It still isn't difficult today from my understanding, there is just more paperwork. The more practical hurdle is complying with safe storage regulations since they want some distance between where you store it and the neighbors. You can't just stash a few hundred pounds in your suburban garage.

>before 9/11 caused them to tighten up the rules,

You mean "before the Weather Underground blew up a bunch of random shit with hardware store dynamite in the 1970s".

>It still isn't difficult today from my understanding, there is just more paperwork.

The paperwork and compliance is enough of an expensive PITA it precludes everyone who isn't a regular commercial user, which is exactly the point.

It used to be that farmers just cleared forest and blew stumps and rocks up. This might sound absurd but when you start looking at the cost of doing that job with equipment it's preferable if you're rural enough to not endanger anything.

It worked how I described in the late 1990s. I know someone who went through the new process and it didn't seem that onerous. As I recall it isn't that different from the process for getting Global Entry on your passport.

Explosives are still heavily used in mining and construction. Many of those operations are just a couple individuals, not any kind of real company.

> I know someone who went through the new process and it didn't seem that onerous

My understanding is that it's nigh on impossible as an individual now but I may be wrong.

>Many of those operations are just a couple individuals, not any kind of real company.

In my limited experience the guys who do the explosives have typically made a business out of it and get subcontracted to many mines and jobsites to blow this or that up.

OK, then what's my plan when coyotes and mountain lions attack my child and I on our regular walks on rural property? As we build more housing and cities close in, these wild animals are being run out of their natural habitat.

Is the answer "dont be on rural property!" or are there real practical solutions?

> but I think bombs and bioweapons and etc are very bad examples for you here

Are there better examples?

Also, I for one don't undermine the drive and tenacity of an evil person and to what extent they are willing to cause harm.

Killers are going to kill. Guns don't democratize it, just makes it easier. Maybe at best YOU could kill one or two:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/16/china/china-stabbing-yixing-c... (8 stabbed to death) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_Schoo... (1 killed, 24 injured)

So they should stop you from 3d-printing knives too.

Successful mass murders with a knife are fairly rare. Killing people that way is physically difficult, and it's relatively easy to just tackle you.

Traditionally, arson was the means of mass killing, as it didn't have either problem. That's gotten much more difficult due to fire safety.

> Killing people that way is physically difficult, and it's relatively easy to just tackle you

I won't argue this as this sounds entirely hypothetical but let me ask you this: if you saw someone stabbing people, would you volunteer to tackle them or would you choose to delegate?

One, a knife never runs out of bullets and never needs to reload. Second, a knife doesn't make a sound. I'm unsure of what training you have but a knife is absolutely the tool of choice up close even if you had a gun on you. One can fatally stab dozens of people in a concert without even being noticed or detected.

I can't make those assertions about a gun.

The point is, a gun in the U.S. has been a weapon of choice but in other countries where a gun is very hard to get, stabbings are equally dangerous and widespread. I have been reading about fatal stabbings in the U.K for a decade now.

It's almost as if evil people will use whichever tool they have at their disposal to hurt people and we are just making it more difficult for good people to defend themselves against the evil.

> Successful mass murders with a knife are fairly rare

I mention 5 myself below but there are more. What I find surprising is how the term "mass murder" seems to be applied almost exclusively when a gun is used, but rarely a knife.

If you look for "mass murder due to stabbing", the media almost never frames it with that terminology, whereas they would immediately use it if a firearm was involved for the exact same number of victims.

When people hear "mass murder", they likely think of hundreds of people dying instantaneously to a volley of bullets, but that's a distortion of what "mass murder" actually looks like in the U.S:

By standard definitions, a mass killing involves 4 or more fatalities. While "mass murders" using a gun get wall-to-wall media coverage, mass murders with a knife rarely make it past local news. If you think these devastating knife attacks are just a myth, here are a few recent ones you can look up right now:

- February 24, 2026: A 32-year-old man fatally stabbed four people at a residence in the Purdy/Gig Harbor area. Responding deputies shot and killed the suspect at the scene.

- July 19, 2024: A grandmother, a mother, and two children (ages 4 and 5) were fatally stabbed in their Bensonhurst apartment. A 24-year-old family member was arrested.

- March 27, 2024: A 22-year-old man went on a "frenzied" spree, killing four people and injuring seven others. The attack involved a knife, an aluminum bat and a vehicle.

- March 10, 2024: In a domestic murder-suicide, a father fatally stabbed his wife and three children (ages 10, 12, and 17) before killing himself. It was the deadliest mass killing in Hawaii since 1999.

- December 3, 2023: A 38-year-old man used a kitchen knife to kill four relatives, two children and two adults, and injured three others (including two police officers) before being shot by police.

If you can only find 5 mass killings with knifes in 3 years, does that not proof his point? That it's rare.

Just like knife kills in the UK, which is less then knife kills in the US AFAIK.

As a citizen with a gun I can shoot you before the police arrive.

The powers that be are far more concerned with you shooting the police before more police arrive.

I'm not in the interest of rehashing decades of the same arguments about guns in society on HackerNews, and per Poe's law, I can't actually tell if you're sincere or not. Assuming you are, it bears summary:

You basically have it with "it reduces the blast radius". Guns are a great tool for damaging soft tissue to the point of death. Gun control advocates believe, with less access to guns, people will kill less.

It is also worth adding that most gun deaths in thbe US are from suicides. Means reduction is well-understood as a way to decrease suicides.

> So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?

We don't need to get stuck in a hypothetical, since we can look at other countries and see how they manage these public goods. Guns are unique in that they're exclusively for killing, and provide scant other value outside sport.

Notably, nowhere that had success in tighter gun regulation needed to censor 3D printing. This legislation is something 'both sides' of the gun debate should be able to get behind and oppose. There is very little potential benefit for the cause of "gun control", and very much potential harm.

In the UK to own a gun you need to have a good reason to do so. This is usually by being a member of a gun club, and getting a license to own a gun. Once you have a club membership and a license you then need to start speaking to the police to purchase a gun alongside having a gun box that is secure and certified by the police. Its an awful lot of hassle so the only people with guns are those who are interested in it.

Police dont tend to have guns apart from specially trained units(?) so you only see these quite rarely. Northern Ireland is a bit of an exception all police in NI have a gun, and are trained to quite a high standard to just be able to use it. NI's police actually go over to England reguarly enough to help when police with guns are required.

I'd bet money that the gun lobby is behind this. What better way to dilute the anti-gun sentiment then to get useless legislation that targets a group that has traditionally been anti-gun. Even the EFF, which generally doesn't touch second amendment stuff, is speaking up. Massive gun lobby win right there.

No it is not, see my other comments

I'm surprised the EFF didn't address the issue that traditional printer manufacturers already comply with law enforcement, specifically that a fingerprint of yellow tracking dots [1] are printed and printers will often refuse to or fail to copy images of money.

My point is there's already precedent for printers cooperating with authorities so one can see this as simply an extension to 3D printer manufacturers.

I suspect it's a losing battle for the EFF and 3D printer manufacturers to resist some kind of fingerprinting or even the prohibition of things that are guns.

I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's just what I expect to happen. And if you want to argue against it, you should address the printer tracking dot issue or argue how this is different.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

I believe EFF did address the yellow dots but got nowhere. Yellow dot problem is decades old.

That's why real hackers refurbish dot-matrix printers.

GDR

Open source is core to 3d printing. I have never heard of an open source traditional printer. That is the difference. This is an attempt to lock down open source.

> how this is different

From purely a technical standpoint: the printer indiscriminately adds tracking dots to all documents, the proposed 3D printer regulation requires the printer to phone home and make some dispositive call on what it's allowed to do.

The bottom of that wiki page has links to EFF pages. However you are correct that they view it as a lost battle:

  (Added 2015) Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable. Although we still don't know if this is correct, or how subsequent generations of forensic tracking technologies might work, it is probably safest to assume that all modern color laser printers do include some form of tracking information that associates documents with the printer's serial number. (If any manufacturer wishes to go on record with a statement to the contrary, we'll be happy to publish that here.)

  (Added 2017) REMINDER: IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT ALL RECENT COMMERCIAL COLOR LASER PRINTERS PRINT SOME KIND OF FORENSIC TRACKING CODES, NOT NECESSARILY USING YELLOW DOTS. THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT THOSE CODES ARE VISIBLE TO THE EYE AND WHETHER OR NOT THE PRINTER MODELS ARE LISTED HERE. THIS ALSO INCLUDES THE PRINTERS THAT ARE LISTED HERE AS NOT PRODUCING YELLOW DOTS.

  This list is no longer being updated.

I wrote that text when I worked for EFF!

Anyway, two things about this:

* EFF definitely did not think that the regular printer tracking dots mechanism was appropriate.

* You could probably argue this either as a modus ponens or a modus tollens -- that is, in either direction -- but one criticism that we made of the tracking dots was that they were (mostly) secret voluntary cooperation between industry and government, not an actual law. Perhaps an actual law is preferable because the public can understand in detail how it's being restricted, as well as oppose it politically and potentially challenge it in the courts.

Of course, the current 3D printing restrictions are proposed as an actual law. That does seem largely better to me than "we got most 3D printer companies to put some secret software in their printers to enforce some unspecified policies that the government asked them to, and the companies and the government don't want to talk about it", although one way it's better is simply the opportunity to oppose it in the legislature.

Thanks for trying to maintain the list as long as you could!

I think you are assuming that the government does not _also_ have secret agreements with big 3D printer manufacturers (to which the state of CA may not be privy)

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