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> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

> 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

> 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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