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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Photocopiers and printers have included anti-counterfeiting tech for decades, so there is precedent for this kind of thing. And this is addressing a real growing problem:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/santa-rosa-167-gun...

https://da.santaclaracounty.gov/da-task-force-seizes-ghost-g...

https://www.vvng.com/3d-printed-firearm-recovered-after-man-...

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Here's a series of models, which of these is a gun part? https://imgur.com/a/p3UtJqW

Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.

Can you send me these models? I would like to print and bring them to the next committee hearing. My senator is on that committee.

I will also be bringing an ergonomic grip for my camera.

My email is in my profile.

I just fundamentally don't understand the idea that nobody's allowed to restrict firearms manufacturing unless they can solve complex riddles about the nature of parts. I understand that you perceive this to be a deep and interesting point, but to me it seems enragingly obtuse. Let's start with blacklisting DefCAD and iterate from there, what's wrong with that?

Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.

How long until people get police showing up at their door because they tried to print something harmless but gun-shaped (like a light gun for retro games, or Nerf-style toys) and were flagged by the AI 'firearm detector'?

If you want to have a voice in how the regulation is implemented, perhaps you should offer suggestions for how to implement it better. That's how it works in most industries; legislators propose to enact regulation X, manufacturers respond that X would have undesirable consequences and Y would be better, and then they discuss to figure out how to best balance all the competing interests.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.

I would rather just accept more crime than accept draconian regulation telling me what I can do with a piece of hardware I own

Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead

Again, it seems like there's a critical insight that's gone missing between the first and second lines of your post. It's unsurprising that a manufacturer might prefer to be regulated less rather than more, and there are a number of cases where I ultimately agree with some manufacturer or another on that. Perhaps it's the case that gun crime would be best resolved with boots on the ground; I could imagine being persuaded by someone who explains where the boots are going to come from and why they're not already there. Maybe I could even be persuaded that 3D printing is more important than crime reduction, although I'm less able to imagine what would convince me of that.

It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?

Of course the vast majority of people opposing this bill have zero interest in manufacturing firearms.

I 3D print as a hobby, mostly items related to retro computing/gaming and things like Gridfinity storage boxes.

But I value my privacy, and don't want governments scanning my models before I'm able to print them, just as I wouldn't want them scanning my code before I'm able to compile it (these days, code can potentially be a weapon of war, malware or drone flight controller code being more powerful than a plastic gun)

> For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!".

Who exactly is the "firearms manufacturer?" I've owned and used 3D printers for years. Not once has anything I've used or seen from any 3D printer manufacturer or other related supplier have anything to do with guns.

Then I'd expect you won't be affected by this ban on manufacturing guns with 3D printers. Perhaps there's some changes we should make to better ensure you won't be affected; if so by all means you should suggest them.

Why not focus on the actual gun problem, handguns, and not histrionics about ghost guns and SBRs?

We try! But most California restrictions on handguns have been struck down by the courts, and many of the surviving restrictions manufacturers simply refuse to comply with. They've been boycotting microstamping technology for over a decade, blatantly lying about commercial viability as an excuse for their policy preference not to do it. (I'm slightly sympathetic, because it is true that the first manufacturer to comply will probably themselves get boycotted by anti-gun-regulation zealots.)

Which “firearms manufacturers” use 3D printing in their process?

Why do you think they would be opposed to this? (I doubt they care.)

Until America bans actual guns I don't want to hear about the "growing problem" of 3D printed guns.

Yeah, if it was the UK cracking down it'd make more sense, but IIRC the US already has more guns than people.

And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)

The establishment is desperate to create/maintain moats to maintain hegemony over society

But money counterfeiting is a different proposition: the printer is blocking exactly known patterns found on real currency. In fact, many bill designs incorporate patterns that are easily machine detectable for this purpose.

Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?

I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.

Yellow dots doxxing me whenever I print something is equally despicable, client side scanning on my iPhone is equally despicable.

Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.

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