We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme | Hacker News Reader

We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

eff.org

513 pointshn_acker193 comments

My kindergartner has a 3D printer.

I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”.

I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand.

I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

Good for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered.

Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.

Why do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?

Because of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?

Fear of everything

The rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience:

1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”.

2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world.

3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk.

4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil.

Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk, I say!

This guy works in compliance!

Oh brings me to the good pre-CoC era when we did not need to have explicit rules and a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. :D You might say that it is too broad, but now with the CoC you have many more broad rules. :P

> a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine.

Not a huge fan of overly broad CoCs, but they arose because, in fact, that simple rule did not work fine. It repeatedly did not work fine, in many groups engaged in many different endeavors. It worked not fine so badly and so frequently that people got tired of it and started writing out the explicit rules.

There's a lot of parallels between CoCs and sexual harassment rules. At first, it was a shitty free-for-all that was fun if you were part of the getting-away-with-it group but terrible for others. Then people said alright, had enough, we're going to make hard and fast rules against all this bullshit. Those first versions tended to be awful and heavy handed because they tried really hard to be comprehensive and serious about it, which is very well intended, but probably too far in the other direction. What we ended up with is probably vastly better, on average, for all involved. It's not as fun for people who enjoy treating others badly, but a whole lot nicer for everyone else.

Because that doesn't improve actual security. It's for dumb nuggets who can't do real defensive work. Maybe you would also qualify for that numb job.

> I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes.

Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.

He started with tinkercad and thingiverse.

I tried basic elegoo and bambu printers.

He can’t read very well but he likes dragging shapes around on a tablet.

He would ask me to find shapes using the search engines then he mixes them together or reshapes them.

I would add them to his history.

This is why I was surprised to hear about 3D printed guns. I was quite sure there wasn’t anything like that in the history.

It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.

>It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.

I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have.

Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded")

And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow.

The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...

School shootings are extremely rare and so I was curious how it could be that large. The nuance is that those pages are not just listing school shootings as commonly understood/feared, but any shooting involving a school in any way.

So for instance from the 2010s [1] page you get teacher shooting principle, biology professor (female no less!) shooting other professors, guy killing himself in a university library after firing off a couple of rounds at nobody, 60+ guy shooting his 60+ year old wife in a parking lot then killing self, and so on.

I think that's a bit dodgy, because there's something like 130k+ schools of all sorts in the US [2], so you have a massive multiplier there. To put that number in contrast, there are fewer than 17k Starbucks in the US. Do the same by basically any metric, positive or negative, and you're going to similarly see a huge number of incidents.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

[2] - https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

All the dodgy things listed in the second paragraph are solid school shootings?

They don't pattern match with what people visualize as school shootings: kids bringing guns to school to shoot other kids.

It is a nitpick, but majority of what you mean was (large ones) were committed by adults.

List by deaths is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

to be fair, other countries also have listed as school shootings any event that involved shooting and a school; eg: Australia with a population ~ 15x smaller than the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_Au...

has a total of six (6) incidents this century (since 2000) .. somewhat less than a factor of 15 less than the US for that same 26 year period.

Note that three of the six incidents of the past 26 years involved guns being fired but no one being hit (no grazes, injuries, or deaths).

I think the connotation of a school shooting is somebody going to a school and shooting numerous students in a mostly random fashion with the intention of creating terror. That's why guns are so scary in this context - it's trivial to kill a person with a gun, a knife, a car, or a brick, but it's much easier to kill 10 people with a gun than it is with the other instruments - well except perhaps a car.

But when you aren't listing just these sort school shootings, but instead listing any homicide that occurred within the vicinity of a school, why is it reasonable to exclude the various incidents of non-gun homicides at Australian [1][2] (or American for that matter) schools? It just feels like a false narrative. Because what matters if we're just speaking of safety at schools is how often people are killed within the vicinity of schools, though obviously subdata including the share of each weapon in homicides would be useful/informative.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lilie_James

[2] - https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15912963/Father-dies-...

> but it's much easier to kill 10 people with a gun than it is with the other instruments - well except perhaps a car.

Or explosives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

> why is it reasonable to exclude the various incidents of non-gun homicides at Australian schools.

(when " listing any homicide that occurred within the vicinity of a school")

It isn't reasonable, and that is exactly why non shooting homicides are included in lists of all homicides but not included in lists of shooting homicides.

Yeah but there the issue of deception by lack of context. Wiki, so far as I can tell, has no comparable page or even information on general homicide at schools, only the gun stuff. Imagine, if somebody started listing all fatal taxi/rideshare incidents with a female driver. There would be a lot incidents, but it'd be completely misleading without the context of how that compares to incidents of all drivers, and so it would serve little purpose other than to implicitly misinform people.

So in the case of schools when there are 130k+ educational institutions in the US basically every single thing that you can imagine happens, and happens a lot. But it says absolutely nothing about the relative frequency of that event, but much more so about the fact that there are a massive amount of schools.

Many school shootings would also be better classified as “shootings at a school”, such as targeted gang violence or arguments between individuals. This doesn’t excuse these events (kids should be safe at school) but most are not the sort of Columbine-style events evoked by the phrase. Conflating the two likely makes it harder to find a solution, as “ban guns” isn’t on the table without an amendment.

We can certainly pick apart any given data point.

It doesn't change the overarching sentiment that guns are a subject that attracts considerably larger attention in the USA than in any other 'developed' nation.

Pick any number of metrics - frequency of incidents, size and power of advocacy groups, political debate, ownership levels, media coverage, constitutional significance - and that pattern is clear.

So my [here refined] point remains : there is no (developed nation) where guns are a greater part of public discourse than the USA. Therefore, when we find ourselves questioning "why are some USA citizens quite passionate about the debate?" (especially where their children are concerned), I don't think we need to look too far for the answer.

That is true for both sides of the debate.

Guns have always posed that risk to children. Despite that, the schools, at least around here, used to have shooting ranges and the kids would bring their guns to school to make use of them! Hard to believe now, and as you can image those ranges have been since decommissioned, but nobody batted an eye back in the day.

Key point here is that adults haven't always been bothered by things that look like guns. That is something that has emerged recently. What changed?

Moreover, target shooting is the only school sport in the U.S. to have _never_ had an injury recorded as part of the sport itself --- that my local public school has a locker of rifles locked up and un-used in the basement and no longer has a marksmanship program/participates in competitions is _not_ justifiable on the basis of safety.

Further, children who have attended the NRA gun safety course have a much better record of safety and safe interactions with firearms than those who don't --- learning the rules of gun safety and the appropriate thing to do when finding a firearm which is not in the possession of a responsible adult makes for much less tragedy.

What has changed is that it used to be a part of the immigrant experience to purchase firearms and take up hunting, but the transition from rural farm life to urban city life means that an ever larger portion of the U.S. population has limited experience with/knowledge of firearms.

I find it fascinating. There are the stabbings in china and car amoks, but everywhere else on the planet such behavior is only found with disenfranchised veterans after a large war has ended.

Nice. My kids are still at the stage where they can only request specific objects and colors but I can’t wait to gradually involve them more and more in the process of model design, slicing, and printing.

There are valid concerns with 3d printing guns but I expect adults to be able to let kids be kids when it comes to something like a Star Wars figurine.

Have you considered BlockSCAD?

When the kid is older, the best movie on the societal aspects of firearms is _Witness_.

If you have the resources, you could also serve her with papers. IANAL, but that arguably is libel, defamation, harassment and so incredibly insane that it deserves a severe legal smackdown.

Not sure I’d want to rope my kindergartener into something like that? I like GP’s approach

Judge will throw it out unless you're well connected. They'll say the case has "no standing" unless you shell out massive amounts of money.

What are your damages? What kind of remedy do you seek?

So their child was accused of 3D printing a gun and taking it in to school, the parent confirmed online that, yes, their child did 3D print a gun and take it to school ... I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve.

It's not libel, it's a misunderstanding.

It was a gun in the same way the word GUN on a page is a gun: only symbolically.

Is it a gun in a meaningful sense if it can't fire a projectile? How could anyone be concerned about that? What if the kid brought toy soldiers to school? Would that be bringing guns to school?

US lawsuit culture is absolutely insane.

No, that is not even remotely close to qualifying for any of those things.

The principal merely said someone made a call about it, they didn't present that claim as a fact, they didn't publish it, they didn't act with malice or negligence, and they caused no damages. A statement would have to meet all of those qualifications to be libel or defamation. It meets none.

Harassment is repeated or continuing communication that serves no purpose other than bothering the person. This was a single phone call was made for the purpose of investigating an alleged school incident. It meets none of the qualifications to be harassment.

Our laws do not prevent anyone from discussing claims by other people that may or may not be true. It would be silly if they did.

There is absolutely nothing illegal nor unusual for school staff to call parents to investigate concerning claims made by other students or parents. Doing so is exactly how misunderstandings in these situations are cleared up.

I can see how something like this happens. We're talking about a 5 year old kid seeing something at school, and describing it to their parents. Who knows what the kid said?

Then you have situations like the young kid that did bring a gun to school and shoot a teacher, and there were tips not followed up on, and the school getting absolutely dragged through the court of public opinion because of it.

So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.

What happened to you is probably the best case scenario: kid told their parent something incorrect, that parent calls the school, the school checks in with you, you tell them they're wrong, the end. If the principal actually thought there was a problem, I doubt she would have simply called you.

>So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.

No, they don't. Because 99.999999% of the time they won't have guns and the other 00.000001% of the time well it's your ass anyway.

Panopticon in every class room ?

There's the case of a kid printing a non-functional toy weapon.

And then there's the case of years of consistent violent behavior, and even when the principal was advised on the day of the shooting that the kid was in possession of a firearm, she did nothing.

Hard to tell them apart.

> they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.

hilarious accidental commentary on the US

> no way to prevent this - only nation where this regularly happens [0]

That boy knows what he is doing. Kids figure this stuff out they are no dummies. You don’t like so and so? Tell teachers they printed a “gun”. Or mentioned “gun” or said a politically incorrect word. It’s a form of bullying using a system’s irrationality against others. Kind of like swatting

Not at 5. 10, maybe.

Those are not the thoughts of a 5 year old.

Unless someone taught that concept to the 5 year old.

It's not that they are planning the sequence and understanding all the cogs in the machine. It's that they've seen the same situation play out 10 times already with other kids. All they need to do is copy it exactly.

>I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

This is the way

California voters, write to your state senator. I'm in San Francisco, and I wrote to Scott Wiener, who recently voted to pass this out of committee.

Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage.

But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are paying attention. The tech capital of the world shouldn't have artificially impaired tools.

It doesnt matter. you know how much campaign financing is tied up with gun control groups? It sucks to lose all your campaign funding and get primaried, right? Wouldn't want that!

When Wiener ignores these messages, will you vote against him in the next election, even if that means voting republican? Because if not, you can expect more laws like this one.

If you want different laws, you need to elect different politicians.

He is currently in a congressional race. 1 month ago I voted against him, for Saikat Chakrabarti. In November he will face Connie Chan.

It's possible that Chan would also support this. She is not in a position to do so now, because she is not voting on state law.

Looks even more draconian than the New York law. For example, it seems to mandate proprietary, locked down slicers from the printer manufacturer.

For integrated preprint software [slicer] design, guidance for how vendors shall demonstrate that printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.

Over the last few years, I’ve felt as though I’ve been living in a feverish dream all the time. Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve. And this is yet another example.

>Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve.

Yet I bet you kept voting for the same parties that keep passing such laws.

It's almost like American democracy has been dysfunctional and degrading further for more than half a century

We're bombing Iran to suppress technology form the 40s. We're suppressing advanced AI. We're suppressing 3d printer technology. Then there are the encryption wars. Control of advanced technology, not just weapons, is a larger and larger battle every year. When the robots get here, you'll need the governments ok to do anything at all with a robot. Mark Andreessen's comments that government regulators told him that they've suppressed whole branches of physics is ominous in that regard. Technology suppression is a whole separate narrative of history practically.

Mark Andreessen has joined the FUD party, he's knowingly regurgitating a fake narrative.

The Take Action link only took 30 seconds: https://www.eff.org/3DPrintCA

(did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)

Also, if you have a couple extra minutes to spare, consider handing the letter and the name of your senator to an LLM (I used Deepseek V4 Pro) with instructions to research your representative and tailor the message to them specifically.

I share your hopeful optimism, but here's the reality of the mass-email campaigns targeting congress:

[email received 6/18/26 from the office of Steve Scalise, majority leader in the house, who is one of my representatives. I have trimmed for brevity.]

>> Due to advancements in technology, many third-party organizations use their mailing lists to send advocacy letters like this on your behalf. With the increased volume of third-party letters being sent to my office, I want to be sure that I am able to more appropriately address your thoughts and concerns.

I will be sure to consider the views you have sent me, but if you have any additional thoughts on this issue, or need other assistance with a federal agency, please contact my office directly through my website scalise.house.gov or by calling (202) 225-3015

-----------

In case it is not clear to anyone reading, this is kosher political speak for "I am ignoring automated emails. Consider this your notice."

Honestly, I am surprised it took this long, although I'm quite certain it has been going on for a lot longer and generally they simply do not provide the courtesy of telling you they are ignoring you.

This is exactly why I had an LLM customize the letter as I said in my other comment; I've had a similar response from another of my representatives. It might not help much if they're filtering based on where the email is coming from, but on the off chance that they are filtering based on identical content, changing the content might make a difference. With LLMs, the effort needed to customize the content has gone down significantly (otherwise, I would agree with the more cynical commentators that such letters are a waste of time and energy).

thanks, done. i did handwrite a message since it seems more personal/effective to me

If some people want to make their own gun, then some people will also make their own 3D printer.

This joke of a law isn't going to stop any 3D printed handguns from getting made, it will only add one more relatively easy step.

Then what, ban stepper motors?

> Then what, ban stepper motors?

Don't give them ideas.

But seriously, given that the 3D printer movement started out with people building their own printers from scratch and there continues to be a healthy open-source hardware ecosystem within the community, I can't see this stopping anyone.

Unless you also make it illegal for 3D printers to print 3D printer parts...

But how was the first 3D printer made? Are they gonna ban CNC machines next?

Working on it

These laws also apply to subtractive manufacturing methods like CNC machines. They just aren't as common in households so they don't get the headline space to grab our attention.

Vorons are great! https://www.vorondesign.com

You've come a long way, RepRap.

Imagine if you couldn't buy a lathe unless it refused to make a baseball bat (which could be used for hitting people).

Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines).

Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over).

And if all of those checked with the government before functioning.

It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce that law, and create societal conditions that don't nudge or force people into doing undesirable things.

https://xcancel.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096

enforce that law

Califoria would not be a sanctuary state if they actually cared about enforcing laws.

Why would a state enforce federal law?

The US legal system never ceases to amaze me. Why indeed should a state enforce a law? Like, one of those anti-discrimination laws?

Why should it enforce a law from a separate sovereign entity, is the question. And the answer is, it shouldn’t. I don’t think states do, or should, enforce federal anti-discrimination laws. The feds do that. The states pass their own anti-discrimination laws if they want something to enforce themselves.

Historically, the states never would have come together to create the United States if they had to give up all of their own sovereignty. The constitution is full of compromises.

We used to ban the undesirable action! Then DEFCAD got that ban overturned, convincing the federal government that they have a First Amendment right to publish 3D-printable firearm plans. So now our choices are to allow widespread 3D printed firearms (which I and many others won't accept) or restrict the means by which they can be made. I genuinely do wish the DEFCAD folks had made different choices that would not have led us here.

Do you think DEFCAD will get this overturned, too?

Certainly not on First Amendment grounds, and in general I expect powerful AI will quite imminently make people more sympathetic to random manufacturing restrictions on potentially dangerous goods. I can imagine 2A arguments against any regulation that's specifically preventing the use of X for gun manufacturing, but my weakly held best guess is that they wouldn't be persuasive here.

> ...our choices are to allow widespread 3D printed firearms...

Which parts of a firearm can be printed in a consumer-grade 3D printer? Be as specific as your knowledge permits.

Of those that cannot, how much money does one have to spend in order to purchase a 3D printer that is capable of printing those parts that cannot be printed by a consumer-grade printer?

Are you aware of "slam fire" firearms? If you were not, you owe it to yourself to learn how to make a functional "slam fire" shotgun. The tutorials are pretty widespread.

I'm aware of "slam fire" firearms and know why and how it's easy to produce them. They're much less concerning to me because their rate of fire is extremely slow.

I don't know the details of what can be printed in a consumer-grade printer, not having performed firearms manufacturing myself, but I've seen things claiming to be pretty complete kits and it seems to me that most components should be possible. Barrels of any reasonable length might be hard, perhaps firing pins too. (And springs, but of course those are trivial to manufacture by hand.) If it's not actually possible to 3D print an effective gun, perhaps someone should make that argument in detail.

You cannot fully 3d print an effective firearm on a consumer 3d printer. When people talk about 3d printing a gun they are almost always talking about 3d printing a single part—the lower receiver. Federal law considers the lower receiver to be a gun, and it is the part with a serial number.

A lower receiver is not complicated. It essentially just a quirk of the law that the ability to 3d print a lower receiver is useful to people who want to manufacture “untraceable” guns.

You could change the law so that barrels have to have serial numbers and accomplish nearly the exact same thing as completely banning 3d printers.

Also buying a kit, 3d printing a lower receiver, snd assembling an effective firearm is about as difficult as buying a kit to assemble an 3d printer and using existing open source slicers (or modifying a 3d printer to let you use an open source slicer).

And if 3d printers are as dangerous as the proponents of this legislation thinks they are, people would just hop across the border to Nevada and use a 3d printer there.

> They're much less concerning to me because their rate of fire is extremely slow.

Not if you make a multi-barreled one and spend some time practicing. [0] Go check out some youtube videos... some of those kids are kinda nuts. But, okay, I believe you when you say that you're unconcerned about firearms with a low rate of fire.

> I don't know the details of what can be printed in a consumer-grade printer...

I expected this, yeah.

With a consumer-grade 3D printer you can't print the things you need for anything much better in the rate-of-fire department than a "slam fire" firearm. To make a semi-auto firearm, you need springs and a rod that are fairly strong and heat resistant to make the shock absorber that drives the gas-powered mechanism that ejects the empty cartridge after firing. You also need a cylinder that can contain the pressure and heat of the gases from the burning powder in the cartridge, as well as provide a straight guide for the bullet so that you hit what you're aiming at. For reliability, you'll probably want a metal firing pin. Your rate-of-fire concerns mean that you're worried about magazine-fed firearms, so you also want decent springs in the magazine to reliably feed ammunition.

Because you're concerned about firearms that aren't low rate of fire, all of these things need to reliably perform for more than a handful of firings.

> ...but I've seen things claiming to be pretty complete kits...

Looks like you never did the inventory on those kits. For any kit that is actually going to give you what you're scared of, you'll find that the parts of the firearm that actually do the hard work are not going to be 3D printed.

You've professed ignorance of what can be printed in a low-end 3D printer, but do you happen to be familiar with what can be made in a high-end 3D printer? If you are, would you care to tell me how much money you need to pay for a 3D printer that will generate reliable springs, shock-absorption assembly, and barrel that will function for more than a couple of shots?

> If it's not actually possible to 3D print an effective gun, perhaps someone should make that argument in detail.

So, there's the video at [1]. That's the guy's second attempt at a barrel for .22 caliber ammo, and it's... ineffective. I also want to call your attention to this short Popular Science news article from fourteen years ago. [2] Notice the discrepancy between what's described by the headline and the article body "3D printed assault rifle made from ABS!" and the truth exposed by the picture of the actual firearm... the important parts of the firearm are made of metal, rather than ABS.

I mention that Popsci article to demonstrate to you that the "3D printed gun" hysteria is not new, and the folks making the claims that one can just go up and get a fully-functional magazine-fed semiautomatic pistol or rifle straight (and entirely) from one's consumer-grade home printer are just lying.

[0] Anyone who has decided to use "slam fire" firearms to harm someone is clearly unconcerned with safety, so they could even make several to dangle from their belt to increase their effective rate of fire.

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AA0R11oU90>

[2] <https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-07/working-as...>

You don't need to print anything, just visit your neighborhood hardware store

Correct! That's why I mentioned "slam fire" firearms.

> We used to ban the undesirable action!

The undesirable action is shooting people, right? That's still banned.

It seems like you think the undesirable action is publishing plans for machines you don't want people to have.

I want to know how on earth restricting the publication of plans could be consistent with the first amendment. That's like prohibiting the publication of books with content you disagree with.

You can make all of those things. First you pick up two sticks and rub them together real good (maybe use the inner bark of a hickory tree or similar to make some cordage s.t. you can make a bow drill and rub them even better.. you may find cottonwood to your liking but I did it with green maple when I was 11 so if you can't lmao look inwards). Using the little coal you've created, build a fire. Now pile a bunch of wood on it and starve it for oxygen. Great, you've created charcoal. Now skin a big animal and make bellows from its hide. Now build a big fire and blast it with the bellows to make it rull friggen hot. Put some rocks in it that have iron in them. Collect the iron from the bottom of the fire (exercise left to the reader) into a stone tub. Build a few forms using wood, sand, and wax in the shapes of the various parts a lathe. Melt the iron in the stone tub and pour it into the forms. Scrape the mating surfaces of the lathe parts flat and clean with a hard stone.

They cannot take this shit away. It's futile.

In fact, right up front in TFA they point out that California already bans manufacturing firearms without a license. This 3D printer regulation is entirely duplicative and unnecessary.

Which definitely fails Bruen.

guess what, the state of california on the printer bed, depicted in the article, looks close to the profile of an AR15 pistol grip.

im looking forward to the idea that the outline of Ca. may trigger false positives

I had the same hunch when I saw it, which is either pure genius on the part of the author/publisher or pure lol meme magic.

Better yet, design and popularize an AR grip that is the state of California

If this becomes law, it will give rise to a fun new form or protest art in this vain. What is the cutest thing you can design that nobody would consider to be related to guns, but which gets flagged? An obvious example... a llama sitting on the ground, legs hidden, and head held high in the air, chewing its cud. Llamas can be really cute! Sell them on Etsy/eBay/etc., printed by an out-of-state 3D printing service. I just used the EFF form to promise my state senator in Sacramento that I'd send her (and reporters that cover her) one of them if the bill passes.

Conversely, add cute animal models to gun parts.

Maybe it would be possible to just embed a prompt injection into metadata or the STL mesh itself.

Gun is stupidly to make. You just need a robust tube, a small hole in the end to trigger and you are done. Ofc it won't fire good, but still should be considered a gun

I think what will happen is that there will be an explosion in the variety of gun designs.

People will make banana, cucumber, corn, sausage, etc shaped guns.

There will be guns with electronic triggers where the trigger could be a universal TV remote or an RC car remote.

It looks even closer to a California banned "large-capacity" magazine.

https://dpmsinc.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7217d38013ee...

now that would be a curious looking AR15 with a california pistol grip, and a california magazine

> One of the most dangerous aspects of the bill is that it criminalizes individual users for common practices, like creating and using alternative open source programs with their 3D printer.

This is, by the way, very similar to attempts to curb down the right to repair, or more recently the age sniffing that also tries to destroy VPNs. Lobbyists are getting rich right now. It's amazing to see how corruption works in the USA here.

I am curious which 3d printer manufacturers/developers are poised to take advantage of this.

What machines already have locked down (or partially locked down) slicers and communications to the boards? Have those companies made a statement?

Is there any opensource firmware which can comply?

This is a massive hit on the opensource community. As a vendor/dev of an opensource CNC control board (Smoothieboard) I will be forced to limit sales to any state with these laws (our board can easily be used to bypass these protections).

Having watched over the last 13 years how our boards have led to many other machines and innovations outside of the 3d printing community over the years (OpenPNP, Wazer, Opentrons, etc) I can only see this as stifling to development in every direction.

I wonder how companies like Machmotion and other retrofit CNC controls are viewing this as well. Since this also applies to all CNC.

I don't live in any of the states proposing these types of laws...but when it does come here I doubt it will be stopped. The simple act of making your own machine for art/design will make you a criminal.

"The more rules and regulations...the more thieves and robbers."

At some point between this, age verification for the OS, and everything else, it starts to seem like a coordinated attack on computing.

They've been at it since 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Hope sanity prevails and printers stay free, don't give Europe ideas.

Leave us out of this. Americans can deal with their own gun issues.

How is enforcement supposed to work? The firmware narcs pull your printer over and checksum your SD cards against permitted firmware? Or they scan it for illegal gun-algorithms?

I am old enough to remember when the fax machine first became ubiquitous in the 80's and read about how the Soviets were threatened by it. Unauthorized use was a crime and they stationed guards at fax machines to prevent mis-use. Perhaps I naively fell for CIA propaganda at the time but if true we can hope/estimate that California Commies will fall in less than 10 years since things are moving much faster in today's world.

It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter.

We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].

It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfe...

If you have a photocopier and a few currencies you can have a lot of fun with EURion:

- look up your local laws! usually you can photocopy money as long as it's shrunken / enlarged by a specific amount

- you can cover up everything but the EURion and see what it does to the rest of the copy

- you can cover up the EURion part of the bill and print out the rest

Again, particularly in the last point, be sure to look up local laws and set the printer scaling accordingly

The Lives of Others is a seriously underrated movie. I highly suggest watching it.

The fax thing sounds unlikely?

Perhaps the CIA wanted people to use fax for secret communications, so they could use automated means to read the text instead of having people listen to hours of phone conversations?

Consumer fax calls were cleartext were they not?

I'm surprised I haven't seen any makers on the popular YouTube channels I watch say anything about this.

Where's William Osman, Adam Savage etc talking about this?

It's fascinating because there are 3+ Constitutional Rights being stepped on which makes this much more nefarious than impacting some 3D printer hobbyists. If they can get their foot in the door on this issue you can kiss all of your civil liberties goodbye.

1) The right to bear arms absolutely gives you the right to make your own gun. It would be like saying the right to vote doesn't give you the right to use a pen or enter a polling place.

2) For the politicians that lack an imagination, print out the GCODE file and put it in a paperback book. Now is the government going to claim it's illegal to disseminate a book?

3) Neither does the government have a right to "search" a 3D printer without probable cause. That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Let me get this straight. The USA has no gun control laws but legislators want to prevent people from making guns with 3D printers?

The USA has plenty of gun control laws

Some states, like California, and New York (which recently passed the first 3d printer ban), have restrictive gun control. These laws are in conflict with Supreme Court rulings supporting the 2nd Amendment, but the litigation and appeal process is very slow. It is 9 years into the Duncan case in California challenging magazine capacity limits, 7 years into the Miller case challenging California's Assault rifle ban.

Unlike the downvoters, I'm genuinely curious: do you believe a narrative that the US has no gun control laws? Sometimes I wonder if that is what people outside the US think.

It’s what approximately half of US voters think.

I think that half thinks gun laws are for the bad guys, and they’re the good guy with the gun

Nah you're not talking about the same thing. When you say it has gun control laws you're thinking "you have to wait 10 days to buy a pistol".

When he says it has no gun control laws he's thinking "after 10 days you can buy a pistol".

Poor choice of words on his part perhaps, but I think it was pretty obvious what he meant if you're not nitpicking.

Right. Combination of poor choice of words, ignorance and laziness not educating myself before posting. But yes, I am Australian, came of age around the time of Port Arthur, I cross Hoddle St a number of times every week. I remember the amnesty. The contrast in gun culture does seem stark.

I'll try to answer as accurately as I can. The narrative that I read into the media that I consume is that (1) the US has ineffective gun control laws, and (2) that there is widespread availability of a variety of guns and ammunition to anyone who wants it. I believe that gun ownership is a constitutional right in the US. I was aware that only some states are "open carry." I am not surprised to be corrected that some states have strict legislation, but I was not aware of that, and it does not seem consistent with my understanding of gun freedom in the USA.

I triangulate (1) from the ongoing mass shootings in the US and the few mass shootings that I recall from my youth: for a long time it seemed to me that the 1996 National Firearms Agreement [1] had been effective here in Australia.

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

> that there is widespread availability of a variety of guns and ammunition to anyone who wants it

Felons (largely) aren't allowed to own guns. There are other restrictions as well. Apart from that, yes, in most states most people are allowed to have firearms.

Lol what an AI response

Except it wasn't.

Like I wrote before is that it signals to the outsiders that things in CA are actually pretty well. The biggest problems are solved if the top of the agenda is to police 3D printers. That’s at least how it should be. I am being sarcastic, of course, I’ve seem the homeless in San Francisco and I am sure that’s not the only major problem.

You've also got an infestation of billionaires in the San Francisco/ San Jose area ;-)

Is somebody organizing a rally to oppose this?

The plan is to show up at the Public Safety Committee hearing on Tue June 30th. 8:30 a.m. - 1021 O Street, Room 2200

Louis Rossmann and David from 3D Printing Nerd should be there. They were at the last one on June 23rd and planned to show up again.

https://spsf.senate.ca.gov/agenda

The racketeering statutes should be applied to the treasonous elites within business, government, and banking who conspire to use "private-public" partnerships to subvert the U.S. Constitution and our indiviudual rights. I further believe these individuals and groups need to be arrested, prosecuted, and punished to the full extent that the treason clause permits.

Haven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.

California: "We need to track your 3D printer." Also California: "Why is everyone moving to Texas?

Could the solution for surveilance state creep is to creat systems to subvert faster than they are subverted ?

I'm glad I don't live in California (or America in general) but this is such BS.

I don't think we will have much of this in Europe because guns are pretty rare here and so is ammo. We just don't really have gun problems except with organised criminals but they don't 3D print them, they just buy them.

But anyway, 3D printing isn't rocket science. It never was and it sure isn't now. Anyone can build one in their garage and many of us have in fact done so when it was a new tech. If someone wants to be printing gun parts they are going to be printing gun parts.

It was partially completed lowers before this, and general machine tools before that.

I support gun control.

This feels like theater, not gun control.

Oh yeah I support gun control too, obviously. But more like a total ban (I don't even support sports shooting since many of the massacres we have seen were perpetrated with guns from that community).

In America the problem is really more that people can just buy guns, not the printers.

wow this is going to add a lot of friction to the printers they already don't make there

I solved this problem by moving my U.S. home from Sunnyvale, CA to St. Charles MO.

We all know Missouri really cares about the rights of the people.

Another fellow who hopes to fight in the American Civil War!

Why don't I see more of these guys going to the Ukraine?

What on earth are you going on about?

That’s a long way to go for 3d printing…

It probably would’ve been cheaper to just buy the gun at a store if you wanted one that bad.

Like your username!8-))

How are gun/hunting laws in MO?

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