Comment by aschla

This is a silly bill. I'm struggling to imagine how this would be practically implemented and enforced.

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

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

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

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