> blog.adafruit.com
Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly.
Click here for more information
if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician
At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.
That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.
Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.
EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.
None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.
Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...
Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...
The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.
They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.
>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.
I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?
To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.
The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.
EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.
My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.
All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.
This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem!
Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.
(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)
I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.
People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?
Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.
Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
I don't get it - afaik you can get every single part of a gun except for the lower receiver/pistol frame without any restriction - as those parts are legally defined as the 'gun' - the rest are just replacement parts.
Even for those, you can get 80% finished parts for those - just drill a few holes, and file off some tidbits, and you get an almost factory-spec gun.
I'm no expert on US gun law, but afaik, some states even allow you to make your own guns without registration, as the law defines gun manufacturing as manufacturing with the intent of selling them.
So there's plenty of options, many of them better than making a gun with a printer.
But even all this is typically overkill, I dont think criminals go to these lengths to make their own guns, they just get them from somewhere.
> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
In the 1980s, my dad machined a lot of replacement parts for a gunsmith, right here in the UK. All legal, all perfectly legit. I will say it took a hell of a lot more skill than just "download file from thingiverse, press print" - but there's nothing stopping you doing it.
And no-one is (yet) suggesting banning lathes, hacksaws, or files.
It’s becoming a thing, police don’t like to report on it because they don’t want to give people ideas. They didn’t want to report on Glock switches either. I do machining as a hobby and am interested in machining guns from an academic challenge perspective, I’ve not done it because I focus on making things I can’t buy. Guns from an academic perspective are fascinating, we’ve been making them for a long time in just about every possible way, and there is an easy way to measure and communicate quality, I.e. does it shoot and how accurate is it. I think the ban is absurd, the tech to make 3D printers / CNCs is pretty generic and someone sufficiently motivated to make a gun is unlikely to have difficulty putting together the machines to do it.
Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.
Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York
Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.
> Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns.
They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877
That case started over a year ago, I would have expected the topic to come up long ago if this was motivated by the shooting. Granted, lawmaking takes longer than public sentiment lasts, but I didn't really hear much about 3D-printed guns at the time.
The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.
You can acquire guns, gun parts, and ammunition quite easily in the UK, and entirely legally.
You need to hold a suitable licence, which isn't expensive and is mostly an exercise in proving to the police that you're not a violent psychopath who's likely to run up to people in cars and shoot them in the face.
I haven't printed a full firearm but I've printed some replacement/ergonomic parts for my legally purchased firearms. And there are people printing guns - you don't hear about it because they keep their mouth shut about it.
In countries that ban guns, 3D printers don't help much because you still can't get the other parts that aren't printed and you can't get bullets. 3D printed guns are only really viable in places where guns are already common.
The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.
No, and the blades created because of the methods used, would likely not be covered by the legislation anyway, theres a carve out for antiques and weapons made using traditional methods (now define traditional methods, because the law doesn't, but hammer and anvil would seem to be the most obvious traditional approach).
However, in practice the police continually take and often destroy legally owned antiques claiming they are zombie swords.
The law is written in such a way the police can take anything and you have to prove to a judge they aren't illegal.
is it because guns are easy to get without printing?
Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).
not a gunsmith, but cast iron manages to be both soft and brittle at the same time. and the barrel and bearing parts would have to be machined anyways. you have to try to harden it too. its probably easier to just machine the whole thing out of decent quality steel. just guessing.
Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.
This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.
My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…
People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.
Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.
If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.
We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.
Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.
Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.
i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.
How many crimes related to “foot claws”, “death stars” and “blow darts” were there before they were banned? The UK Offensive Weapons Act is a joke of a law that makes us look like morons afraid of cartoon turtles and farming tools.
It's just very easily substitutable with regular knives? Plus the Offensive Weapons Act already covers them? I would be very surprised if it has made a difference.
(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)
The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.
> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.
This will cause 3D printer usability to go down massively. A bit like the multicolored tracking dots - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots that causes the driver to tell you "you can't print black and white as you're out of yellow".
When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.
I would suspect flashing your firmware to the globally standard one would become commonplace if printers sold in NY came with a nerfed version.
On principle, yes, but also for maintenance. The nerfed firmware that's only required in a few jurisdictions is almost assuredly going to fall out-of-sync with mainline features.
"The rule saying you can't print the thing that you either weren't going to print, or you weren't going to let the rule tell you not to print, wants you to run old/broken software." No matter which side of that you fall on, you're upgrading the software.
It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary
"The government has been notified that you are attempting to 3D print a copyrighted Door Wedge™ without a license. Local law enforcement has been notified, please prepare to be arrested."
or worse...
"You are trying to print a design that is 87% similar to Egg Cup™. Acquire a limited run license for $3000 for ten runs which expires in six months? Y/N"
I could see why "people are making guns" would be at the top of the list of politicians' worries in places where there are almost no guns, and people want to keep it that way. But in the US?
Indeed. Don't want people making guns? Ban the making of guns. Banning the production of guns using a 3D printer makes zero sense, should ban CNC machines too then.
Even then it makes little sense... 3d printers are just tools. They can be used to print dangerous items, or parts of dangerous items in the same way a saw or hammer could be used to make something dangerous. To some degree this is just a problem with human nature – some people are going to want to harm people and will create or acquire items which do that.
Perhaps if it was literally as simple as downloading a model and pressing print, then in 20 minutes you had a fully working automatic rifle this would be an issue, but that technology simply doesn't exist today.
In reality if your goal is to acquire a weapon which can do lethal harm to someone you just wouldn't print a gun. Even if you wanted to kill multiple people in a place like the UK where guns are illegal you still wouldn't print a gun because you'd probably be better off just getting knife than printing a crappy gun and trying to source an effective propellant, etc.
The most insane thing about this is that it is not illegal to manufacture firearms in the United States. Providing that you do not sell or distribute the firearm, it is entirely legal to manufacture a firearm in the USA for personal use only. Laws vary state by state, of course, and it may be different in the state of New York, but assuming that this federal law has not been overridden by some state law in New York, then this proposed regulation is 100% nonsensical.
So it's okay to 3D print a gun as long as you have a serial number? That seems to reinforce that 3D printing shouldn't be banned, especially by blanket technical means.
theres a procedural problem with this, and its apparently why the feds dont require serial number on a PMF until FFL transfer is about to occur
when should you be required to serialize it?
if you serialize after it is worked to the point of being a firearm, then there is a period in time, however short, when the firearm is unserialized, thus illegal, thus serializing after creation could be obscuring a crime.
vs serializing before firearmhood, and you are now requireing a "hunk of metal"
to be serialized because of what it MAY become in the future.
and just when does a hunk of metal start becoming a firearm, the so called 80% threshold
I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?
I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.
It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.
Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"
Hmmm... this is literally the intro of the narrative arc in the game that I'm making.
Governments confiscating 3D Printers, powerful GPUs, robotic parts to prevent "simple people" the access to "dangerous technologies".
For their own good of course.
Mate, the government is responding to a concern _from the populace_. Your "simple people" are begging lawmakers to restrict access to dangerous technologies in this case.
I think a lot of people don’t realize that in the US we have the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm. There are still requirements like it must be for personal use, cannot be transferred, must have a serial number, etc.
bool isRestricted(uint8_t* /* data */) { return true; } // Might catch a few false positives
and
popup("This is a restricted model. If you are not in the state of New York, please flash the international firmware ([link]) to print restricted parts.");
It can also handle STL, step and all kinds of other formats.
People regularly circumvent "blocking technology" (i.e. DRM) because they want to watch a TV show on a plane with no wi-fi, or because they want to save $20 on a cartridge of printer ink. If someone wants to kill another human being and evade detection, I'm sure they'll find a way to print their part.
I built an 8'x4' CNC router table in 2004. I bought rack and pinion, steppers, drives, aluminum extrusion, and I had it built in one week. What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set? They would make it illegal to make 3D printers or CNC machinery without a license, and if you are caught it is tantamount to making guns.
It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.
Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.
> The obvious problem: you cannot reliably detect firearms from geometry alone.
The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.
What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?
Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.
How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?
It depends how you define the problem. Certainly a human can look at a part and say "that's a lower reciever" but you probably can make something that functions as a firearm exclusively from inconspicuous parts. For the more limited case, an AI can definitely be trained, the broader case is likely unsolvable.
It’s not nearly that hard of a problem. There are n gun files on internet, so validate the hash of those n files (g code whatever). These people aren’t cadding their own designs.
Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?
I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.
I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.
You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.
4th Amendment, unreasonable search. And of course the 2nd, but the former is more worrying. Also if printing is speech, then you can add the 1st to the list as well.
The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.
The actual wording of the law, and the way it was interpreted when I was young was that a person who does not hold an FFL may not make a firearm with the intention of selling it, but after making it, they could change their mind and then sell it.
Since, the BATF decided to interpret the prohibition as a thought-crime, enforcing a prohibition making such sales illegal, since like The Shadow, they know what lurks in the hearts of men.
The one transfer which has not yet been tested in the courts to my knowledge is an individual having made firearms, passing away, then leaving them in their will to their heirs....
If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.
I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.
For example[0]:
> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.
…
> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.
Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.
Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.
Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.
> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?
The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.
It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.
There is close to zero chance the current Supreme Court would find a law that criminalizes possession of a file describing the making a gun to be constitutional.
I wonder if you can sell the printer shell without the main PCB and just open source the main board design. Manufacture and sale of that board as a distinct entity seems tough to stop. Especially because the board can have non-3D printer use cases which it advertises as the main ones.
Also, if I wanted to print a gun, there are thousands upon thousands of older Creality and Prusa printers that I could buy used. My CR-10 isn't connected to the internet, it's running a FOSS Marlin release.
It will be very strange and funny if there is a registry of 3D printers before there's a registry of guns, and for that matter, it will be very funny if it becomes easier to buy a gun than a 3D printer, with the reasoning being that 3D printers can print guns.
There would be a presumption of intent. Probably an "aggravated" add-on to whatever charges you might be facing.
I highly doubt we would send goon squads door to door to check your firmware. Then again, given today's situation in MN, I wouldn't rule it out either.
This is a frustrating replay of the DRM (digital rights management) / copy protection debate from about 20 years ago. That time, it was about restricting fully general-purpose computers and storage devices from copying or displaying certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping media piracy. The pro-restriction side spent enormous amounts of money, engineering talent, and legal firepower, yet hackers have defeated every copy-protection system ever devised.
This time, it's about restricting fully general-purpose 3D printers (and perhaps CNC machines) from following instructions according to certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping the manufacture of firearms. I have a feeling it's going to play out in the same way, leading to an long and expensive intellectual war that accomplishes nothing.
Fighting a war against general-purpose tools is as futile as making water not wet. When will legislators learn this and give up?
This is ridiculous. As WIRED has shown [0], the only 3D printed part of most "3D printed" guns is the frame. You can do only so much with the frame alone. All the other parts are sourced online and much easier to get, other than getting a 3D printer and finding the frame of the gun you want to print it for.
Maybe these advocating for gun control laws for 3D printers should first advocate for stricter control on selling spare repair parts for guns and the websites selling them with no sort of background check.
This is another example of either stupid or malicious politicians thinking that it is possible to implement mandatory scanning on devices owned and operated by people and somehow get a meaningful true match rate without false positives. Of course this is not possible! But the negative consequences are immense.
It is exactly the same kind of stupid thinking driving ideas such as Chat Control in the EU. In the end, no child will be safer, but we will end up having a world where no-one has the right to control what software can run on their own hardware devices and where no-one has legal access to end-to-end encrypted communication.
For hundreds of years people have been making guns without 3D printers and CNC mills. All that is needed is some metal machining skills, a lathe, and some other tools.
make sure to collect a bunch of stl, gcode, etc files that you have questions about and email them to the NY and WA legislators seeking clarification. if it’s possession and not intent, maybe they need have skin in the game to understand.
I wonder if this could fall under the 1st amendement. In any case it is stupid, won't work and has nothing to do in a budget bill. Someone's getting paid
That exists, it's a functioning education system and electorate aware of current events, past history and able to reason logically and impartially, and a viable fourth estate.
The problem is, as Rousseau warned us, elections only function for so long as the voters are able to see and identify efforts to bribe them with their own money (paraphrased).
That seems like the way to go about it. Address when people are _selling_ guns. The fact that they were printed and not imported from Yugoslavia in 1990 doesn't really matter. Trying to stop people with 3D printers (Or metal tubes) from creating guns seems almost impossible.
?
Inherit gun
Request the form
Fill in the form
Background check
Visit from plod
All good
Export form
Customs were a pain, but carnet protected
Import form
Store gun at plods
Fill in form
Visit from plod
Secure gun ok
Two different EU countries
Time taken is the most 'labourious' part
And grandad's funeral
I'm very confused by this. 3D printers seem to have become a critical part of many european manufacturing workflows. Is this not the case in the usa? If -say- Province Noord-Brabant were to adopt a similar law, the western IT industry would crash.
"This printer is for collecting and research purposes only. Note that certain 3D-printed objects are forbidden by the law. If you notice any of these objects growing inside your 3D printer, power it off IMMEDIATELY"
We’re soon gonna realize that we will need manual kill switches for all tech in case it goes rogue or allows an AI installed somewhere else to go rogue.
The USA has these type of rules. Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).
I always think it's strategy to block Chinese manufacturers with super difficult to implement technology being a hard requirement.
Specially the selling face-to-face requirement here.
> Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).
The US regulations on Automatic Emergency Braking systems requirements for new cars are actually several years behind many other markets like the EU and Japan.
This isn’t really an American thing and it’s not for blocking Chinese manufacturers. Chinese automakers can make AEBs too.
The irony is it’s really easy and cheap to get a type 7 ffl, basically a background check and $150. Legally manufacture and sell all the guns you want. The reality is no one would buy your 3d printed junk anyway.
Once again another proposed law that would just make normal people's lives more difficult while doing nothing to prevent individuals who are motivated to do the illegal thing from doing it. Offline 3D printers are really not difficult to build, there are many open source plans and all of the hardware is available to order from AliExpress making it simple to do. Somewhat more technically capable people can cobble them together from alternative sources if they don't want to purchase things online.
But the bar is even lower than that since you can simply buy a gun much more easily than you could 3D print parts for one.
Any state laws trying to restrict the 2nd amendment are always going to be useless. You're not going to stop someone who's determined at causing harm with firearms in a country where firearms outnumber people. All these little "bandaid" solutions do is allow for fishing expeditions by police and prosecutors.
On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.
What if i want to print a nerf gun for my kid? They have clearly not thought this through. I thik they should gather experts BEFORE signing this in to law :
Feasibility escape hatch: If the working group determines it’s “not technologically feasible,” no regulations are required… until the group decides it is feasible. This is good, but weak sauce: the working group could be stuffed with non-experts who just say what the legislators want.
I can't believe they haven't tried banning anyone from having a knee mill if they don't have an FFL yet (or just banned it entirely). It's not hard to convert an old inexpensive Bridgeport to CNC or just mill the parts by hand. Pandora's box is already open, and all this is is just useless flailing.
I think it's interesting to note that not only is there precedent for this type of "blocking technology that prevents the printing of certain things"[1], but it's also inconsequential and uncontroversial enough that most of the people here obviously have never even heard of it.
We lost the ability to print $50 bills with our HPs[2] and it had no noticeable negative impact on society. I'm not sure why losing the ability to print a gun with our Prusas will be any different.
The printing of money has primarily lied within the purview of the government from the start. Money is one of the few modern physical item, off the top of my head, that this statement applies to. Maybe there are seals or other official marks that this also applies to, but all of these items fall into a similar category.
So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.
Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.
Good news, as the article notes, the proposed regulation creates a working group to determine of it is feasible and won't require any further regulation if it is found nonfeasible. If you're right and this does prove to be "not technically possible", then nothing will actually change.
Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban. It would be like if printer manufacturers weren't just asked to prevent the printing of US dollars, but anything that looks like money, having an ability to detect if something is money-like based on look and feel alone, without relying on an existing database or hardcoded watermarks.
Your implication makes me think that you assume that this useful-yet-not-overreaching detection tech is possible. Do you have any ideas for how this would be implemented? Because in my mind, the only way to ensure compliance would be either a manual check (uplink to the manufacturer or relevant government authority, where an employee or a model trained on known gun models tries to estimate the probability of a print being part of a gun) or a deterministic algorithm that makes blanket bans on anything remotely gun-like (pipe-like parts, parts where any mechanical action is similar to anything that could be in a gun). These scenarios seem to be both a lot more annoying and a lot more invasive. There's no negative consequences for tuning detection to always err on the side of caution and flood the user with false-positive refusals to print. Both scenarios are obviously a lot more involved and complicated than a basic algorithm checking if you're trying to print an image of a US dollar. Therefore I don't see a reason why drawing this comparison is useful. The only thing these implementations have in common is that they're detecting something.
>Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban.
If you have seen that other people have pointed it out, you have already seen my response, but I guess people keep repeating the question, so I need to repeat the answer. This regulation establishes a working group to investigate this technology. If the technical aspects are as difficult as you claim, the proposed regulation will basically be voided. Your concerns are already factored into the proposal and therefore aren't a valid argument against the proposal.
That said, the regulation also makes it sound like "implementing a check for a specific banned print" would be an acceptable outcome of this law. From page 11 of the actual proposal:
>(b) be authorized to create and maintain a library of firearms blue-
print files and illegal firearm parts blueprint files, and maintain and
update the library, including by adding new files that enable the three-
dimensional printing of firearms or illegal firearm parts. In further-
ance of this authorization, the division may designate another govern-
ment agency or an academic or research institution in this state to
assist with the creation and maintenance of the file library. The
library shall be made available to three-dimensional printer manufactur-
ers, vendors with demonstrated expertise in software development, or
experts in computational design or public safety, for the development or
improvement of blocking technology and firearm blueprint detection algo-
rithms. The division shall establish safeguards to prevent unauthorized
access to and misuse of the library and shall prohibit all persons who
are granted access to the library from misusing, selling, disseminating,
or otherwise publishing its contents.
Think of it like the early stages of internet copyright protections, the first step is just cross-referencing the design with a list of known banned designs. Just like an early Youtuber could have mirrored banned videos to bypass copyright detection, people will likely still be able to manipulate designs in certain ways to get past this sort of ban. That's ok. Regulation like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to still be worth doing. The goal here is to make it more difficult for some random person with no expertise to buy a 3d printer, download some files, and print a weapon.
I'm willing to admit that it's entirely possible that a full on-demand analysis of whether a shape could potentially be part of a gun might not currently be possible and it might be years before that becomes feasible, but until then, simply banning a handful of the most popular STL files would still have value.
I was bounced out of a Kinkos circa 2000 with my grandparents for attempt to counterfeit Pokémon cards on the photocopier. Mind you I didn’t seek to make illegal copies. I just wanted to photocopy and color in and draw on my own artistic creations. Fun times learning about copyright mechanisms and fraud as a kindergartner.
The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.
I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.
Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
>Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed.
Here's a relevant article that addresses a lot of these points.[1]
Counterfeiting money is bad, and should be illegal (the wisdom of forcing such software into printers notwithstanding). Manufacturing your own products is good, and shouldn't be illegal.
Correct. And even if this bill passes you can build your own printer from common parts or drive across state lines to the nearest Micro Center. It’s useless posturing regulation for the sake of looking tough.
Uh, I'd say that something has in fact been lost in that every single printer sold watermarks every document printed regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.
There are plenty of people who change their behavior because that tracking is in place, regardless of if what they are doing (or would be doing) is in any way illegal.
Moreover, every person who has mostly printed in b/w on a colour device, but then been blocked by printing because the yellow cartridge has been emptied printing such watermarks is negatively affected by this.
>regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.
Maybe the way this applies to everything should be an indication that it's unrelated to the point I made about blocking the printing of certain things.
Clearly, if politicians are afraid of the people, it's a sign that the people aren't happy with the work they're doing. Maybe the solution is to start delivering the results that people want.
Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?
Edit, reading further it's even more insane:
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.” That’s a lot of shop & manufacturing equipment!
Exactly. The zip gun people are mostly just weird nerds, and not professional assassins. The latter seems to be doing it the old fashioned way which leaves no traces - buy cheap gun, file off serials, throw it in the river after.
Zip guns may get past a metal detector, but not the standard x-ray luggage scan. To the extent it'll make it past the x-ray screeners, it's because they let all kinds of stuff through, because it's a poor way to screen for dangerous things, and they are not high-skill employees, they are relatively cheap labor.
Source: I used to travel every week flying home Friday, cycle clothes out of my travel bags, and be on the road again on Sunday night. I learned to my horror I'd been flying with a pair of scissors for at least 5 weeks - during which, TSA forced me to open a Christmas present for my sister and throw away some hand lotion which was in too big of a bottle.
There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.
Back in college I was flying home immediately after the end of the semester for a family reunion. Flew there, attended, then flew back. On the flight back, I got stopped for additional search by TSA. Immediately, I remembered that I had left my lab dissection kit in my backpack which included a razor blade and long, pointed, pick-like tool. But it turns out that neither of those are what got me stopped....I had also forgotten a half full bottle of gatorade. They were however happy to confiscate my dissection kit as well, after I had (stupidly) informed them of it.
Same thing happened to me -- had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it. They looked at their "regulations" and vice grips weren't on it so they let me through. You know who didn't let it through though - I left it in the bag and the Chinese security confiscated it on the way back.
btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
3D printed guns haven't been zip guns in a long time. That reads as willful ignorance. Only the receiver or frame are controlled. Every other part can be purchased online without any checks. Hoffman Tactical's Orca and a myriad of pistol frame can be used to produce weapons on par with commercial weapons. Many commercial pistols are polymer frames. A good 3d printed pistol frame is no different than a cast nylon polymer frame.
If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.
3d printing ghost guns with a 100% plastic construction is a silly thing only done for clickbait, and probably comprises less than a tenth of a percent of 3d printing gun related activity. Most people are printing frames, parts, flair, accessories, mounts, things like that, and using sensible real metal parts for things involving explosive forces and danger.
Not is it only dumb, but it is plain unimplementable. Are they saying the HMI interfaces on CNC machines need to be able to parse the GCode generated by any of dozens of CAM software options out there and divine if it might be gun related? That is not possible.
> Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?
Even in countries with strict gun control, like the UK, the most serious criminals can get hold of guns. And if lesser criminals 3D printed a gun, they'd struggle to get hold of ammo for it. So they stick to knives.
Reading up on this, the remaining UK incidents seem to involve mostly "converted blank-firing copies", with the NCA describing 3D printed firearms as "low status". And as you say ammo is highly controlled here.
The only time a 3d printed gun is useful is if your country is occupied and you have a chance to secretly shoot one of the occupiers if only you could get a gun past their confiscation. Otherwise it is an interesting toy that you might shoot once to say you did it.
I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.
Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits, so at least there is a log and provenance chain someone could use in case it's used for bad stuff? Sounds like if you'd want to avoid that (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example), you could use a offline 3D printer.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
The implication with this type of argument is that if someone is willing to break the law against murder, they'd be willing/able to break the laws around legally purchasing or owning a gun.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
What are you referring to as "it" here? When OP mentioned getting a gun from "off the street", that's referring to obtaining one illegally, without a provenance chain or any permitting.
If you want to shoot a CEO, its far easier to buy an untraceable gun on the streets (or obtain a non-serialized 80% lower receiver that you drill yourself) rather than an unreliable fully 3D-printed gun.
> (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example)
Dude literally sat in a McDonalds with all the evidence on him including the 3D printed gun. The idea of phantom murderers wielding 3D printed weapons is nothing more than a rich guy/CEO anxiety fantasy.
If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.
Really garbage administration they have in NY. Hochul and a lot of her ilk have done things like block right to repair after years of activists trying to get it passed.
The way it worked was as follows:
1. Local groups push to get right to repair passed
2. Fails repeatedly for years
3. They finally get it past the houses and onto the governor's desk
4. Governor gets a visit from a 'unknown' (hint likely Apple) lobbyist, refuses to sign even though they have to
5. They wait until the very last second and then adds last minute 'amendments' neutering the bill.
6. Their sycophants then try to shut down any discussion on Reddit/other social platforms from anyone who criticizes the bill.
They are going to keep doing this crap, the government needs to be voted out but just like NJ, NY is captured by really corrupt 'neoliberal' Democrats so its an uphill battle to get someone better in there. The incentives are not there: In NJ and most of NY the economic base is the wealthy suburbanites who like the way things are and will fight efforts to make radical change. That results in a lot of 'think of the children' type people who would welcome any and all bans on things like 3D printing of guns.
If anything, ghost guns should be decriminalized to protect people from the rising danger of ghost-related deaths in NYC. Now that is a startup idea I can get behind.
Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"
A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
You can buy jigs to complete what are called 80% receivers with a drill press (and (optionally a router) - could do it on your kitchen table in an evening for a couple hundred bucks.
Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.
I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".
Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.
Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.
If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.
I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.
Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.
Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".
How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.
Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.
Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?
We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.
Good point, as a further example see all the "luck" countries like Ukraine have been having with even slightly modified "consumer" drone stuff applied to this kind of application
Too complicated - just strap it to a flying drone that can then slam it to the target at high speed.
Works well enough and is in wide use, many people just don't seem to have realized the implications - kinda like with machineguns and barbed wire at the start of WW1.
The first person to build ChatGPT with limbs wins.
The British army only has maybe 20,000 actual soldiers. You could manufacture enough robots to kill them all in a week. Then you’d just have a whole country.
It’ll completely change the game. There’s no point selling it to a state for their army, when you could just instantly make yourself the owner of the state.
It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".
I thought all printers had in place block to stop printing of money so something like that to stop printing and making of firearms etc is not unrealistic
It’s more complicated than that. A 2D rectangle with certain graphics is entirely different than a single part of a gun which may really look like anything. Would you recognize a trigger sear if I showed you one?
And if 3DP gun designers get blocked, they just have to alter the design slightly. Vs counterfeit currency which always and forever must look the same. If the 3DP database detection is loosened to catch lookalikes, then you have false positives for the guy making a desk lamp whose part just kinda sorta looks like a trigger sear.
Also, I am not aware of any open source 2D printers built from the ground up, but 3DP got started that way. So bypassing this would be insanely easy.
To get it through security somewhere with metal detectors. That's probably the only reason to specifically fear a 3D-printed gun in a nation full of proper guns.
Of course, 3D printed plastic ammo isn't likely to be very effective.
(Maybe they're worried that before long, 3D printing with metal will almost as easy and affordable as plastic 3D printing is now, and people will be printing off entire arsenals of very effective firearms?)
Is this a real question? Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses. Printing a gun does not. Printing a gun also does not need to wait for a multi-day delay from a background check. Depending on the printer, it could just take multiple days to print.
Asking why someone would want to do this is just not trying very hard in the conversation is actually pretty myopic.
Note that Washington's similar HB 2321 defines a "3D printer" as any additive or subtractive manufacturing machine. So these idiots want to regulate CNC machines too.
Public comments can (and should!) be submitted here: https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/2321 Keep them polite and respectful; insults and threats won't help.
Weird how this is happening simultaneously in many states. Washington is considering a vague 3d printer and CNC law to address ghost guns. Gun crimes are mostly committed with regular pistols but that isn’t stopping politicians from passing all sorts of restrictions under the guise of keeping people safe. Meanwhile these states have serious budget problems that go unaddressed …
It is not weird in the slightest. These things are coordinated at the state level all the time.
This is probably one of those good tests of "is your 'conspiracy theory' meter properly calibrated", because if it's going off right now and you are in disbelief, you've got it calibrated incorrectly. This is so completely routine that there's an entire branch of law codified in this way called the "Uniform Commercial Code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code and see the organization running this' home page at https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc .
And that's just a particular set of laws with an organization dedicated to harmonizing all the various states laws for their particular use cases. It's not the one and only gateway to such laws, it's just an example of a cross-state law coordination so established that it has an entire organization dedicated to it. Plenty of other stuff is coordinated at the state level across multiple states all the time.
Policy in the pursuit of easy political narrative wins looks like this. US gun crime is a national issue, and therefore unsolvable in the current political climate, so useless posturing like this is what we're left with.
The real fix is something like a nationwide licensing system like for cars, with auditing of weapons and weapon storage.
No thanks. We don't need law enforcement checking weapon storage in private homes. And there's already a national background check system for most legal firearm transfers.
I didn't say it was politically feasible. I'm just saying that's how you control gun crime.
It's mostly handguns, and about half of firearm homicides are with illegally trafficked arms. They can be trafficked because there's no way to account for the guns.
All this rests on the assumption that anyone actually wants to solve gun homicide. A lot of people SAY they do, and that's how you get shit like 3D printer bans.
The real fix is to leave it alone. You're wasting political capital by pushing for gun control yet again. You'd want the Trump administration to have access to a database of gun owners like the Black Panthers? Seriously?
Year 2027: beep boop beep boop, scan your implanted rfid digital ID chip to authenticate:
- your social media consumption and any post you make
- your app installations
- registering a new account or keeping an already existing one
- driving your car
- 3D printing something
- watching a YouTube video
- buying anything online
- receive any gov support or healthcare
- any transaction including cash ones
And all of that is synced with your digital wallet (TM) for convenience, internet is not needed!!
I am so glad we are protecting the 16yo from accessing tiktok, or something something deportations if you are the other team!!
Trump is gonna cancel or fuck with elections in 2026 like he has said multiple times he will, and by 2027 and 2028, he will likely install himself as 3d term president.
Its gonna be an era of economic decline and social dirtiness as shit gets worse and worse and eventually things like crime is gonna rise up again as the lower income sector transitions into the "nothing to lose" crowd.
Instead of containing the anger of the public by doing good politics and thus reduce radicalizations and peace by plenty of filled pots, its surveilance, panopticons, terror and ever more laws sas lids. If you can't atand the heat get out of the kitchen.
Washington state is pursuing a similar law at a similar time. Presumably pushed by the same advocacy organization, whichever one it is. The Washington one seems impossible to actually comply with -- how the hell is the computer in a CNC machine going to figure out what geometries are gun-like? A de facto ban on additive or subtractive manufacturing is pretty dumb.
I wrote as good an opposition as I could. Basically, I opposed it on multiple principles.
From the top, I absolutely detest this kind of censorship. But the bill states that the implementation will be defined (or rendered infeasible - yeah right) AFTER the bill passes. Said decision will be punted to a "working group" of industry folks. That alone stinks, since it places a lot of abuse potential outside of duly elected representation.
If you haven't bought a 3D printer yet then I think it's a good time to invest in one. This is going to be one of those technologies that slowly the government will erode our access to, so getting on board now is the best course of action.
Gun nut Eric Raymond was cheering when the first printable guns came out. Checkmate gun grabbers, you'll never prevent us from having our shooty-shootys now! Haha! I thought, well the answer to that is simple: simply declare 3D printers to be weapons. You know, like how the Feds declared encryption to be "munitions".
This is batshit crazy leftist authoritarianism. And because it's so silly, it will achieve nothing but expose its peddlers as morons and give more votes to Republicans just by making them appear saner in comparison. BAD.
Yet another reason why fully open hardware and open software is so important + of course a fully open source slicing pipeline.
It might be a bit less convenient than a shiny vendor locked Bamboolab closed machine but it is perfectly doable.
A filament 3D printer is basically just a control board, firmware (like Marlin), bunch of off the shelf steppers, two thermistors, heatbed and nozzle heater. If you have modern stepper drivers you don't even need end stop switches.
Put this together and you have a machine you fully own and control and can easily repair or upgrade. Then just feed it GCODE generated by something like Prusa Slic3r from STL/obj/step files and that's it.
Avoids any shenanigans like forcing you to use only blessed consumables or trying to dictate what you can print.
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.”
...what? This some of the stupidest, most out of touch garbage I've ever read and clearly made by uneducated lawmakers being out of their depth.
Yet another case of lawmakers proliferating the “you should not have root access” meme. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern political landscape and a backdoor to much less well intentioned actions (intentional and unintended).
Not all AI assisted writing is "slop," especially if, as your screenshot shows, significant portions of the article were written by a human. Drawing attention to any and all hints of AI assisted writing is not the public service announcement you think it is.
Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.
I actually think AI-human collaboration is quite beneficial. I have a more fundamental issue that it's just bad writing when you use pure LLM generated text. My general feeling is "why should you expect me to spend my time reading something that you didn't care enough to spend your time writing?"
Also, most of the suggestions provided in the AI generated section are just useless. While I think this law is terrible, the suggestions provided completely contradict what the lawmakers are intending. I'll explain what I mean with some of the suggestions provided.
> Narrow the Scope to Intent, Not the Tool
This is essentially a suggestion to throw out the entire law as written. Sure, but this is meaningless advice to lawmakers.
> Drop Mandatory File Scanning
This is the same suggestion as before but rephrased.
> Exempt Open-Source and Offline Toolchains
This is asking them to create a massive loophole in their own law making it useless. Once again, essentially just asking them to throw out the entire law.
> Add safe harbor for sellers and educators who don’t modify equipment or participate in unlawful manufacture.
Two fundamentally different concepts here jammed into one idea. Do you want to add safe harbor for sellers who don't modify equipment or do you want to throw out the entire law and have it not apply to anybody who doesn't participate in unlawful manufacture? These are very different ideas, it makes no sense to treat them as one cohesive concept.
All of these are signals that not much thought went into this. If a human had used AI for ideas and writing assistance, but participated in the writing process as an active contributor, I think they would have caught things like this. I don't think they would have chosen to make multiple bullet points semantically identical. I think they would have chosen to actually cite specific aspects of the law and propose concrete solutions.
Another example, one of their suggestions is to improve the working groups to add specific members. Genuinely a fairly good idea. Having actually read the law, I would have cited the specific passage, which requires that the working group "SHALL INCLUDE EXPERTS IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIGITAL SECURITY, FIREARMS REGULATION, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY, AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DISCIPLINES DETERMINED BY THE DIVISION TO BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS PRESCRIBED HEREIN." I would question, who do they consider to be experts in additive manufacturing? Why does it seem that the working group will be far more heavily weighed towards policy experts as opposed to 3D printing experts? The article suggests that "standards will default to large vendors" yet there is no evidence here that vendors will be included at all.
> Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram
The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.
Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.
Pangram has extremely high accuracy. While there's no way to prove AI use, it's a very good proxy for that metric. It's obvious to my eyes that the article is written with AI, I supplied Pangram as a citation to convince people such as yourself who didn't notice the AI usage when reading the article.
My HP printer already does this. It blocks random prints on paper. I once tried to print a target practice thing for snowballs and it would always fail. There were other cases too. My very expensive printer has some other very sketchy issues with it. It's easily the least secure device I have connected to my network. This surveillance state has gone too far and I'm so sick of it.
Why have you allowed a printer access to the network? You should tell the router to drop every packet that is going outside of the lan from this mac address.
I really dislike this whole debate because I never wanted to be lumped in with 3D gun printing weirdos.
When I first told my very non-technical somewhat new friend about my 3D printer, they looked really concerned and told me they weren’t comfortable with it because of how people make weapons with them.
I’ve had to spend a lot of time building trust and showing that I’m not one of those weirdos.
Ultimately I don’t think any kind of printed gun banning law has a tangible impact (it’s not like guns with serial numbers aren’t regularly getting away with murder), but what I don’t like is that the law and discussion around it validates this stupidity and continues to lump me in with gun weirdos.
It’s weird to own a gun. It’s weird to print a gun. I don’t even think the 2nd amendment is very necessary and is clearly not capable of stopping tyranny (and the amendment itself says that’s not its purpose anyway).
At this point we could probably get a coalition of Trump cult members who have no consistent ideology (Trump doesn’t like guns) and “liberal pansies” to just repeal the 2nd amendment and become a normal country.
This seems like a problem with your friend moreso than with 3D printing in general. Most people I know who hear about 3D printing don't immediately think of making weapons. Toys and weird gadgets tend to come to mind first, or maybe an office accessory like my laptop stands. The fact that your friend immediately jumped to the conclusion that it's for making weapons says a lot about the way they think about the world.
I agree that the law seems to validate the viewpoint, but I disagree that it's a common one, nor that you should have had to spend time building that trust.
A normal country? Like Iran that just slaughters or imprisons anybody that speaks or acts against the government. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back. Before then we would prefer to resolve our grievances peacefully in court.
perhaps people printing their own guns at home is actually quite bad and in fact should be controlled in some way without it being seen as a fundamental incursion on your rights.
The idea that we should let government software run on our printers to prevent the rate case where someone both wants to print a gun and do some crime with it is absurd. There are more important 1st and 4th amendment considerations here
NYC doesn't have a gun problem. They regulate the shit out of guns to no effect. They should regress closer to the national mean and spend the resources on stuff that matters more. And even if they do want to regulate it, micromanaging everyone's 3d printers is not the way to do it both because of bad efficacy and bad precedent.
I can more or less understand where the legislator might be coming from: laser printers and copiers are already mandated to include fingerprinting in the output and disrupt any attempt of copying money.
> blog.adafruit.com Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information
if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
This is part of the wider problem and heavily relates to the right to repair
Cory talked about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs
> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician
At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.
That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.
1 reply →
Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.
EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
10 replies →
Actually I tried to use it just for fun on some vouchers, but it didn't work on the copy machines I tried. They just happily photocopied the vouchers.
1 reply →
Is this true? Couldn't I put the mark on a page of my book and photocopiers would still detect and refuse to copy that page?
1 reply →
No idea why this comment is getting downvoted so hard. This was exactly what I thought of too, and it provides a concrete answer to the question.
There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.
Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.
We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.
1 reply →
Prusa is still kicking... if open source hardware is your priority.
1 reply →
3D printer hardware is pretty simple. All the magic happens in software, and there's plenty of open-source options.
Sovol open source hardware and software.
AnyCubic AMS is great
None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.
Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).
5 replies →
IP/BigCo lawyers are probably the main lobbyists behind this article in the bill so I would think soonish
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...
Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...
The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.
They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.
>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.
I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?
4 replies →
To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.
[dead]
The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.
EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.
My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.
All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.
44 replies →
I’ll just build my own 3D printer lol. Did it college 15 years ago. I’ll do it again.
"And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?"
You see how it's impossible to regulate technology? I don't want my tax dollars funding impossible missions.
3 replies →
I would unironically love to see the diy 3d printer scene come back.
5 replies →
You can do that if it is still legal.
This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem!
Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.
(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)
I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.
People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?
Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.
Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
I don't get it - afaik you can get every single part of a gun except for the lower receiver/pistol frame without any restriction - as those parts are legally defined as the 'gun' - the rest are just replacement parts.
Even for those, you can get 80% finished parts for those - just drill a few holes, and file off some tidbits, and you get an almost factory-spec gun.
I'm no expert on US gun law, but afaik, some states even allow you to make your own guns without registration, as the law defines gun manufacturing as manufacturing with the intent of selling them.
So there's plenty of options, many of them better than making a gun with a printer.
But even all this is typically overkill, I dont think criminals go to these lengths to make their own guns, they just get them from somewhere.
4 replies →
FCUs are not tracked in US (aside from full auto trigger groups, which however are classified as "machineguns" in their own right).
Receivers are tracked.
1 reply →
> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
21 replies →
In the 1980s, my dad machined a lot of replacement parts for a gunsmith, right here in the UK. All legal, all perfectly legit. I will say it took a hell of a lot more skill than just "download file from thingiverse, press print" - but there's nothing stopping you doing it.
And no-one is (yet) suggesting banning lathes, hacksaws, or files.
It’s becoming a thing, police don’t like to report on it because they don’t want to give people ideas. They didn’t want to report on Glock switches either. I do machining as a hobby and am interested in machining guns from an academic challenge perspective, I’ve not done it because I focus on making things I can’t buy. Guns from an academic perspective are fascinating, we’ve been making them for a long time in just about every possible way, and there is an easy way to measure and communicate quality, I.e. does it shoot and how accurate is it. I think the ban is absurd, the tech to make 3D printers / CNCs is pretty generic and someone sufficiently motivated to make a gun is unlikely to have difficulty putting together the machines to do it.
Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.
6 replies →
This law in new york will also affect CNC machines and laser cutter AFAIK. Everything that is computer controlled that can "create" a 3d object.
Or a file. You can make a perfectly good gun with a damned file.
1 reply →
Or fire and a hammer
Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York
Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.
> Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns.
They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877
And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
The premise here would have to be that it was previously difficult for the majority of the population to obtain a weapon.
Actual shootings with 3D printed guns are relatively rare but it’s come up because Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one.
That case started over a year ago, I would have expected the topic to come up long ago if this was motivated by the shooting. Granted, lawmaking takes longer than public sentiment lasts, but I didn't really hear much about 3D-printed guns at the time.
1 reply →
And they're still doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.
EDIT: I think you mean "allegedly"
12 replies →
Given the potential chain of custody issues, I'm not sure we can be certain a 3D printed gun was involved at all.
The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.
You can acquire guns, gun parts, and ammunition quite easily in the UK, and entirely legally.
You need to hold a suitable licence, which isn't expensive and is mostly an exercise in proving to the police that you're not a violent psychopath who's likely to run up to people in cars and shoot them in the face.
I haven't printed a full firearm but I've printed some replacement/ergonomic parts for my legally purchased firearms. And there are people printing guns - you don't hear about it because they keep their mouth shut about it.
In countries that ban guns, 3D printers don't help much because you still can't get the other parts that aren't printed and you can't get bullets. 3D printed guns are only really viable in places where guns are already common.
3 replies →
> who this is coming from and why
I would suspect it is at least partly because the gun that killed the United Healthcare CEO was partly 3D printed.
In other words, the most famous murder/assassination in NY in modern memory.
The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygxGrxCEOp0
[2] https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/BWA-Ammo-V...
I've been saying the same about deepfake noods of hot girls.
Something something about distribution.
Does the UK ban shows like Forged in Fire that teach you how to make all sorts of specific blades?
No, and the blades created because of the methods used, would likely not be covered by the legislation anyway, theres a carve out for antiques and weapons made using traditional methods (now define traditional methods, because the law doesn't, but hammer and anvil would seem to be the most obvious traditional approach).
However, in practice the police continually take and often destroy legally owned antiques claiming they are zombie swords.
The law is written in such a way the police can take anything and you have to prove to a judge they aren't illegal.
One very large example of such police practices: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RPm4Pts23Qg
Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?
Preemptive regulation is absurd.
Quite famously, Luigi Mangione. (allegedly)
Of course, this is silliness since it is very easy to just buy a gun in the US, and it is also legal to make one in your garage.
is it because guns are easy to get without printing?
Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).
not a gunsmith, but cast iron manages to be both soft and brittle at the same time. and the barrel and bearing parts would have to be machined anyways. you have to try to harden it too. its probably easier to just machine the whole thing out of decent quality steel. just guessing.
5 replies →
Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.
This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.
My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…
Lower receiver being the serialized part isn’t universal. Many firearms have only a single receiver or only the upper receiver is serialized.
> Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!
People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.
Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.
If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.
We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.
Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.
Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.
i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.
How many crimes related to “foot claws”, “death stars” and “blow darts” were there before they were banned? The UK Offensive Weapons Act is a joke of a law that makes us look like morons afraid of cartoon turtles and farming tools.
It's just very easily substitutable with regular knives? Plus the Offensive Weapons Act already covers them? I would be very surprised if it has made a difference.
(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)
1 reply →
Would they really do less stabbing if they had to use a mundane kitchen knife instead of a 'tacticool' knife or 'ninja sword'?
4 replies →
The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.
> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
you can buy every individual component and build it yourself, it's absurd (I did some years ago)
maybe amazon/aliexpress is also too powerful for you own good then ;p
This will cause 3D printer usability to go down massively. A bit like the multicolored tracking dots - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots that causes the driver to tell you "you can't print black and white as you're out of yellow".
As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.
To mandate tracking dots they would first have to admit they exist.
When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.
4 replies →
>buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers *sold or delivered in New York* to include “blocking technology”.
I.e don't buy your printer in New York. Pick it up out of state. Problem solved.
Yes, this is rent seeking, and yes New York is gonna New York, but not a big deal.
I would suspect flashing your firmware to the globally standard one would become commonplace if printers sold in NY came with a nerfed version.
On principle, yes, but also for maintenance. The nerfed firmware that's only required in a few jurisdictions is almost assuredly going to fall out-of-sync with mainline features.
"The rule saying you can't print the thing that you either weren't going to print, or you weren't going to let the rule tell you not to print, wants you to run old/broken software." No matter which side of that you fall on, you're upgrading the software.
1 reply →
It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary
"The government has been notified that you are attempting to 3D print a copyrighted Door Wedge™ without a license. Local law enforcement has been notified, please prepare to be arrested."
or worse...
"You are trying to print a design that is 87% similar to Egg Cup™. Acquire a limited run license for $3000 for ten runs which expires in six months? Y/N"
I could see why "people are making guns" would be at the top of the list of politicians' worries in places where there are almost no guns, and people want to keep it that way. But in the US?
Indeed. Don't want people making guns? Ban the making of guns. Banning the production of guns using a 3D printer makes zero sense, should ban CNC machines too then.
The gun industry does not earn anything from 3D-printed guns, so those kinds of guns are "free game" for the law makers.
Exactly. In the US you don't even need a license if you want to manufacture a gun for yourself. The idea of it being made illegal is far from reality.
Even then it makes little sense... 3d printers are just tools. They can be used to print dangerous items, or parts of dangerous items in the same way a saw or hammer could be used to make something dangerous. To some degree this is just a problem with human nature – some people are going to want to harm people and will create or acquire items which do that.
Perhaps if it was literally as simple as downloading a model and pressing print, then in 20 minutes you had a fully working automatic rifle this would be an issue, but that technology simply doesn't exist today.
In reality if your goal is to acquire a weapon which can do lethal harm to someone you just wouldn't print a gun. Even if you wanted to kill multiple people in a place like the UK where guns are illegal you still wouldn't print a gun because you'd probably be better off just getting knife than printing a crappy gun and trying to source an effective propellant, etc.
The most insane thing about this is that it is not illegal to manufacture firearms in the United States. Providing that you do not sell or distribute the firearm, it is entirely legal to manufacture a firearm in the USA for personal use only. Laws vary state by state, of course, and it may be different in the state of New York, but assuming that this federal law has not been overridden by some state law in New York, then this proposed regulation is 100% nonsensical.
it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...
So it's okay to 3D print a gun as long as you have a serial number? That seems to reinforce that 3D printing shouldn't be banned, especially by blanket technical means.
1 reply →
NY and CA have the most strict gun regulations
1 reply →
theres a procedural problem with this, and its apparently why the feds dont require serial number on a PMF until FFL transfer is about to occur
when should you be required to serialize it?
if you serialize after it is worked to the point of being a firearm, then there is a period in time, however short, when the firearm is unserialized, thus illegal, thus serializing after creation could be obscuring a crime.
vs serializing before firearmhood, and you are now requireing a "hunk of metal" to be serialized because of what it MAY become in the future.
and just when does a hunk of metal start becoming a firearm, the so called 80% threshold
1 reply →
I don't think they know what Ctrl+Alt+Delete means.
They want to restart it? They want to go to the screen where you can switch users or sign out?
Do they think it's just a fancier way of saying delete?
The folks at adafruit probably do know, but it does make sense if you expand the words: "Control, Alter, and Delete"
That's more charitable. Alt is still short for Alternate though, not Alter.
7 replies →
That's bullshit (IMO) and the post author (Phillip Torrone - I believe that's one of the owners of Adafruit) is obviously ignorant in this regard.
That said, what he's actually talking about in the post makes a lot of sense. That is the important part.
I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?
Meta+L is the lock hotkey on all major operating systems!
1 reply →
Reminds me of people who think penultimate is just super-duper-ultimate.
Or “epicenter”.
All prefixes eventually become intensifiers?
"Irregardless"
2 replies →
It has been used as an idiom to mean stopping or restarting something (the former in this case) for decades: https://wordspy.com/words/ctrl-alt-delete/
I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.
It means restart. It has never meant stop. Even the link you provide says:
> n. A metaphoric mechanism with which one can reset, restart, or rethink something.
That's what's confusing. The headline makes no sense because it's not about restarting.
Alter the control, and delete!
In modern Windows, the three-key salute is a way to lock your session securely. Maybe that's what they mean: locking it up?
It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.
3 replies →
Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"
Maybe we should just install this keypad on our printers and be done with it:
https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/ctrl-alt-del...
Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.
Hey, it's similar to Weird Al's song:
Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you
Perhaps they were using Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the Task Manager so that they can kill an unruly process?
This is more like installing anti-virus on your 3d printer.
I don’t want an antivirus on my (hypothetical because I don’t have one) 3D printer. I want it to dumbly print whatever it is I send to it.
2 replies →
It's the same as control open-apple reset.
I don't think there's a reading that suggests it's a good thing for 3D printers. The rest of the page confirms that.
Hmmm... this is literally the intro of the narrative arc in the game that I'm making. Governments confiscating 3D Printers, powerful GPUs, robotic parts to prevent "simple people" the access to "dangerous technologies". For their own good of course.
Mate, the government is responding to a concern _from the populace_. Your "simple people" are begging lawmakers to restrict access to dangerous technologies in this case.
Don't conflate "populace" with "lobbying groups". The populace wants health care and this ain't it.
5 replies →
Do you have any evidence that any significant number of Americans want this restriction on 3D printers?
I think a lot of people don’t realize that in the US we have the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm. There are still requirements like it must be for personal use, cannot be transferred, must have a serial number, etc.
None of what you said is true.
> the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm
There has been a right to manufacture firearms since before the Revolutionary War, and which has remained a right continually since.
> it must be for personal use
Not necessarily; though you can't conduct business without a federal license, you can, for example, manufacture a firearm to be given as a gift.
> cannot be transferred
See above.
>must have a serial number
Not only is that not true, a federal judge struck down the prohibition on defacing serial numbers in United States v. Randy Price (2022):
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvsd.23...
This is an easy one:
bool isRestricted(uint8_t* /* data */) { return true; } // Might catch a few false positives
and
popup("This is a restricted model. If you are not in the state of New York, please flash the international firmware ([link]) to print restricted parts.");
It can also handle STL, step and all kinds of other formats.
People regularly circumvent "blocking technology" (i.e. DRM) because they want to watch a TV show on a plane with no wi-fi, or because they want to save $20 on a cartridge of printer ink. If someone wants to kill another human being and evade detection, I'm sure they'll find a way to print their part.
I built an 8'x4' CNC router table in 2004. I bought rack and pinion, steppers, drives, aluminum extrusion, and I had it built in one week. What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set? They would make it illegal to make 3D printers or CNC machinery without a license, and if you are caught it is tantamount to making guns.
It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.
Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.
> What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set?
That it's easier with this skillset to build guns and sell them to criminals when the penalty is the same.
> The obvious problem: you cannot reliably detect firearms from geometry alone.
The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.
I think it's still not a viable problem to solve.
What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?
Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.
How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?
It depends how you define the problem. Certainly a human can look at a part and say "that's a lower reciever" but you probably can make something that functions as a firearm exclusively from inconspicuous parts. For the more limited case, an AI can definitely be trained, the broader case is likely unsolvable.
Btw, AFAIK they also want to lock down the slicer.
2 replies →
It’s not nearly that hard of a problem. There are n gun files on internet, so validate the hash of those n files (g code whatever). These people aren’t cadding their own designs.
6 replies →
New York are going to be very angry when they discover that pipes and hammers exist.
Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?
I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.
I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.
You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.
Since when peroxiacetone requires NAOH?
4th Amendment, unreasonable search. And of course the 2nd, but the former is more worrying. Also if printing is speech, then you can add the 1st to the list as well.
The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.
Eyes on the prize, friend, and don't capitulate prematurely.
The problem is, nobody is willing to use 2nd amendment rights to defend other amendments.
Right, so they can't use the blocked print as cause to get other evidence. Or if they do it is excluded.
It's not illegal to make your own firearm, you just can't sell it.
The actual wording of the law, and the way it was interpreted when I was young was that a person who does not hold an FFL may not make a firearm with the intention of selling it, but after making it, they could change their mind and then sell it.
Since, the BATF decided to interpret the prohibition as a thought-crime, enforcing a prohibition making such sales illegal, since like The Shadow, they know what lurks in the hearts of men.
The one transfer which has not yet been tested in the courts to my knowledge is an individual having made firearms, passing away, then leaving them in their will to their heirs....
If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.
True, a terrible patchwork of different state laws makes it very easy to unknowingly violate a law.
They want to make it illegal
Maybe they should look more at how other countries quite successfully banned fire arms. Hint: it wasn't by banning printers.
67 replies →
I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.
For example[0]:
> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.
…
> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.
0: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111
Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.
Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.
Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor
In Washington state I believe you need to serialize each firearm as well.
So what's next? People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks? Who's liable in this case?
> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?
The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.
It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.
There is close to zero chance the current Supreme Court would find a law that criminalizes possession of a file describing the making a gun to be constitutional.
1 reply →
I wonder if you can sell the printer shell without the main PCB and just open source the main board design. Manufacture and sale of that board as a distinct entity seems tough to stop. Especially because the board can have non-3D printer use cases which it advertises as the main ones.
Also, if I wanted to print a gun, there are thousands upon thousands of older Creality and Prusa printers that I could buy used. My CR-10 isn't connected to the internet, it's running a FOSS Marlin release.
It will be very strange and funny if there is a registry of 3D printers before there's a registry of guns, and for that matter, it will be very funny if it becomes easier to buy a gun than a 3D printer, with the reasoning being that 3D printers can print guns.
There would be a presumption of intent. Probably an "aggravated" add-on to whatever charges you might be facing.
I highly doubt we would send goon squads door to door to check your firmware. Then again, given today's situation in MN, I wouldn't rule it out either.
We need blocking technology on CNC lathes and mills too!
How's this supposed to work for all the printers running tiny AVRs?
This is a frustrating replay of the DRM (digital rights management) / copy protection debate from about 20 years ago. That time, it was about restricting fully general-purpose computers and storage devices from copying or displaying certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping media piracy. The pro-restriction side spent enormous amounts of money, engineering talent, and legal firepower, yet hackers have defeated every copy-protection system ever devised.
This time, it's about restricting fully general-purpose 3D printers (and perhaps CNC machines) from following instructions according to certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping the manufacture of firearms. I have a feeling it's going to play out in the same way, leading to an long and expensive intellectual war that accomplishes nothing.
Fighting a war against general-purpose tools is as futile as making water not wet. When will legislators learn this and give up?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
This is ridiculous. As WIRED has shown [0], the only 3D printed part of most "3D printed" guns is the frame. You can do only so much with the frame alone. All the other parts are sourced online and much easier to get, other than getting a 3D printer and finding the frame of the gun you want to print it for.
Maybe these advocating for gun control laws for 3D printers should first advocate for stricter control on selling spare repair parts for guns and the websites selling them with no sort of background check.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/luigi-mangione-ghost-gun-built-t...
It'll also just drive people to refactor designs into parts that pass individually.
This is another example of either stupid or malicious politicians thinking that it is possible to implement mandatory scanning on devices owned and operated by people and somehow get a meaningful true match rate without false positives. Of course this is not possible! But the negative consequences are immense.
It is exactly the same kind of stupid thinking driving ideas such as Chat Control in the EU. In the end, no child will be safer, but we will end up having a world where no-one has the right to control what software can run on their own hardware devices and where no-one has legal access to end-to-end encrypted communication.
We look the other way for so many actual gun tradgedies. "What more can we do?"
But when it comes to a theoretical problem we must take action even if it takes freedoms and opportunities away from normal people.
For hundreds of years people have been making guns without 3D printers and CNC mills. All that is needed is some metal machining skills, a lathe, and some other tools.
I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).
If you want to be really simple you can make a slam fire shotgun with two pipes and a nail, no machining skills required
make sure to collect a bunch of stl, gcode, etc files that you have questions about and email them to the NY and WA legislators seeking clarification. if it’s possession and not intent, maybe they need have skin in the game to understand.
Legislators will never be prosecuted for receiving an illegal file by email
I wonder if this could fall under the 1st amendement. In any case it is stupid, won't work and has nothing to do in a budget bill. Someone's getting paid
New York should introduce a technology that can detect politicians and law makers who are not the sharpest tool in the shed, and let them go
That exists, it's a functioning education system and electorate aware of current events, past history and able to reason logically and impartially, and a viable fourth estate.
The problem is, as Rousseau warned us, elections only function for so long as the voters are able to see and identify efforts to bribe them with their own money (paraphrased).
Over here in Europe, it's pretty laborious to get a firearm legally and yet 3D prints for that are not discussed at all.
It's surprising to see discussions and bills like these, when there is the second amendment in place. What is fueling this discussion?
What do you mean? The police shut down 3d gun factories every now and then, and here's a EP briefing about it https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7758...
That seems like the way to go about it. Address when people are _selling_ guns. The fact that they were printed and not imported from Yugoslavia in 1990 doesn't really matter. Trying to stop people with 3D printers (Or metal tubes) from creating guns seems almost impossible.
? Inherit gun Request the form Fill in the form Background check Visit from plod All good Export form Customs were a pain, but carnet protected Import form Store gun at plods Fill in form Visit from plod Secure gun ok
Two different EU countries Time taken is the most 'labourious' part And grandad's funeral
I'm very confused by this. 3D printers seem to have become a critical part of many european manufacturing workflows. Is this not the case in the usa? If -say- Province Noord-Brabant were to adopt a similar law, the western IT industry would crash.
just sell almost-3d-printers.
All it is missing is a screw with a serial number on it.
"This printer is for collecting and research purposes only. Note that certain 3D-printed objects are forbidden by the law. If you notice any of these objects growing inside your 3D printer, power it off IMMEDIATELY"
We’re soon gonna realize that we will need manual kill switches for all tech in case it goes rogue or allows an AI installed somewhere else to go rogue.
only if by "soon" you mean "decades away" at minimum
Also, manufacturers that make 3d printers simply wont sell in NY. They’ve solved nothing with this.
The USA has these type of rules. Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).
I always think it's strategy to block Chinese manufacturers with super difficult to implement technology being a hard requirement.
Specially the selling face-to-face requirement here.
> Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).
The US regulations on Automatic Emergency Braking systems requirements for new cars are actually several years behind many other markets like the EU and Japan.
This isn’t really an American thing and it’s not for blocking Chinese manufacturers. Chinese automakers can make AEBs too.
The irony is it’s really easy and cheap to get a type 7 ffl, basically a background check and $150. Legally manufacture and sell all the guns you want. The reality is no one would buy your 3d printed junk anyway.
Once again another proposed law that would just make normal people's lives more difficult while doing nothing to prevent individuals who are motivated to do the illegal thing from doing it. Offline 3D printers are really not difficult to build, there are many open source plans and all of the hardware is available to order from AliExpress making it simple to do. Somewhat more technically capable people can cobble them together from alternative sources if they don't want to purchase things online.
But the bar is even lower than that since you can simply buy a gun much more easily than you could 3D print parts for one.
Any state laws trying to restrict the 2nd amendment are always going to be useless. You're not going to stop someone who's determined at causing harm with firearms in a country where firearms outnumber people. All these little "bandaid" solutions do is allow for fishing expeditions by police and prosecutors.
On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.
What if i want to print a nerf gun for my kid? They have clearly not thought this through. I thik they should gather experts BEFORE signing this in to law :
Feasibility escape hatch: If the working group determines it’s “not technologically feasible,” no regulations are required… until the group decides it is feasible. This is good, but weak sauce: the working group could be stuffed with non-experts who just say what the legislators want.
I can't read this because adafruit.com uses blocking technology on the website
It's the same "blocking technology" JWZ uses on his sites.
Easily sidestepped, it's there to make a point I guess: https://www.jwz.org/blog/
No, it isn't.
1 reply →
I can't believe they haven't tried banning anyone from having a knee mill if they don't have an FFL yet (or just banned it entirely). It's not hard to convert an old inexpensive Bridgeport to CNC or just mill the parts by hand. Pandora's box is already open, and all this is is just useless flailing.
All government regulation is good regulation.
I think it's interesting to note that not only is there precedent for this type of "blocking technology that prevents the printing of certain things"[1], but it's also inconsequential and uncontroversial enough that most of the people here obviously have never even heard of it.
We lost the ability to print $50 bills with our HPs[2] and it had no noticeable negative impact on society. I'm not sure why losing the ability to print a gun with our Prusas will be any different.
[1] - https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/cant-photocopy-scan-cu...
[2] - https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-Archive-Read-Only/Won...
The printing of money has primarily lied within the purview of the government from the start. Money is one of the few modern physical item, off the top of my head, that this statement applies to. Maybe there are seals or other official marks that this also applies to, but all of these items fall into a similar category.
So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.
Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.
Images of authentic $50 bills are pretty easily detected. They are designed that way.
It's not technically possible to detect "gun geometry".
The only way to comply with this law is to ban 3d printers entirely.
Good news, as the article notes, the proposed regulation creates a working group to determine of it is feasible and won't require any further regulation if it is found nonfeasible. If you're right and this does prove to be "not technically possible", then nothing will actually change.
2 replies →
Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban. It would be like if printer manufacturers weren't just asked to prevent the printing of US dollars, but anything that looks like money, having an ability to detect if something is money-like based on look and feel alone, without relying on an existing database or hardcoded watermarks.
Your implication makes me think that you assume that this useful-yet-not-overreaching detection tech is possible. Do you have any ideas for how this would be implemented? Because in my mind, the only way to ensure compliance would be either a manual check (uplink to the manufacturer or relevant government authority, where an employee or a model trained on known gun models tries to estimate the probability of a print being part of a gun) or a deterministic algorithm that makes blanket bans on anything remotely gun-like (pipe-like parts, parts where any mechanical action is similar to anything that could be in a gun). These scenarios seem to be both a lot more annoying and a lot more invasive. There's no negative consequences for tuning detection to always err on the side of caution and flood the user with false-positive refusals to print. Both scenarios are obviously a lot more involved and complicated than a basic algorithm checking if you're trying to print an image of a US dollar. Therefore I don't see a reason why drawing this comparison is useful. The only thing these implementations have in common is that they're detecting something.
>Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban.
If you have seen that other people have pointed it out, you have already seen my response, but I guess people keep repeating the question, so I need to repeat the answer. This regulation establishes a working group to investigate this technology. If the technical aspects are as difficult as you claim, the proposed regulation will basically be voided. Your concerns are already factored into the proposal and therefore aren't a valid argument against the proposal.
That said, the regulation also makes it sound like "implementing a check for a specific banned print" would be an acceptable outcome of this law. From page 11 of the actual proposal:
>(b) be authorized to create and maintain a library of firearms blue- print files and illegal firearm parts blueprint files, and maintain and update the library, including by adding new files that enable the three- dimensional printing of firearms or illegal firearm parts. In further- ance of this authorization, the division may designate another govern- ment agency or an academic or research institution in this state to assist with the creation and maintenance of the file library. The library shall be made available to three-dimensional printer manufactur- ers, vendors with demonstrated expertise in software development, or experts in computational design or public safety, for the development or improvement of blocking technology and firearm blueprint detection algo- rithms. The division shall establish safeguards to prevent unauthorized access to and misuse of the library and shall prohibit all persons who are granted access to the library from misusing, selling, disseminating, or otherwise publishing its contents.
Think of it like the early stages of internet copyright protections, the first step is just cross-referencing the design with a list of known banned designs. Just like an early Youtuber could have mirrored banned videos to bypass copyright detection, people will likely still be able to manipulate designs in certain ways to get past this sort of ban. That's ok. Regulation like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to still be worth doing. The goal here is to make it more difficult for some random person with no expertise to buy a 3d printer, download some files, and print a weapon.
I'm willing to admit that it's entirely possible that a full on-demand analysis of whether a shape could potentially be part of a gun might not currently be possible and it might be years before that becomes feasible, but until then, simply banning a handful of the most popular STL files would still have value.
I was bounced out of a Kinkos circa 2000 with my grandparents for attempt to counterfeit Pokémon cards on the photocopier. Mind you I didn’t seek to make illegal copies. I just wanted to photocopy and color in and draw on my own artistic creations. Fun times learning about copyright mechanisms and fraud as a kindergartner.
The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.
https://xkcd.com/1425/
I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.
Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
>Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed.
Here's a relevant article that addresses a lot of these points.[1]
[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/luigi-mangione-united-healthcare...
Counterfeiting money is bad, and should be illegal (the wisdom of forcing such software into printers notwithstanding). Manufacturing your own products is good, and shouldn't be illegal.
What about manufacturing your own counterfeit products?
But this tech isn't required by law, is it? You can legally make your own printer without a $50 bill detector.
Correct. And even if this bill passes you can build your own printer from common parts or drive across state lines to the nearest Micro Center. It’s useless posturing regulation for the sake of looking tough.
The proposed legislation is about the sale and distribution of 3d printers. You could build your own 3d printer legally without the detector software.
Uh, I'd say that something has in fact been lost in that every single printer sold watermarks every document printed regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.
There are plenty of people who change their behavior because that tracking is in place, regardless of if what they are doing (or would be doing) is in any way illegal.
Terrible example IMO.
Moreover, every person who has mostly printed in b/w on a colour device, but then been blocked by printing because the yellow cartridge has been emptied printing such watermarks is negatively affected by this.
>regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.
Maybe the way this applies to everything should be an indication that it's unrelated to the point I made about blocking the printing of certain things.
2 replies →
Clearly, if politicians are afraid of the people, it's a sign that the people aren't happy with the work they're doing. Maybe the solution is to start delivering the results that people want.
Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?
Edit, reading further it's even more insane:
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.” That’s a lot of shop & manufacturing equipment!
This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.
Exactly. The zip gun people are mostly just weird nerds, and not professional assassins. The latter seems to be doing it the old fashioned way which leaves no traces - buy cheap gun, file off serials, throw it in the river after.
Zip guns may get past a metal detector, but not the standard x-ray luggage scan. To the extent it'll make it past the x-ray screeners, it's because they let all kinds of stuff through, because it's a poor way to screen for dangerous things, and they are not high-skill employees, they are relatively cheap labor.
Source: I used to travel every week flying home Friday, cycle clothes out of my travel bags, and be on the road again on Sunday night. I learned to my horror I'd been flying with a pair of scissors for at least 5 weeks - during which, TSA forced me to open a Christmas present for my sister and throw away some hand lotion which was in too big of a bottle.
There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.
Back in college I was flying home immediately after the end of the semester for a family reunion. Flew there, attended, then flew back. On the flight back, I got stopped for additional search by TSA. Immediately, I remembered that I had left my lab dissection kit in my backpack which included a razor blade and long, pointed, pick-like tool. But it turns out that neither of those are what got me stopped....I had also forgotten a half full bottle of gatorade. They were however happy to confiscate my dissection kit as well, after I had (stupidly) informed them of it.
Same thing happened to me -- had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it. They looked at their "regulations" and vice grips weren't on it so they let me through. You know who didn't let it through though - I left it in the bag and the Chinese security confiscated it on the way back.
btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
4 replies →
3D printed guns haven't been zip guns in a long time. That reads as willful ignorance. Only the receiver or frame are controlled. Every other part can be purchased online without any checks. Hoffman Tactical's Orca and a myriad of pistol frame can be used to produce weapons on par with commercial weapons. Many commercial pistols are polymer frames. A good 3d printed pistol frame is no different than a cast nylon polymer frame.
If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/@HoffmanTactical
https://www.youtube.com/@PrintShootRepeat
3d printing ghost guns with a 100% plastic construction is a silly thing only done for clickbait, and probably comprises less than a tenth of a percent of 3d printing gun related activity. Most people are printing frames, parts, flair, accessories, mounts, things like that, and using sensible real metal parts for things involving explosive forces and danger.
Not is it only dumb, but it is plain unimplementable. Are they saying the HMI interfaces on CNC machines need to be able to parse the GCode generated by any of dozens of CAM software options out there and divine if it might be gun related? That is not possible.
> Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?
Even in countries with strict gun control, like the UK, the most serious criminals can get hold of guns. And if lesser criminals 3D printed a gun, they'd struggle to get hold of ammo for it. So they stick to knives.
Reading up on this, the remaining UK incidents seem to involve mostly "converted blank-firing copies", with the NCA describing 3D printed firearms as "low status". And as you say ammo is highly controlled here.
And anyways, you can make a zip gun out of hardware store parts on your kitchen table, no machining or 3d printing required.
The only time a 3d printed gun is useful is if your country is occupied and you have a chance to secretly shoot one of the occupiers if only you could get a gun past their confiscation. Otherwise it is an interesting toy that you might shoot once to say you did it.
I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.
Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits, so at least there is a log and provenance chain someone could use in case it's used for bad stuff? Sounds like if you'd want to avoid that (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example), you could use a offline 3D printer.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
The implication with this type of argument is that if someone is willing to break the law against murder, they'd be willing/able to break the laws around legally purchasing or owning a gun.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
What are you referring to as "it" here? When OP mentioned getting a gun from "off the street", that's referring to obtaining one illegally, without a provenance chain or any permitting.
If you want to shoot a CEO, its far easier to buy an untraceable gun on the streets (or obtain a non-serialized 80% lower receiver that you drill yourself) rather than an unreliable fully 3D-printed gun.
4 replies →
> (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example)
Dude literally sat in a McDonalds with all the evidence on him including the 3D printed gun. The idea of phantom murderers wielding 3D printed weapons is nothing more than a rich guy/CEO anxiety fantasy.
If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.
And not for the first time:
2025: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228
2023 (before Mangione): https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A8132
Maybe there are others.
Really garbage administration they have in NY. Hochul and a lot of her ilk have done things like block right to repair after years of activists trying to get it passed.
The way it worked was as follows:
1. Local groups push to get right to repair passed
2. Fails repeatedly for years
3. They finally get it past the houses and onto the governor's desk
4. Governor gets a visit from a 'unknown' (hint likely Apple) lobbyist, refuses to sign even though they have to
5. They wait until the very last second and then adds last minute 'amendments' neutering the bill.
6. Their sycophants then try to shut down any discussion on Reddit/other social platforms from anyone who criticizes the bill.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fair_Repair_Act
They are going to keep doing this crap, the government needs to be voted out but just like NJ, NY is captured by really corrupt 'neoliberal' Democrats so its an uphill battle to get someone better in there. The incentives are not there: In NJ and most of NY the economic base is the wealthy suburbanites who like the way things are and will fight efforts to make radical change. That results in a lot of 'think of the children' type people who would welcome any and all bans on things like 3D printing of guns.
I could understand these laws more if the majority of gun related deaths were from ghost guns. But they simply aren't.
If anything, ghost guns should be decriminalized to protect people from the rising danger of ghost-related deaths in NYC. Now that is a startup idea I can get behind.
Wait, so this is in the budget bill proposed by the supposed adults in the room, not from the usual types in the peanut gallery of the legislature?
I will just continue to use my non-regulated printer and open source slicer. Fortunately I have a copy of the source.
If anyone needs help printing parts for a Voron just let me know. (Not a real offer for the public, but for friends absolutely.)
Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"
Mentioned in TFA
A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
This isn't the 80s anymore, desktop CNC machines have existed for decades and have gottwn incredibly cheap.
You can buy jigs to complete what are called 80% receivers with a drill press (and (optionally a router) - could do it on your kitchen table in an evening for a couple hundred bucks.
https://www.makera.com/products/carvera-air?srsltid=AfmBOopy...
Desktop CNC machines are here bruh.
Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.
1 reply →
Not uh
I have one on my desk...
I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".
Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.
Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.
If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.
I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.
Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.
Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".
How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.
Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.
Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?
We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.
Good point, as a further example see all the "luck" countries like Ukraine have been having with even slightly modified "consumer" drone stuff applied to this kind of application
Too complicated - just strap it to a flying drone that can then slam it to the target at high speed.
Works well enough and is in wide use, many people just don't seem to have realized the implications - kinda like with machineguns and barbed wire at the start of WW1.
The first person to build ChatGPT with limbs wins.
The British army only has maybe 20,000 actual soldiers. You could manufacture enough robots to kill them all in a week. Then you’d just have a whole country.
It’ll completely change the game. There’s no point selling it to a state for their army, when you could just instantly make yourself the owner of the state.
3 replies →
It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".
I thought all printers had in place block to stop printing of money so something like that to stop printing and making of firearms etc is not unrealistic
It’s more complicated than that. A 2D rectangle with certain graphics is entirely different than a single part of a gun which may really look like anything. Would you recognize a trigger sear if I showed you one?
And if 3DP gun designers get blocked, they just have to alter the design slightly. Vs counterfeit currency which always and forever must look the same. If the 3DP database detection is loosened to catch lookalikes, then you have false positives for the guy making a desk lamp whose part just kinda sorta looks like a trigger sear.
Also, I am not aware of any open source 2D printers built from the ground up, but 3DP got started that way. So bypassing this would be insanely easy.
It’s political theater.
But not CNC machines?
Looks like them too, both subtractive and additive manufacturing. Not bending sheet metal though.
Well, at least folks will still be able to make AK-47s:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121128215957/http://www.northe...
The legislations includes CNC mills.
And muzzleloaders are pretty well unregulated.
invest in manual mills now, profit later.
Yeah they should also ban metal working in New York...
The stupidest thing is you can go to another state and buy a gun in Walmart, why even bother to build a plastic gun in the US?
Obviously to have an unregistered gun?
To get it through security somewhere with metal detectors. That's probably the only reason to specifically fear a 3D-printed gun in a nation full of proper guns.
Of course, 3D printed plastic ammo isn't likely to be very effective.
(Maybe they're worried that before long, 3D printing with metal will almost as easy and affordable as plastic 3D printing is now, and people will be printing off entire arsenals of very effective firearms?)
1 reply →
Is this a real question? Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses. Printing a gun does not. Printing a gun also does not need to wait for a multi-day delay from a background check. Depending on the printer, it could just take multiple days to print.
Asking why someone would want to do this is just not trying very hard in the conversation is actually pretty myopic.
5 replies →
Note that Washington's similar HB 2321 defines a "3D printer" as any additive or subtractive manufacturing machine. So these idiots want to regulate CNC machines too.
Public comments can (and should!) be submitted here: https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/2321 Keep them polite and respectful; insults and threats won't help.
Weird how this is happening simultaneously in many states. Washington is considering a vague 3d printer and CNC law to address ghost guns. Gun crimes are mostly committed with regular pistols but that isn’t stopping politicians from passing all sorts of restrictions under the guise of keeping people safe. Meanwhile these states have serious budget problems that go unaddressed …
It is not weird in the slightest. These things are coordinated at the state level all the time.
This is probably one of those good tests of "is your 'conspiracy theory' meter properly calibrated", because if it's going off right now and you are in disbelief, you've got it calibrated incorrectly. This is so completely routine that there's an entire branch of law codified in this way called the "Uniform Commercial Code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code and see the organization running this' home page at https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc .
And that's just a particular set of laws with an organization dedicated to harmonizing all the various states laws for their particular use cases. It's not the one and only gateway to such laws, it's just an example of a cross-state law coordination so established that it has an entire organization dedicated to it. Plenty of other stuff is coordinated at the state level across multiple states all the time.
Oh no, now New Yokers will have to get their 3D printers the same way they currently get their guns: bring it in from another state.
Policy in the pursuit of easy political narrative wins looks like this. US gun crime is a national issue, and therefore unsolvable in the current political climate, so useless posturing like this is what we're left with.
The real fix is something like a nationwide licensing system like for cars, with auditing of weapons and weapon storage.
Meanwhile gun crime is near record lows, but it's still a "gun violence epidemic"
Insincere actors like to lump in suicides by firearm.
No thanks. We don't need law enforcement checking weapon storage in private homes. And there's already a national background check system for most legal firearm transfers.
I didn't say it was politically feasible. I'm just saying that's how you control gun crime.
It's mostly handguns, and about half of firearm homicides are with illegally trafficked arms. They can be trafficked because there's no way to account for the guns.
All this rests on the assumption that anyone actually wants to solve gun homicide. A lot of people SAY they do, and that's how you get shit like 3D printer bans.
The real fix is to leave it alone. You're wasting political capital by pushing for gun control yet again. You'd want the Trump administration to have access to a database of gun owners like the Black Panthers? Seriously?
Is this a real issue? Guns are not hard to get in the US.
Why is it in a budget bill?
Year 2027: beep boop beep boop, scan your implanted rfid digital ID chip to authenticate:
- your social media consumption and any post you make
- your app installations
- registering a new account or keeping an already existing one
- driving your car
- 3D printing something
- watching a YouTube video
- buying anything online
- receive any gov support or healthcare
- any transaction including cash ones
And all of that is synced with your digital wallet (TM) for convenience, internet is not needed!! I am so glad we are protecting the 16yo from accessing tiktok, or something something deportations if you are the other team!!
Lol no.
Trump is gonna cancel or fuck with elections in 2026 like he has said multiple times he will, and by 2027 and 2028, he will likely install himself as 3d term president.
Its gonna be an era of economic decline and social dirtiness as shit gets worse and worse and eventually things like crime is gonna rise up again as the lower income sector transitions into the "nothing to lose" crowd.
I think this would be even harder than the penis detection in Lego Universe.
Just another example of more lid than pots.
Instead of containing the anger of the public by doing good politics and thus reduce radicalizations and peace by plenty of filled pots, its surveilance, panopticons, terror and ever more laws sas lids. If you can't atand the heat get out of the kitchen.
Washington state is pursuing a similar law at a similar time. Presumably pushed by the same advocacy organization, whichever one it is. The Washington one seems impossible to actually comply with -- how the hell is the computer in a CNC machine going to figure out what geometries are gun-like? A de facto ban on additive or subtractive manufacturing is pretty dumb.
No! Just No!
I wrote as good an opposition as I could. Basically, I opposed it on multiple principles.
From the top, I absolutely detest this kind of censorship. But the bill states that the implementation will be defined (or rendered infeasible - yeah right) AFTER the bill passes. Said decision will be punted to a "working group" of industry folks. That alone stinks, since it places a lot of abuse potential outside of duly elected representation.
Stuff like this used to make me incandescently angry but as I've gotten older I've come to understand that honestly we just can't have nice things
If you haven't bought a 3D printer yet then I think it's a good time to invest in one. This is going to be one of those technologies that slowly the government will erode our access to, so getting on board now is the best course of action.
Gun nut Eric Raymond was cheering when the first printable guns came out. Checkmate gun grabbers, you'll never prevent us from having our shooty-shootys now! Haha! I thought, well the answer to that is simple: simply declare 3D printers to be weapons. You know, like how the Feds declared encryption to be "munitions".
They also declared that a shoelace is a machine gun until they declared that it's not
https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/ctdm3/oldie_but_goody...
https://imgur.com/7N6zc
Fuck all the way off.
This is batshit crazy leftist authoritarianism. And because it's so silly, it will achieve nothing but expose its peddlers as morons and give more votes to Republicans just by making them appear saner in comparison. BAD.
Seems like a boon for small batch 3d printing companies.
Gotta do something ism. Making things shit. Just do gun control, America.
"preventing firearms printing", aka "securing big companies' income from spare parts selling with 500% margin"
Yet another reason why fully open hardware and open software is so important + of course a fully open source slicing pipeline.
It might be a bit less convenient than a shiny vendor locked Bamboolab closed machine but it is perfectly doable.
A filament 3D printer is basically just a control board, firmware (like Marlin), bunch of off the shelf steppers, two thermistors, heatbed and nozzle heater. If you have modern stepper drivers you don't even need end stop switches.
Put this together and you have a machine you fully own and control and can easily repair or upgrade. Then just feed it GCODE generated by something like Prusa Slic3r from STL/obj/step files and that's it.
Avoids any shenanigans like forcing you to use only blessed consumables or trying to dictate what you can print.
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.”
...what? This some of the stupidest, most out of touch garbage I've ever read and clearly made by uneducated lawmakers being out of their depth.
Yet another case of lawmakers proliferating the “you should not have root access” meme. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern political landscape and a backdoor to much less well intentioned actions (intentional and unintended).
Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram:
https://i.imgur.com/gGIAApA.png
Hard to trust an article like this when the legal analysis and suggestions are being outsourced to an LLM.
Not all AI assisted writing is "slop," especially if, as your screenshot shows, significant portions of the article were written by a human. Drawing attention to any and all hints of AI assisted writing is not the public service announcement you think it is.
Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.
I actually think AI-human collaboration is quite beneficial. I have a more fundamental issue that it's just bad writing when you use pure LLM generated text. My general feeling is "why should you expect me to spend my time reading something that you didn't care enough to spend your time writing?"
Also, most of the suggestions provided in the AI generated section are just useless. While I think this law is terrible, the suggestions provided completely contradict what the lawmakers are intending. I'll explain what I mean with some of the suggestions provided.
> Narrow the Scope to Intent, Not the Tool
This is essentially a suggestion to throw out the entire law as written. Sure, but this is meaningless advice to lawmakers.
> Drop Mandatory File Scanning
This is the same suggestion as before but rephrased.
> Exempt Open-Source and Offline Toolchains
This is asking them to create a massive loophole in their own law making it useless. Once again, essentially just asking them to throw out the entire law.
> Add safe harbor for sellers and educators who don’t modify equipment or participate in unlawful manufacture.
Two fundamentally different concepts here jammed into one idea. Do you want to add safe harbor for sellers who don't modify equipment or do you want to throw out the entire law and have it not apply to anybody who doesn't participate in unlawful manufacture? These are very different ideas, it makes no sense to treat them as one cohesive concept.
All of these are signals that not much thought went into this. If a human had used AI for ideas and writing assistance, but participated in the writing process as an active contributor, I think they would have caught things like this. I don't think they would have chosen to make multiple bullet points semantically identical. I think they would have chosen to actually cite specific aspects of the law and propose concrete solutions.
Another example, one of their suggestions is to improve the working groups to add specific members. Genuinely a fairly good idea. Having actually read the law, I would have cited the specific passage, which requires that the working group "SHALL INCLUDE EXPERTS IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIGITAL SECURITY, FIREARMS REGULATION, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY, AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DISCIPLINES DETERMINED BY THE DIVISION TO BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS PRESCRIBED HEREIN." I would question, who do they consider to be experts in additive manufacturing? Why does it seem that the working group will be far more heavily weighed towards policy experts as opposed to 3D printing experts? The article suggests that "standards will default to large vendors" yet there is no evidence here that vendors will be included at all.
> Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram
The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.
Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.
Pangram has extremely high accuracy. While there's no way to prove AI use, it's a very good proxy for that metric. It's obvious to my eyes that the article is written with AI, I supplied Pangram as a citation to convince people such as yourself who didn't notice the AI usage when reading the article.
Just reject printing everything or nearly everything :)
Inform users where this censorship filter is implemented, so users can go change the source file value from 1 to 0 :)
Malicious compliance is highly appropriate for a malicious law.
My HP printer already does this. It blocks random prints on paper. I once tried to print a target practice thing for snowballs and it would always fail. There were other cases too. My very expensive printer has some other very sketchy issues with it. It's easily the least secure device I have connected to my network. This surveillance state has gone too far and I'm so sick of it.
Why have you allowed a printer access to the network? You should tell the router to drop every packet that is going outside of the lan from this mac address.
They can require whatever the want. Good luck stopping people from just building their own printers without such "blocking technology".
0. We will have to enforce blocking technology against printing printer components to bypass blocking technology
Goto 0
[dead]
I really dislike this whole debate because I never wanted to be lumped in with 3D gun printing weirdos.
When I first told my very non-technical somewhat new friend about my 3D printer, they looked really concerned and told me they weren’t comfortable with it because of how people make weapons with them.
I’ve had to spend a lot of time building trust and showing that I’m not one of those weirdos.
Ultimately I don’t think any kind of printed gun banning law has a tangible impact (it’s not like guns with serial numbers aren’t regularly getting away with murder), but what I don’t like is that the law and discussion around it validates this stupidity and continues to lump me in with gun weirdos.
It’s weird to own a gun. It’s weird to print a gun. I don’t even think the 2nd amendment is very necessary and is clearly not capable of stopping tyranny (and the amendment itself says that’s not its purpose anyway).
At this point we could probably get a coalition of Trump cult members who have no consistent ideology (Trump doesn’t like guns) and “liberal pansies” to just repeal the 2nd amendment and become a normal country.
This seems like a problem with your friend moreso than with 3D printing in general. Most people I know who hear about 3D printing don't immediately think of making weapons. Toys and weird gadgets tend to come to mind first, or maybe an office accessory like my laptop stands. The fact that your friend immediately jumped to the conclusion that it's for making weapons says a lot about the way they think about the world.
I agree that the law seems to validate the viewpoint, but I disagree that it's a common one, nor that you should have had to spend time building that trust.
A normal country? Like Iran that just slaughters or imprisons anybody that speaks or acts against the government. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back. Before then we would prefer to resolve our grievances peacefully in court.
Most countries aren’t Iran. Are the French unable to protest without the 2nd amendment?
Did the 2nd amendment save Mark Pretti from that exact situation happening to him?
3 replies →
>. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back
The fact that ICE are still parading around on the street has put in a nail in the coffin that 2A is absolutely pointless.
If anything, USA citizens deserve to have their guns taken away forcibly just because they could use them but didn't.
2 replies →
perhaps people printing their own guns at home is actually quite bad and in fact should be controlled in some way without it being seen as a fundamental incursion on your rights.
just a thought from across the pond.
Should people be allowed to own basic metalworking tools, or is that something else that would be OK to be 'controlled in some way'?
Maybe we shouldn't let people write their own software either, as there's all sorts of crime they could get up to...
You know, putting people in a straightjacket with feeding tubes as soon as they are born would reduce crime by 100% basically, so... why not?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/23/ban-sales-po...
I'm also from 'across the pond' and think this is technically unworkable and is likely not going to fix any problems at all.
The idea that we should let government software run on our printers to prevent the rate case where someone both wants to print a gun and do some crime with it is absurd. There are more important 1st and 4th amendment considerations here
NYC doesn't have a gun problem. They regulate the shit out of guns to no effect. They should regress closer to the national mean and spend the resources on stuff that matters more. And even if they do want to regulate it, micromanaging everyone's 3d printers is not the way to do it both because of bad efficacy and bad precedent.
I'm glad there's an ocean between us.
Do you support gun ownership absent of this idea? Or is your actual concern with guns?
I can more or less understand where the legislator might be coming from: laser printers and copiers are already mandated to include fingerprinting in the output and disrupt any attempt of copying money.
That's more so another example of a law that shouldn't exist.