This bill is analogous to requiring text editors to verify that a document does not contain defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, child porn, etc., before it saves the file. In first amendment terms that led to the conclusion that prior restraint on publication is incompatible with the amendment. The same doctrine should be extended to the second amendment for the same reasons. The alternative is intolerable surveillance.
Moreover, how could this be implemented? Determining the 3D volume which a given G-code file will result in is something which the industry would find very useful, but no one has yet achieved. Doing so would probably simultaneously result in the folks doing so being awarded a Fields Medal and the Turing Award (in addition to making a boatload of money licensing the resultant software/patent).
On top of that, how does one resolve the matter of the same G-code file (for two nested circles plus some machine-specific codes) resulting in either a metal washer, or a lamp base, depending on whether run on a machine set to metric w/ a coolant system, or Imperial w/ a tool changer?
Lastly, who creates the list of forbidden parts? How will it be curated? And most importantly, how will it be secured that it isn't a set of blueprints which are then used to make firearms?
A more reasonable bit of legislation would be one which required folks who are barred by statute from owning firearms (convicted felons (who have not had their rights restored)/convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse) to approve with their parole officer any file for a part/object made by a 3D printer or CNC machine before submitting it to the machine.
Killing is bad... killing because you don't like $group is double-bad. Speeding is bad, speeding without a seatbelt is double-bad. etc.
If you are such a danger to society that you shouldn't be allowed to be armed in case of defense, then you probably shouldn't be in society and remain locked up. That's just my take on it. I feel similarly on taking away voting rights after prison as well. I may not like how you vote, but I'm just not a fan of taking away people's rights outside prison/jail.
Possibly, if there are enough armed felons running about, we might be able to get both sides to the table and admit that maybe there should be some limits. Until then it does us no good to exclude some groups just because we don't like them, while still enduring school shootings.
The ability to form militias is so important, that everyone should have the right to bear arms, in order to enable this.
The idea is that it prevents the idea of a "special militia" having some selection criteria, so the government of the day cant make qualifying for its group a requirement to own guns.
You might say that a farmer runs a "well-regulated farm" because things run smoothly. Or that the windmill was a "well-regulated machine."
It would also mean having regular meetups in your community to discuss any coordination necessary in times of emergency... Where to show up with your gun(s), who is in charge, who to communicate with, etc.
I'd be a proponent of returning to this norm.
My take on it is that if your judgement is so twisted that you are able to commit a felony and not be able to successfully petition for rights restoration, then you are not suited to deciding by whom the country should be governed.
I was trying to get ahead of the debt for awhile but I realized that's a sucker's game and now I just pay the minimum that keeps them from confiscating parts of my paycheck or other assets.
Meanwhile, open source printers can and will just bypass it.
>In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.
The inobvious thing is that that aspect of the law cannot be applied to felons or persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, since like failing to pay the tax stamp on a Class-III firearm or accessory, it would require self-incrimination, which thus far, is still illegal.
Your judgement is twisted if you think that's a reasonable expectation for anyone who has served their time.
Just to confirm your meaning --- if a person has demonstrated such poor judgement as to be convicted of a felony, and then cannot trouble themselves to then recant this judgement and argue that they are now capable of making responsible decisions, then they should be allowed to vote and own firearms despite not being willing to make an effort to state that their character has changed?
I'd be more inclined to see an English language and American history/civics test as a requirement to vote. Not that I'm advocating for this, but it would be just as justified by your logic.
If you've served your time, you've served your time... I wouldn't even mind a reasonable parole term (something up to even a decade) after release... but at least some limit on the restriction(s). I'm also opposed to private prisons for similar reasons... you shouldn't incentivize restricting/removing people's rights. If you're too much of a danger to society, you should remain locked up.
I think we know all we need to know.
Oh and yeah, people are allowed to open carry guns in the statehouse here.
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/boise-mall-shooter-d...
"People lived" during the same event. In fact even more people lived. Was that interesting?
That's the problem with those style of arguments. As logical as you want them to be, it doesn't remove the trauma burned into the psyche of the people who lived that day.
If you deny someone's humanity in your argument, you've lost.
Why would either of those be double-bad? They're the same thing as the original.
If you don't want to wear your seatbelt and you like to risk your own life, then that's on you. Just like riding a motorcycle.
They are presenting them as examples of things that a lot of people do say, and many laws are written this way, and many cops, prosecutors, & judges treat them as double bad.
And intentional killing is generally considered worse because it means you thought about it and then did it, vs when it's due to acute emotional disorder. Intentional crimes are usually treated more harshly
Owning a gun is legal, but if you've ever smoked weed it's illegal for you... murder is bad, but if it's because you hate a protected group it's a much harsher punishment... in some places, you can't be pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt, but you can be charged with it if you're pulled over for anything else. It's just to attach additional charges for prosecution.
I don't like the idea of excessive charges as part of the prosecution process in general. It creates/extends what I consider an unfair asymmetry between the state (prosecution) and the individual. That's not to say there aren't similar examples in the other direction, such as a clerical error resulting in dismissed charges altogether.
That’s valid. But if we literally can’t keep them from having guns, I’d want longer sentences for violent crimes and a default of life for gun crimes.
I'm surprised this is not a 4th Amendment issue.
My conspiracy theory is that these laws (there have been a rash of them lately, and that feels off) are being promoted by some of the cloud-based 3d printer manufacturers. In other words, an attempt at regulatory capture.
As you note, determining from gcode whether the print is a gun is effectively impossible, and hiding the blocklist is hard anyway. Thus, the only way that could possibly work technically is with those cloud printers that take a .STL as input, routed through the printer manufacturer's servers.
Discriminating between "gun" and "not gun" from the .STL is still hard, but vastly easier than inferring from gcode. The blocklist story becomes at least coherent, if still highly suspect, to anyone who knows anything about computer security.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/08/any-user-who-has-a-3d-p...
And on top of that, there is no protected right to 3d printers.
Regardless, it is 1000% more clear that states can't ban you from sending around gun design files.
"This bill would require, on or before July 1, 2028, any business that produces or manufactures 3-dimensional printers for sale or transfer in California to submit to the department an attestation for each make and model of printer they intend to make available for sale or transfer in California, confirming, among other things, that the manufacturer has equipped that make and model with a certified firearm blueprint detection algorithm."
This in my opinion is the state monitoring me in my own home. You can split hairs on semantics, but the effect is the same if machine learning or a person does it.
The person proposing this, and/or their staff certainly knows this.
But also, California regulators likely see the regulatory landscape as the reason this law is needed rather than in spite of it.
Gun manufacturers are likely against these types of regulations because many of them would affect manufacturers and the tools they use too.
Note that "the federation" allowed states to have stricter gun laws until recently when we got a new partisan supreme court that is out of step with the previous 200 years of jurispudence.
The result of United States v. Cruikshank was that southern states were allowed to to prohibit black individuals from owning firearms to defend themselves from the KKK. Not exactly a great example of gun control.
What's also crazy it is that it is also relatively recently that the first amendment was incorporated against states and localities as well.
No chance. For them compliance is the easiest thing in the world to law like that
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20260218/washington-action-a...
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20260112/bans-for-3d-bluepri...
Definitely not, it's pressure from the anti-gun lobby that keeps pushing "one more bill that this time will actually change violent crime statistics, we promise!"
These bills are being introduced in the states that already have the most restrictive gun control already, yet to nobody's surprise, hasn't done much to curb violent crime. But the lobby groups and candidates campaign and fundraise on the issue so they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure.
I do some range days a couple times a year.
The "most restrictive gun control" states in the US would still be generally by far the least restrictive gun control states in the rest of the developed world (you know, where gun-related deaths are a small fraction of here?).
Your answer smacks of "well, they tried and surprise surprise it doesn't work so why are we doing it?", i.e. "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".
Similarly to how many (most?) guns used criminally in Mexico actually come from the United States.
Edit: I'm not surprised by the downvotes, but I am amused. These are objective facts. Any basic research will yield many studies (including from the American government) showing that the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico are traced back to the States. Americans love the boogeyman of dangerous Mexican cartels so much they never seem to ask themselves where these guns come from in the first place. Hint: look in the mirror.
The characterization of the federal government as "broken" (at least in this capacity) and "dysfunctional" is a normative judgment you're making based on your own subjective value preferences.
Some -- perhaps most -- Americans regard the federal constitution's ability to restrain states from enacting policies that transgress against generally accepted individual rights as desirable, and working as intended.
Are you willing to concede most guns used by criminals in Mexico come from the United States? That would be a question of fact, not characterization. And that, if it is easy enough to smuggle guns from red states into Mexico to commit crimes, it stands to reason it is even easier for red states to do the same to blue states? Or are you going to invent some other strawman to attack in your defense of your "individual rights"?
No -- nor am I willing to assert the opposite, because I have no knowledge of the topic. I will ask, though: why is the place of manufacturer of guns used by criminals is Mexico something worth worrying about?
> And that, if it is easy enough to smuggle guns from red states into Mexico to commit crimes, it stands to reason it is even easier for red states to do the same to blue states?
Well, yes, of course. But I assume that this will be the case regardless of any attempted policy at any level of government, because I do not believe suppressing the movement of firearms is an attainable goal at any scale in the first place.
So why are the crime rates in most of these "red states" you are referring to often so much lower?
> Any basic research will yield many studies (including from the American government) showing that the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico are traced back to the States
I couldn't give less of a fuck if this were true "research" or not: this isn't my problem, nor is it a valid reason to restrict my rights.
Also, please: a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise can't build or buy a machine shop and enslave or hire some machinists? They can build submarines and drones, but just couldn't possibly operate without US firearms? What reality do you live in?
Not seeing this so much lower crime rate in red states here.
The welfare states have higher murder rates.
> they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure.
It's a documented, empirical fact that there is a marked correlation between common-sense gun laws and reduced rates of gun deaths.[1]
My dad was ex-army, retired PD (detective, undercover) and a heavy 2A advocate. I grew up with guns around so it wasn't some weird, scary thing to see. I have many friends who also are heavy 2A who also grew up with guns in the home. It's first a matter of familiarity and second a matter of civil defense. I'm not a fan of "must flea" laws, and not a fan of restricting gun rights at all.
And yeah, if you can afford a tank and the ammo for it, as far as I'm concerned, you should be able to own and operate it. I would draw the line at nuclear weapons and materials.
Where's the line you're drawing between tanks + everything else up until nuclear weapons?
It's pretty much already the case that people can have access to these weapons, I'm just being explicit.
I won't try to make as strong a claim as the person you are responding to, but unfortunately, the politicized nature of the topic makes research on gun violence, especially as it relates to gun laws in the US, extremely fraught. The vast majority of research articles are plagued with issues. One should not just blanket trust the research (in either direction, and there are definitely peer reviewed journal articles pointing in different directions).
The claim you responded to was too strong, but for similar reasons, yours is also far far too confident.
I'm arguing that your statement, citation supported or otherwise, was stronger than I believe is warranted. You (correctly) criticized the original comment for making a stronger claim than they were able to support. You then technically did a better job in supporting your own claim (in the sense that you made any attempt to support it at all), but, in my opinion, you still made the same mistake of making a claim that was much stronger than warranted.
Your own completely unsupported claim?
No, that's not how it works.
This is an area where lay people should stay out of it, and should _definitely_ not be making strong claims like "documented, empirical fact" based on a shallow reading of someone else's summary of the literature.
So I already know they are fudging the numbers, presumably because my state usually votes democrat and they want us to look good.
Hell its got Vermont as #17, but it has some of the highest gun ownership rates and most permissive gun laws in the nation.
So you have failed to present an argument, and then continued to fail to support it. So all you have done is express an opinion. Those are fine and allowed, but of no significance to anyone else.
You ever wonder _why_ they state the problem in such an abstract way?
It's because that statistic is an abstract itself. It combines, in my view inappropriately, suicide, murders, and accidental injuries.
There are 2x as many suicides every year over murders.
Anyone bandying about the "gun deaths" statistic has either been misled or is attempting to mislead others.
But I doubt most people count suicide as “violent crime”.
Yet another lie by ommision. Violent deaths by guns have no relation to strength of gun laws. What your link measures is the number of accidental deaths by guns. If gun owners want to kill themselves it's not my job to keep them safe.
Not so fun fact, the person most likely to be killed by a gun in your home is you.
Some places deal with that reality head on, and it has an outcome that a lot of people are okay with.
No shit: people commit suicide (which your "statistic" you lifted from Everytown, Giffords, or VPC - anti-gun lobbies includes.)
Suicidal people aren't a valid reason for my rights to be restricted, sorry.
You also have a right to travel around the country, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to drink and drive. There are plenty of valid, constitutional reasons for firearm ownership to be restricted to qualified individuals. When these restrictions are in place, many fewer people die. It is what it is.
Also, what a shitty analogy: suicide is by definition a self-harmful act, DUI is almost always a socially-harmful act on its own.
(And in many states, you can DUI on private property, by the way.)
"59% of people who died in crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers in 2022 were the alcohol-impaired drivers themselves"[1]
Also, people who commit suicide with their firearms typically have families who suffer.
So of course you're going to have wildly-overreaching proposals making it through committees and put to the vote, because no one from the other side is there to compromise with. Americans prefer to debate on the news circuit instead of the committee floor.
Interests are also not always clear, any movement that wants to restrict activities using the law, is going to attract opportunistic power-seeking individuals. There's always crazy carve out exceptions in these proposals that allow the wealthy and the powerful to use and possess firearms that regular people cannot reasonably expect to have. It's laws to protect the powerful from the everyone else. Billionaires are creating armed doomsday compounds in countries like New Zealand, while supporting legislation that makes it harder to own a gun for self defense.
Also mass shootings are statistically the least likely cause of a gun related death. They are in the news because they are novel, not because they are likely to happen to most people.
Maybe we should enshrine that right in the Constitution as the Zeroth Amendment, because it is seriously being trampled as of late.
Give a different or changing culture the same constitution, they can turn things into/remain a shithole very quickly.
Either we should be allowed whatever semi-auto gun, or we should be allowed zero. Everything in between is a complete waste of time and effort and just leads to fucking over poor people for judicial profit because they can't afford $10,000+ lawyer that gets everybody with any money off of such charges.
Guns kill things. That's their primary purpose, it's why they exist. The people who aren't interested in guns for that purpose are easy to please: they don't really care about gun laws except in so much as they stop them from buying fun toys. They'd probably be fine with wildly invasive processes (being put on lists, biometric safeties, whatever), so long as they were given something in return. Something like, "You can have machine guns, but they need to be kept locked up at a licensed gun range".
People who just want guns for hunting are likewise easy to please. I'm not aware of any gun laws that have seriously effected the people who just want to shoot deer, because the tool you use to shoot an animal that isn't even aware you're there is pretty fundamentally different than those you to shoot someone who doesn't want to be shot.
The problem is people who want guns because of their utility against people, whether that means self defense, community defense, or national defense, fundamentally need the same things ( a need that is very expressly protected by the second amendment) as the person who wants to shoot a bunch of innocents. The militia folk might be fine with restrictions on handguns, but handguns are bar none the best choice for the self defense folk. The self defense folk might be fine with the existing machine gun ban, or other restrictions on long guns, but the militia folk need those for their purposes. The self dense folk are probably fine with being put on a list, but the militia folk who are concerned about the holders of that list are rightfully opposed to that.
IMO, the most effective gun law that isn't a complete non-starter to any legitimate groups of gun owners is the waiting period. It's an effective policy that substantially reduces suicide. That's a good thing. Requiring sellers to not sell to people under 18, or those who are obviously a threat to themselves and others is also largely unobjectionable. Punishing parents who fail to secure their weapons from their children, also a good thing.
No one's in favor of mass shootings, but it's not anywhere as simple as saying "common sense gun regulations".
As far as the waiting period, there's a perfectly valid reason against that as well... if you are under eminent threat of violence from someone and want to be able to defend yourself/family/home today... it stops you from being able to do so.
I am okay with the (relatively quick) background check... when I bought my first guns a few years ago, I had to wait about an hour in the store for the results to come back (Phoenix). Even then, I'm not okay with secondary offense restrictions (weed, etc) as a restriction.
If I own many firearms already, what exactly does a waiting period do besides infringe upon my rights?
But yeah, the benefit does mostly arise for first time gun buyers. But that would require a master list of all gun owners. I'd prefer the wait per gun.
All of the gun grabbers I am aware of that are in favor of waiting periods try to make this infringement justified based on "crimes of passion" and other "heat-of-the-moment" nonsense - not "schoolchildren."
Casual gun ownership is the difference. In Europe you can get guns, but you do it for a purpose like hunting or sports, license and training is required.
If you look at the people doing the shooting you get a much better correlation but no-one wants to go there.
2021 - Ethnic minorities represent over 50% of Birmingham’s population - [0]
2022 - Birmingham overtakes London as 'gun capital' of Britain with huge surge in gang violence - [1]
[0] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/birmingham-overtakes-l...
[1] https://www.birminghamworld.uk/news/ethnic-minorities-repres...
Going from 0.05 to 0.06 is also a "big surge".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
If you take a look at say a heat map of the US where homicide is[1], it tracks extremely closely to where the black population is (New Mexico an outlier despite having stronger gun laws than most the surrounding states besides Colorado).[2]
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Ho...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Af...
I'm talking about saving people's lives here.
If you talk to hunters, they'll give you a long list of annoying laws.
California requires a background check to buy ammunition and prohibits state residents from importing ammunition. If you are a non-resident, you can bring ammunition in, but you cannot give it to your hunting buddies and you cannot buy ammunition in California. This is such a common problem that many hunting organizations have guides explaining the issue.[1] When I lived in California, I was unable to buy ammunition despite legally buying several firearms. Around 1 in 6 legal gun owners in California are incorrectly denied when purchasing ammunition.
California (along with several other states) bans civilian ownership of silencers. Hunters need to be able to hear when searching for game, and they rarely have time to don hearing protection before taking a shot. So the net effect of this restriction is to give hunters hearing damage and create more noise pollution. It's also a problem for anyone in rural areas who wants to dispatch pests, as gunshots annoy neighbors and can even result in the police being called.
California requires that long guns be unloaded when transported, but the definition of "unloaded" states that ammunition be stored separately. If ammunition is readily available near the firearm, California counts that as loaded, and you are committing a crime. If you have cartridge holder loops on your rifle's stock, they must be empty during transport even if the firearm is in a locked case.
California requires that hunters use lead-free ammunition. Lead-free ammo is more expensive and less available than typical lead ammunition, especially if you're not hunting with a common caliber. Many hunters zero their rifle using leaded practice ammo, and are generally less experienced with their hunting ammo. This makes hunters more likely to miss an animal's vitals, prolonging its suffering. Lead-free birdshot makes sense, but considering how few rifle rounds are expended while hunting, and how it's legal to use leaded ammo for target shooting in the wilderness, the lead restriction on rifle ammo serves no useful purpose.
It's been years since I lived in California, so I'm probably forgetting some other laws that annoy hunters. But believe me: hunters are not happy with the current laws.
1. https://calwaterfowl.org/navigating-californias-new-ammuniti...
It's like saying "I am baffled by Europe, look at what Hungary is doing ..."
For example, some states don't need any permit to open or conceal carry, some have no minimum age requirements to buy guns, and the majority don't have any mention of 3D printed guns.
Federal law applies then about untraceable guns and or arms that cannot be detected by metal detectors. But those predate 3D printers as we know them today.
If you live in CA and don't want to experience permanent hearing damage from shooting, you'll catch a Felony for simply possessing one. It's a big middle finger like the rest of California's gun laws.
Thank you California for acting on this, our top national priority.
Criminals have tons of options, including straw purchasing a CA compliant gun, straw purchasing a non-CA-compliant gun from Nevada, or just throwing a brick through the window of the nearest pickup truck with a Glock sticker on it.
You could make a similar case for this as was made for the banning of highly toxic coal gas in the UK in the 1960's. Most suicides are acts of distressed individuals who have quick, easy access to means of ending their own lives. The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC478945/
I don't think 3d printed guns have been around long enough to really provide meaningful data on whether this law will be effective, and on the whole, I'm not thrilled about it. But again, as was originally commented: this is an issue where states are, perhaps ineffectively and ineptly, attempting to solve what they see as problems, under a federal government that has shown itself incredibly resistant to common sense gun regulation that virtually everyone, including the gun owning community, thinks is a good idea.
The mechanism of that reduction very well could be reducing the level of depression in the populace and thus suicidal ideation, rather than just making the means less handy (or of course, some combination). Coal gas, like any other gas used for combustion, doesn't burn perfectly and UK homes likely had persistent amounts of carbon monoxide roughly all the time since heat gets used not-quite-year-round.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning#Chro... :
> Chronic exposure to relatively low levels of carbon monoxide may cause persistent headaches, [...], depression [...].
What historical precedent is there for infringement of Constitutionally-enumerated rights of others based on suicides?
Why is this somehow a "gotcha" that would justify these infringements, in your mind?
There is no requirement that a precedent exist for limiting personal freedoms for the sake of safety. We infringe personal rights in the name of public safety all the time, not the least of which is current, existing gun regulations, all the way down to far more benign shit like speed limits, and not letting people scream "fire" in a theater. The 2nd Amendment was itself a modification to the constitution, ratified some time after the constitution itself. Hence the "amendment" part.
And as numerous gun activists have pointed out before me: The individual ownership interpretation goes only back to the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, and is not itself law, merely judicial precedent. The right for every single American to own a gun is not enshrined in any law, merely an interpretation of a law, and the law itself was written in an era of single‑shot, muzzle‑loading firearms, not modern semiautomatic rifles, and further, it was written to promote the creation of, and I quote, "well-regulated Militas," not "Ted up the street who owns the gas station."
Further, even if it was spelled out, in the 2nd Amendment, in clear words, that every single American had the innate right to buy and use an AR15, that does not make it unimpeachable or forever carved in stone: We can change that. We can amend the amendment, hell, we could reverse it entirely. The problem of gun violence is a hard nut to crack, and the culture of American gun ownership is long standing and on the whole I myself quite like guns. That said, I think they're far too easy to get right now, and I am far from alone in that opinion.
The judicial precedent set in that case was overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio.[2]
If the number of people killing themselves with 3D printed guns is not literally zero or vanishingly small at most, I would be very surprised.
This is a bill with no votes - the first committee hearing is in March.
The purpose of the bill seems to be have some controversy & possibly raise the profile of the proposer.
The bill is written very similarly to how we enforce firmware for regular printers and EURion constellation detection.
The real fix is that we need to get rid of immunity for legislators. When they violate the civil rights of the constitutional rights of citizens through their actions, they must be held personally liable and must go to jail.
Why are you so angry about this?
These bans are almost exclusively in states with already extremely strict (high rated by the gifford's law people) gun laws.
So far, there is zero evidence in the last 30 years more strict gun laws have curbed crime. The states with the strictest laws conveniently have the highest proportion of gun crime. The same people writing these laws don't understand what "per capita " means. Nor are they willing to confront the reality of what the data shows. The calculus for these petty tyrants has changed from banning guns wholesale to lawfare. Make owning and purchasing firearms so burdensome the market dies, and with it, the rights. This is just another play in that strategem.
Fun fact: More people died last year putting foreign objects in their rears than by AR-15s. That is how insane the anti-gun lobby has become. They are literally barking at their own shadow these days.
I don't know how to square the same people saying we're living under a tyrannical government also pushing legislation that makes sure said tyrannical government is the only one with guns.
I’ve seen this claim from a few people in this thread but everytime I look up gun deaths per capita Massachusetts and California are low on the list and both have strict gun laws compared to red states
Pick whatever demise: falling off of ladders, roofs, etc. - it's not hard to exceed this number in any given year.
> In 2023, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 53% of the 13,529 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 4% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (42%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”
Interesting findings:
Most gun deaths are suicides with handguns.
Assault weapons are used in less than 5% of deaths.
Handguns account for 53% of the deaths.
Shotguns are negligable.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...
I wouldn't over-rotate on the comparison to foreign body objects: the point is, if you rely purely on the media to inform you about gun violence, you're going to get a funhouse mirror version of reality. It's way more exciting to write about the 40 school children killed in the last two years in mass shootings than the 16,000 depressed dads that blew their heads off in their garage with a handgun in the last 12 months (spitballing a bit, but 40,000 deaths, 50% of which are suicides, 80% of those are men).
No argument that the media produces inaccurate representations about guns. I spend a fair amount of time reading articles and also spend a lot of time reading into the facts that they report.
The most important thing to note here is that a majority of the support for gun control in America is cultural. Even the loud-and-proud pro-gun people got extremely shy about their own principles once the Black Panthers started packing heat. On the flipside, it's also not hard to find gun control supporting Democrats that happen to own firearms in their house. There's a related cultural argument over "assault weapons", or "black guns" - i.e. the ones that look like military weapons rather than hunting tools.
The result of all this confusion - and, for that matter, any culture war fight - is a lot of stupid lawmaking designed specifically to work around the edges of 2A while ignoring how guns actually work or how gun laws are normally written. Like, a while back there were bans on purely cosmetic features of guns. Things like rail attachments, that do not meaningfully increase the lethality of the weapon, but happen to be preferred by a certain crowd of masculinity-challenged right-wingers. In other words, a ban on scary-looking guns.
What's going on here is that someone figured out how to make a 3D printed gun that will not immediately explode in your hand on first firing. In the US it's legal to manufacture your own guns, and there's no requirement to serial-number such a gun, which makes it more difficult to trace if that gun is used to commit a crime. You can't really stop someone from making such a "ghost gun" (practically, not legally), so they want to take a page out of the DMCA 1201 playbook and just ban all the tools used to make such a thing possible.
Personally, I don't think that will pass constitutional muster - but that also relies heavily on existing culture-war brained nonsense that happens to be standing constitutional principle. 2A itself can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. The original interpretation was "no interfering with state-run slave catching militias", and then later that turned into "everyone has the right to own firearms". Nothing stops it from changing again.
I'm a strong believer in 2a rights. However I think every type of weapon might require a license. So if you 3d print a gun that you would be allowed to own if you had already completed your background check, then you're gold.
If you end up 3d printing a nuclear bomb, the licensing requirements for that would be a billion times harder. (secure facilities, 24/7 guards, blood oath to the United States etc...)
now they have to do 80% printers, kits composed of not a printer subunits, to be assembled on site.
then DIY sources must be dealt with:
https://pea3d.com/en/how-to-build-your-own-3d-printer/
it looks like mole whackings, all the way down.
Regulating theoretical guns? No requirement is too draconian.
Carrying a handgun for self-defense was impossible, as the local authorities only gave out permits to those with political connections. This caused a scandal in 2020 when the Santa Clara County Sheriff was caught issuing concealed carry permits to bodyguards at Apple in exchange for iPads.[1] Thanks to Bruen[2] it is now possible for any law-abiding citizen to get a permit if they jump through all the hoops (which includes fingerprinting, a psych eval, and examination of your social media posts), though it can take over a year to process the application and costs can exceed $1,000.
At some point the law changed to require a background check to buy ammunition, which always failed for me. I never figured out why, but my guess is that my name didn't fit in the state's database. This sort of thing happened to around 10% of legal gun owners in the state. I never got it sorted out before I moved away.
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/apples-security-chief-accus...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Rifle_&_Pistol_...
You can pretty much tell when any given administration has run out of ideas once they start making a huge amount of noise about laws that affect to first and second order literally nobody. 3-D printed guns is basically California's version of illegal immigrants voting in elections. Both things happen to a vanishingly small degree that it's not worth taking any action on either, but you can make them sound like they're the greatest threat to America if you have a megaphone loud enough.
Not making excuses for politicians, but nearly all big bureaucracies start exhibiting this same behavior. It is the lamp post fallacies of problem solving.
Eh, small thing there. Ever notice how when discussion about voter ID laws in the US come up that commenters from other countries are absolutely blown away by the idea of not having to show an ID when you vote? Because it’s such an obvious thing to not just leave up to the honor system, like we do? Point being, everyone else seems to think this “thing that could never happen” is worth safeguarding against.
But this is what I'm talking about it being a theoretical problem. It's so obvious that this could be an issue but it's not an actual issue and the USA stands as an example that, counterintuitively, you actually can rely on the honor system. And so because the system currently works as it is and there's no real problem to point to I think it is reasonable to be inherently suspicious of the motives of a government that wants to make a thing harder without being able to point to a concrete problem.
A less controversial example on hacker news would be having to show your government ID to access porn. We are all rightfully suspicious of the motives of a government that wants that when to most Americans it is plainly obvious that there is not a real problem being solved. It's so obvious that you should have to show proof that you're 18 in order to access 18 and up material but we have more than two decades of proof that just asking them if they're 18 and up works well enough.
Voter ID laws are a non-starter because historically they've been used, along with literacy tests and civics tests, to disenfranchise people who can't get an ID. For example, in Idaho you must have "proof of your identity and age" like a birth certificate or citizenship certificate, plus proof of residency like a utility bill or rental agreement or employment record.
These things are easy for most people to provide, but people who are in unstable living situations may find these things impossible to provide. Requiring those people to provide ID at the polls would effectively disenfranchise them.
Who is verifying the documents? If the names have to match, what about people who change their names? What documents should they present to prove that that's their real name? How will the election worker actually verify that the documents are correct?
Women who have changed their names after getting married have a higher burden of proof than people that have not changed their name. The folks who wrote this act are aware of this.
The SAVE Act, in particular, puts in place criminal and civil penalties for election workers that fail to properly identify someone. But a random election worker is not equipped to make that judgment perfectly and is going to end up making mistakes, since document verification for things like birth certificates is completely manual.
Young voters are more likely to have the documents like a birth certificate back at their parents' house and they're not likely to yet have a passport. Likewise, poorer voters do not have the resources to easily obtain these documents. Passport costs over $100 in the United States and for someone that doesn't travel often is not a very good investment. Just because you can't afford an expensive government document does not mean you're not entitled to your vote.
If Silicon Valley has taught me anything, it's every time you add friction to a process, fewer people have the resources and/or are willing to go through it as they drop off the funnel. In this case, it's targeted at the young, the poor, and the women. We used to be a nation that would say: get out and vote! Participate in our democracy! Now we're looking for excuses to not let citizens vote if they can't prove on the spot that they're a citizen. Papers, please.
And all that for what? Multiple institutions, including the Cato Institute and the U.S. Department of Justice, have found no evidence of meaningful voter fraud. This is because identification is required during voter registration, which is effective in preventing illegal immigrants from voting. This is why we tie voter registration to things like getting a driver's license at the DMV. You already have all your documents prepared that you gathered for that visit, and so that's the right time to be checking all of them.
1. Voter turnout wasn't already shit and we're about add friction for very little practical gain.
2. The people pushing for voter id laws also pushed for things that reduced the disparity like a national id, a program to get it in the hands of every American, automatic registration when interacting with the government, literally anything.
Here's one.
"Life is complicated, so is rule-making."
Well, two things. First, your phrasing implies there’s no regulations around firearm ownership at all, which is not true.
Second, much to the chagrin of California and similar states, that pesky second amendment exists. Which makes the kind of regulations they _want_ around firearms (i.e., regulate/tax them out of existence) kind of tricky. But presumably regulations around what you can do with a 3D printer are much easier to handle from a constitutional perspective.
Not really. They do whatever regulations they want all the time. It's just sometimes federal government steps in and forces certain local laws to not be enforced.
I was able to get CCW permit in LA only due to such intervention.
(The answer is actually "yes, several".)
if a printing or milling job, or some combination of both, is split into many portions, until each portion is such a jigsaw puzzle, [perhaps literally] that it cant be filtered as its so non specific in form, that it could be anything.
By "general-purpose" I mean that there's no components that are 3d-printer specific; motor controllers and microcontrollers and voltage regulators and all the various jellybean parts. And even if there were any, they could easily be replaced with general-purpose components.
> (b) A person, firm, or corporation shall not use a three-dimensional printer to manufacture any firearm, including a frame or receiver, or any firearm precursor part, unless that person, firm, or corporation is licensed pursuant to Chapter 2 (commencing with Section 29030).
To get a license from the state, you must first have a federal firearms manufacturing license. California has additional requirements such as fees ranging from $250-600, yearly background checks of any employees who handle guns, a CA DOJ certificate of eligibility for every business owner, stricter building security measures than a FFL type 07, records of the serial numbers of all firearms produced, and allowing the local police to inspect the facility regularly. Firearm manufacturers are not allowed to sell guns to individuals, so you would not be able to take possession of your 3D printed gun until you got the model approved on California's roster, transferred it to a firearm dealer, then went through California's standard process for buying a gun, which I describe here.[2]
1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
His lawyer knows they are going to lose all the appeals in New York but basically he has to sit in jail for 3-4 years through the state court system until it can hit federal courts where there is a good chance his case will eventually get overturned.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor
* Response to below (my comments are throttled): The argument/reference in his defense, not actual guns.
"Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law out of all other freedom struggles."
Sports Arenas and Jails are two other places you might be surprised to learn don't allow the second amendment.
>Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.
This is not about guns in the courtroom. This is a claim that the 2nd amendment of the constitution does not apply to the state of New York.
https://scnr.com/article/hobby-gunsmith-in-nyc-convicted-aft...
IMO, it depends on the events in court; if there was extensive argumentation about that and the judge is finally saying that it's been discussed to death and there's no point bringing it up, that seems fine. (I don't want to read the actual court transcripts to figure out what the attorney is referring to, so this comment is intentionally inconclusive.)
It's a gross oversimplification of what the judge was trying to say to imply that they don't care about the 2nd amendment or the constitution.
I'm not familiar with the details of the case but, reading the thread, it seems this didn't occur if the guns "never even left his house".
And he didn't sell them, you pulled that out of your ass.
It doesn't appear you have any familiarity with the case yet you purport to understand what the judge was saying by completely mischaracterizing the case with outright falsehoods. But I suppose if you just tell straight up lies confidently enough, someone will believe you!
you have to be an FFL to legally transfer a nonserialized firearm, and part of that includes endowing the firearm with a serial, and completing the 4473.
if the firearm is already serialized you can do private sale from person to person, in a casual non business context, you cant privately transfer a "ghost" it has to be serialized and go through 4473 transfer then it can go through private sale.
[addndm] "Requirements for Individuals
For individuals who already possess a PMF or an unfinished receiver for personal use, the rule does not require retroactive serialization. However, if that individual decides to sell or transfer a privately made firearm to another person, the transaction must be conducted through an FFL. The FFL must then apply a serial number to the weapon and complete the required background check and record-keeping procedures before the transfer can legally occur."
https://legalclarity.org/supreme-court-ghost-gun-decision-cu..
You can't make it for the purposes of sale, but you can sell or loan it as part of trading your personal collection. I've heard the myth about not being able to sell over and over but no one has ever been able to point out a federal law against selling a privately manufactured firearm incidentally later as part of trade in their collection, with or without a serial number. All successful prosecutions I've read involved people making them for the purpose of sale or transfer and then getting caught doing that -- for that you need an FFL.
You do not have to be a FFL to transfer a nonserialized firearm. In fact tons of guns made before the GCA had no serial number, as there was no blanket requirement before 1968, they are legally sold privately all the time (as are PMF / "ghost guns" that people no longer want).
>[addndm] "Requirements for Individuals
Yeah that's an uncited bit of misinformed nonsense, it's totally false. If there is a law or ruling they surely could have cited it, in fact what they did was apparently trawl forums or something repeating that myth and just regurgitated it out. Here is the actual rule they claim they are referring to[] I challenge anyone to find that nonsense in there.
In fact, it says the exact opposite, as I will cite the actual rule publication that those morons are pretending to refer to but yet won't cite themselves:
At the same time, neither the GCA nor the proposed or final rule prohibits unlicensed individuals from marking (non-NFA) firearms they make for their personal use, or when they occasionally acquire them for a personal collection, or sell or transfer them from a personal collection to unlicensed in-State residents consistent with Federal, State, and local law. There are also no recordkeeping requirements imposed by the GCA or the proposed or final rule upon unlicensed persons who make their own firearms, but only upon licensees who choose to take PMFs into inventory. In sum, this rule does not impose any new requirements on law-abiding gun owners.
I happened to remember reading about how the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement would have ruined EARN IT Act's implementation had it passed [1]:
> When a private entity conducts a search because the government wants it to, not primarily on its own initiative, then the otherwise-private entity becomes an agent of the government with respect to the search. (This is a simplistic summary of “government agent” jurisprudence; for details, see the Kosseff paper.) And government searches typically require a warrant to be reasonable. Without one, whatever evidence the search turns up can be suppressed in court under the so-called exclusionary rule because it was obtained unconstitutionally. If that evidence led to additional evidence, that’ll be excluded too, because it’s “the fruit of the poisonous tree.”
> Fourth Amendment government agency doctrine is why lawmakers and law enforcement must tread very carefully when it comes to CSAM scanning online. Many online service providers already choose voluntarily to scan all (unencrypted) content uploaded to their services, using tools such as PhotoDNA. But it must be a voluntary choice, not one induced by government pressure. (Hence the disclaimer in the federal law requiring providers to report CSAM on their services that they know about, which makes clear that they do not have to go looking for it.) If the provider counts as a government agent, then its CSAM scans constitute warrantless mass surveillance. Whatever CSAM they find could get thrown out in court should a user thus ensnared raise a Fourth Amendment challenge during a resulting prosecution. But that’s often a key piece of evidence in CSAM prosecutions; without it, it’s harder to convict the accused. In short, government pressure to scan for CSAM risks letting offenders off the hook.
[1] Ignoring EARN IT's Fourth Amendment Problem Won’t Make It Go Away - https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2022/03/ignoring-earn-its...
Don’t we have something similar with how pretty much all copiers/printers wont print currency?
The short answer is yes, but I'm not sure how similar.
Copiers/printers that refuse to print money detect a pattern designed in the original physical currency note (as with the EURion constellation [1], with emphasis on the fact that currency is printed by the government) or a digital watermark placed in digital images of money (as with the Counterfeit Deterrence System voluntarily developed by banks [2]).
18 U.S. Code § 474A makes controlling or possessing "any essentially identical feature or device adapted to the making of" counterfeit money a felony [3]. What happens if I make a single "simple" printer for my own use that prints anything I tell it to because I "simply" didn't include any scanning or blocking functions in the printer design, and I never intend to print copy/counterfeit money? Is such a printer "adapted to the making of" counterfeit money? I don't know. If I instead make or transfer such a printer for any purpose other than my own personal use, the answer might move toward yes, but maybe it was already yes. Does the US require all copiers and printers to include at least one feature that prevents copying or counterfeiting of money? I don't know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...
[3] 18 U.S. Code § 474A - Deterrents to counterfeiting of obligations and securities - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/474A
In most place of the world, including where I am, pressure bearing parts such as the barrel, the bolt that locks onto the end of the barrel to seal it as it fires, the firing pin that ignites the cartridge, the live cartridge containing gunpowder, etc etc, rather than the part that merely carries its nameplate, are controlled. It is illegal in such places to buy or possess functionally relevant parts of a gun, at least without a license, and/or prior approvals. This is more like buying a CPU or motherboards would be controlled rather than cases and faceplates. In some places, what is considered a gun in US hardly qualify as such, even almost slipping through customs(allegedly).
You guys gotta fix that broken classification before trying to offload onus onto the global 3D printing community. Or drop it altogether.
https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-civ/division-3/...
I expect someone to get around this by modifying the slicing software to use a different algorithm that doesn't rely strictly on layering 2D cross sections.
Yep
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advanced_3DPrinting/comments/1qsy6v...
Or just start printing them out of something useful like metal
I'm a long time shooter of all kinds of firearms (bolt actions to full-autos).
What people don't realize is that gun control works, but only when it's very controlled - i.e. full registration, deep checks, mandatory training, strict storage, no handguns, etc.
You need to do it across the whole country, as a real customs border can cut guns significantly, but in the US you can do still do a private party (person to person with no dealer) transfer in many states, making gun running pretty trivial.
None of this will happen anytime soon in the US, and the ghost guns, etc. thing will keep happening.
Yes, we have a gun violence problem. But notably, we do not have a heavy weapons problem. By and large, gun crimes are committed with guns that can be purchased legally somewhere inside the US.
So if the silver bullet to the gun violence problem is taking away all the guns (please do not misunderstand me, I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT TO BE THE CASE), then step 1 is to limit what guns can be purchased anywhere in the US.
But this whole 3d printer farse reveals something we sort of already knew: if people want to have guns (or have weapons in general), they're going to find a way. If you want to address the gun violence problem, you have to find a way to make people not want to kill, nor own guns, that's unrelated to how difficult/expensive it is to get guns. And you're going have to do that in the shadow of the constitution.
I do think gun control can work, but these kinds of legislation feel like the "paper straw" kind of regulation - ie alienating some people who'd otherwise agree with you on many things.
All the news stories about ghost guns being 3D printed didn't hurt either. So they can sell a narrative of protecting people.
> Rebecca Beth Bauer-Kahan (née Bauer; born October 28, 1978) is an American attorney and politician who has served as a member of the California State Assembly from the 16th district since 2018. A member of the Democratic Party, her district extends from Lamorinda to the Tri-Valley region of the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been described as a women's rights advocate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066567
Nice sentiments, but totally impractical.
I’ve certainly seen projects and models demonstrating the ability to create firearms with the help of a 3D printer, but I’m not aware of anyone using one to commit a crime…
What are the recommendations for printers now? Bucket it by price range, so $0-200, $200-400, $400-800, $800+
Any notable features which can be a big value add? Offline is obviously a requirement given how the winds are blowing.
Flashforge AD5X (also ~$300) is the best value for single extruder multi-filament since it forgoes the expense of material to enclose it which works well for PLA (an enclosure is easily fabricated and installed). Note that they had a recent social media gaffe where they claimed that they would report manufacture of weapons, but have since walked that back.
I own both of the above, and print from USB sticks w/o connecting to my network --- I'm pretty sure that's possible with most if not all printers.
The Snapmaker U1 (~$1,000) is the most striking value for multi-filament since it minimizes "poop" (extra filament extruded when changing colours).
If you want to support opensource, then one of Prusa's (they cover a wide range of price points) --- they have been pushing the "INDX" printhead technology which allows fast/efficient switching between different filaments.
You see it a lot on crime investigation shows. Pretty sure I've seen it on 24 hours in police custody and at least one other show or documentary.
edit: police acting on a source, a lead or some other un-named entity.
The Feed was a centralized matter distribution network under strict control of what could be created and by whom. The Seed was a completely self contained system that could bootstrap from raw materials.
"Hey I see your printing a replacement part for you washer. Well that is a patent part and you will need to pay to print that."
WE DO NOT LIVE IN THAT WORLD.
just as deadly, harder to trace when there is no ballistic evidence, maybe an RF signature that FCC monitors will record.
Also, good luck farming off the job to the DOJ right now. The ATF has already mostly shrugged at the prospect of 3D printed guns, and that was before the administration gutted it. I don't think they have any interest/ability to cooperate with tech regulation at this time.
This, like every other bill on the subject that has been attempted from around the country, is bound for a quiet death by committee.
A great deal of regulation is sold to the public in the name of "safety", "equality", etc., but actually functions to entrench vested interests or inhibit competition in various industries.
Political solutions to social problems will always be turned to the advantage of whomever has the most political influence -- and that's always some narrow faction, and not the public at large.
and it doesnt have to be a sexual endeavor, it could be transgressional art, for example a series of insect inspired sculputres of genitalia.
as soon as someone starts printing/distributing materials that cater to a CSAM genre, then those cornflakes are no longer edible.
Purely performative power grabbing. There is no epidemic of ghost gun violence. These measures would not stop it if there were. The new legal thicket this creates will exclusively harm innocent people.
This is about notching a victory: making others bend the knee to the prerogatives of some pressure group. Nothing more. Behind it are wealthy pearl clutching virtue signalers. In front of it there are non-profit grifters and politicians with campaigns to fund, and in the middle lobbyists milk both sides. Everyone mouthing obligatory moral panic narratives to keep the money flowing.
Yes, but no too. I've built and purchased many 3d printers. You can make a 3d printer, but can you make one that works reliably as something like a washing machine with little to no tinkering or adjustment? Bambu Lab can sell you that for less than three hundred bucks. Just give it a file, feed it plastic, and it will rip.
I can now build a 3d printer that reliable, but only with parts and tools from other people and only after experience. Realistically not being able to buy a 3d printer off the shelf means it's going to be inaccessible for most people.
If you tell me that this can make an untracked weapon, I will tell you that probably an untracked weapon can be done with anything, and surprise surprise, even without 3d printed parts.
Imagine the amount of false positives and inquiries on unprovable things. Soon this will also be used for copyright or whatever, and that will be the sole purpose
Because there is a significant part of the country that would love to ban guns completely but they currently don't, and perhaps won't ever, have quite enough support to make a change to the constitution to allow them to. In the absence of that, and given they do have plenty of support to create local law many places, the strategy seems to have become to create a regulatory regime that technically still allows guns while making it as impractical as possible for anyone to actually do so.
Ban guns, or regulate them, and their owners?
Both, though I don't know the breakdown. I'm confident saying there's absolutely some people who seem to see onerous regulation as a path to a de facto ban, though.
I'd be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to those pushing regulations if the regulations themselves seemed well thought out and drafted rather than leaning on kneejerk "guns bad, rules good" reactions from voters to get passed. Unfortunately the actual situation seems to be that left-leaning areas where it's easy to push anti-gun law lean farther and farther into restricting both first and second amendment rights without meaningful impact, while the right-leaning areas that actually could use some additional regulation over the perhaps overly lax federal level laws can't or won't do anything.
https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-6/titl...
I'm not sure even one such machine exists. Some companies market benchtop or small lathes as "gun lathes" but that is marketing fluff not a technical description. Any lathe can be used to make weapons. They have tons of round parts and parts with drilled holes. So does everything else that gets manufactured.
I am not aware of any machine tool company that manufactures lathes, mills, etc explicitly designed just for manufacturing firearms.
So in that sense the law you reference is typical of performative legislation. You have angry idiots pestering you to Do Something(TM). So you pass a do-nothing bill. You get to say you banned a thing that never existed. Meanwhile it doesn't hurt or bother anyone because it applies to no one. That's the best of both worlds! Do nothing while looking busy! Take action without actually hurting anyone.
Is it silly? Yes. But I'd rather they do stuff like that then actually try to regulate 3d printers.
It still highlights the performative nature of some legislation. I'm certain everyone involved understood that's exactly what would happen.
so i don't mind if you downvote me. but if you care to listen to a man rant:
we have an incredibly sycophantic doj which selectively enforces the law according to socioeconomic status, so it boggles the mind that some of us in this thread maintain that this issue is partisan alone ("oh you liberals"). this line of thinking is a trap.
is it really the dems in california? is it really trump's doj? or, taking a step back and looking at fascist trends worldwide in aggregate, don't these policies benefit those groups who operate and lobby above common law? those groups of people who we magically let slide time and time again after committing gross misconduct? those companies whose monopolies fundamentally destroy free trade?
so much tribalism.
conservative or liberal, once the pendulum swings maybe consider what happens when your phantom political 'enemies' on the other side of the aisle can monitor what you create in your home, what queries you toss into your AI assistant, who you talk to on social media, what you are buying, or where your location is on the cell tower map.
then if you have a second brain cell, maybe consider whether those enemies on the other side of the aisle are struggling to feed kids and make shelter just the same as you, whether they are as much the rabble as those goliaths who dictate what the topics of division -are-
who benefits most from your fear of the other but those groups who lobby both sides??
isn't it would be better to have a world of celebrated differences and rules of decorum that instill trust and foster co-operation? isn't that the world that we want, so that we may put the monsters at epstein island, sarajevo, (and so many other places) in prison? maybe it is time to rise up and hold our leaders accountable, on the left and the right!
"oh this is just political posturing, those lawmakers are rewarded merely for doing 'something'" yes-- this is true. but from the outset, whose political posturing is it really? because the end result for every one of these laws that come to pass don't seem to prevent the folks up top from getting away scott-free.
just remember that with all illegal files (violations of copyright law, banned books, etc): it is easy to determine whether you are in possession of them. whether it is enforced against you is a matter of convenience and leverage, your personal value (and optic value as a victim in the political theatre). be value-less.
rant aside. obvious, stupid questions to the topic at hand: - (yes, shooting people is bad). - what is the definitive geometry of a gun? - who arbitrates that? - is it a crime to print a rubber band gun? a toy gun? - what about parts for a gun? how is that known? - who do we register our printers to? - what mechanisms are in place to side channel whether a person purchases tools such that we can detect whether they own an unregistered 3d printer? - how do we deal with false positives? - if I have a novel prototype of a non-gun which I would like to patent in a highly litigious first-to-file country, how can I guarantee that the file in question is submitted only to the government entity or API endpoint in question? - do we ban chinese printers? whose companies form the superset of allowable printers? how do smaller manufacturers join in? - what happens when the printer EOLs and software updates for the device stop (and therefore can't update the API endpoint)? - will open source printers be illegal? - what else should our government forbid us for printing: cock rings and contraceptive devices? emblems associated with religious groups (modernly) associated with hate speech?
i am sorry if you read this much and are from elsewhere. watch that it does not happen to your country. my heart goes out to you.
Some US company specialize in selling CNC mills specifically for firearms.
Ex: https://realghostguns.com/product/gg3-s-cnc-deposit/
It is sold with the cut codes for the AR-15, AR-.308, 1911, Polymer80 and AK-47 receivers and frames. New York’s budget bill S.9005 buries similar requirements in Part C, sweeping
in CNC mills and anything capable of “subtractive manufacturing.”
Yes but most designs still require metal bits. Typically the frame will be 3d printed and then you rely on machined components for things like slides and rails.
Let's look at actual numbers. ATF says 50,000 guns were smuggled into latin america between 2015 and 2022. So about 7,200 a year. There are about 15-20 million new firearm sales per year in the US.
So assume ~.03% of production gets smuggled out. I think the industry would survive if that was cut that off. It actually would be better for them because it would make lies and slanders about the industry harder to make.
https://www.thetrace.org/2024/06/atf-gun-trafficking-report-...
It seems like the USA has about 393.4MM civilian firearms, which is ~1.2 per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
About 32% of Americans say they personally own one or more guns, and most of those people own multiple weapons. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...
Where are the 'cooked statistics'?
The fact that supposedly every American owns 4 or 5 guns should hint at how bad the smuggling problem is
I think it shows how disconnected non-gun owners are from people who own guns. None of my liberal gun owning friends in California have fewer than 4-5 guns. My conservative gun owning friends in Texas have 20-30 guns. I've never met a gun owner that had 1-2.
1. people who don't have a gun
2. "gun owners"... who have them as a hobby and have a bunch of guns
3. people who just happen to have a gun at home. you don't hear about these people because they aren't "into" guns and don't talk about them.