Personally, I see this as an assault on 3d printing more than any real attempt to regulate guns.
I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?
So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
> You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
Why would you buy a pipe at Home Depot? A gun barrel is not a firearm, and is not required to be registered or serialized. You can drive to Arizona or Nevada and buy an actual barrel, with rifling, manufactured to meet well-known specifications, without showing an ID. Until this year, you could have a barrel shipped to your California residence without an ID. There's no need to build the Shinzo Abe contraption.
> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.
> Either way, this is bad legislation.
California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.
Yes and the response is telling you that you can build something orders of magnitude more sophisticated without any trouble. The point is, the firearm is not the tube the projectile comes out of. Firearm is closely defined and not intuitive to the general public.
I'd guess the bring-back-DRM lobbyists are all automotive interests, whether it's OEM or the existing after-market people. Replacing mirror housings and stuff even for cheap cars has got to be one of the highest margin businesses out there, and lux cars? Insane
> Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.
Probably more accurate to say politicians are trying to take actions which will be seen publicly as fighting against gun crime. It seems like a stretch to say anyone earnestly believes that 3D printed guns are a real problem in the landscape of existing gun crime in America
> California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.
California and New York have been done more for gun rights than anyone else by passing absurd laws that get struck down by the judiciary, setting precedent.
However, due to the adversarial nature of the judiciary system, opposition is required to set precedent. It'd be great if the overstepping didn't ever happen but we don't know what is overstepping until SCOTUS rules.
California and New York have played a pivotal role in defining the edges of the second amendment.
Do you even realize what you just said? Oh hey why even go to a nearby Home Depot when you can drive over to an entirely different state instead. Really?
Like everything in the United States, it’s actually gun manufacturers that want to clamp down on this cottage industry which threatens their profits. I don’t buy for a second that this is some gun control attempt.
> Like everything in the United States, it’s actually gun manufacturers that want to clamp down on this cottage industry which threatens their profits.
I have 0 reason to believe this.
That is some pretty wild speculation, and a terribly risky proposition for any company because they would instantly get blackballed by the 2a community.
I think a fundamental problem here is that people who don’t know any 2A/RKBA people think it’s like most political opinions. Oh, you’re a gun guy, you’re a Republican who like country music and hates them black folk.
It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music. It is a group that has decided that one issue is more important than anything else to them. And they vote. For you, if you are for them, but for your opponent, if you are not. They will primary you. They do not care if D or R is next to your name. In fact they love pro-gun D politicians, because it’s a chance to pull that party into respecting all constitutional rights.
The NRA is massively successful because of this. They do one thing, and everyone in it knows that. They don’t have to agree on anything else, because if you can’t have guns, the rest of the politics is irrelevant.
A company that made the slightest anti-2A movement would be dead by sunset the next day. No store would carry their product. No consumer in the know would buy their product.
I think it's actually mostly about school shootings and 'gang violence' that drive these regulations at least here in washington, which is a little paranoid. I don't think we've had too many school shootings. I know in seattle we had a shooting OUTSIDE a high school that killed a student, but I'm not sure we've had any columbine type situations.
Any gun company caught funding anything remotely anti-2A would be met with an unbelievably negative reaction from the firearms community and face boycotts and massive reputational damage. It absolutely would not be worth it for them to do this. I can maybe see the arguments that perhaps it’s really a proxy for the anti right to repair groups, but absolutely not the firearms manufacturers.
I think they don't give a shit about 3D printing, especially in CA. It's not like you're competing with a glock19 type hand gun and cornering this market.
Reminds me of the sUAS legislation crushing the R/C flying hobby. Vague allusions to "safety" are constantly being thrown around, but in fact it seems that big companies are lobbying to claim the airspace for drone delivery and similar autonomous BVLOS operations.
The only thing you need to make is the "lower" or whichever part the ATF constitutes as "the firearm" I've seen someone take a shovel and turn it into an AK. Once you have the "firearm" part of whatever gun you're building, the rest of the parts can be shipped to you in most of the country (idk about CA, and NY though) and you can easily assemble the rest of the gun.
Like you say, you just need to build a key metal piece, and voila, the rest is buying parts that can be delivered to you, in some cases fully assembled.
You could also just buy black powder guns directly to your home (idk about in CA or NY though) which are not treated as "firearms" by the ATF.
The only people shooting 3D printed guns are enthusiasts usually, who have other guns.
I'm not on top of the current SOTA in 3d-printed guns, but the way it typically was done in the past is that you don't actually 3d-print all of what you or I would call a complete gun.
The barrel will be metal. In designs made for the US market, it will almost certainly be an actual manufactured gun barrel, since gun parts other than the receiver are not closely tracked in the US. In designs for Western Europe, the metal parts will be either milled or things you can buy at the hardware store[1].
The barrel and chamber being made of something tougher than you can get from an FDM machine is basically a requirement for making a gun that doesn't explode in your face when you shoot.
Watching what bills show up in my state's legislature, several of them are addressing "Hollywood plots" rather than real-world issues.
For example, one legislator always sponsors a bill (which goes nowhere every year) to outlaw chemtrails. This year's version[0] includes the plot from the SF novel Termination Shock[1]. The word "artillery" was not in any previous session's version, nor was sulfur.
Hmm, assuming it's part of somebody's bigger plans with an ulterior motive... The requirement to pass everything through a government watchdog module could be leveraged into DRM/copyright/patent overreach.
Any real attempt would need to be at the national level, not that I would advocate for it, but it's simply a pipe dream to create a "gun free zone" in a country with 100s of millions of firearms. There are plenty of gun enthusiasts in California, they just don't flaunt it or talk about it.
I think the real issue is that 3d printing is a direct attack on products as a service (think roomba parts, fridge parts, anything with plastic clip assembly) that are planed to break and they don't sell replacement parts.
lots of companies got fat and happy selling you plastic crap for a fortune, now 3d printers let you make plastic crap at home for pennies.
If they must pass these laws, it must include protections for printing consumer goods parts, if they won't add that I will not vote for you.
First, I agree with you, though I don't call it "bad legislation", I call it lobbyism. But there is one tiny nitpick to disagree with, aside from another user pointing out that there are even simpler ways for obtaining firearms.
> If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm
While I totally agree with you that this is all about lies, there is still one difference in that most regular firearms are metal-based. With 3D printing one could print plastic or similar materials.
Again, I am not saying this is a reason to explain this lobbyism here, but we also need to be objective when debunking the lies of the other side. For instance, one difference is metal detection (naturally plastic-based weapons would also tend to break more easily, so this whole legislation is a total lie to begin with anyway; California is currently broken. I am surprised about that, usually you'd think other US states are more broken, but California is now in the top 3 lobbyist-controlled states - and from there the disease spreads slowly).
> I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
I agree that this legislation is not good, but you apparently aren’t aware of the large communities dedicated to 3D printing guns.
The first 3D printed gun was making headlines 13 years ago and since then it’s turned into a semi-underground fascination.
You aren’t going to be fashioning a gun out of a pipe from Home Depot more easily than the designs these groups are playing with.
Many of the subreddits, Discords, Facebook groups and other communities have started to get shut down since a 3D printed gun was used in a high profile murder recently.
There are a lot of comments in this comment section from people unaware of how big these communities are. I’m not supporting these legislative attempts to interfere with 3D printers but you really should know some of the context.
I believe such forces are the indirect result of the structure of society and economy.
If legal arms dealers want the state to step in because of some decentralizing technology, then for the government it would be yet another cost center to combat this phenomenon. So lobbyists need to come up with a kind of reward, and design more "palatable" proposals, so that income can be derived by somehow initiating government control into the whole decentralized technology instead of just the illegitimately decentralized subsection...
but punishing "the rest" for actions of a few would mean financing it with taxes, instead of scapegoating the legitimate majority of 3D printer users.
Although people point out the occam's razor or whatever, i dont think this is true. As it happens with "protect children", "protect people" is the next blabbering speech to trick people accepting lobbied practices.
Someone needs to track who is financing this stuff and I think it will make it much clearer. PS: I wouldnt be surprised if it was disney or something
If you're a California constituent and inclined to take action you can find your California Assemblymember and Senator here ( https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/ ) to voice opposition to California bill A.B. 2047 "Firearms: 3-dimensional printing blocking technology."
They are typically stocked with material and ready to deploy at a moment's notice. When the time comes that you need a weapon, casually walking into Home Depot won't be an option.
Most of the '3d printed' guns out there in the 2a community, and all the ones that actually work, require some kind of metal barrel, which might be a pipe, rifled or not.
What they actually hate is people who buy bags of glock parts from ebay (contains everything but the frame) and then print the frame. The frame being the handle part, everything below the slide but none of the internals. That's the legal 'gun' when it comes to most glocks and clones. The new ruger rmx, a newer glock clone, is different, the firing group (trigger and all the associated bits there) is the serialized part. The frame is, of course, very easy to print.
All the regulations around firearms are super fucking stupid, the way they classify different parts and try and make them illegal. Like.. in a lot of states if you have a rifle (ar or otherwise), you are not allowed to have a vertical foregrip for stabalization. However if your foregrip is like 5 degrees off pure vertical... legal.
This 3d printer 'ban' is unenforcable, it's a fucking tool, you can build anything with tools. Sure it's easier and takes less skill to download a glock 19 frame model off the internet and hit print, but there is, apparently, a lot of work that goes into making the gun work with that frame well enough for the gun to actually cycle.
I mean, the entanglement between technology and politics is difficult to unsee, once one sees it. And the analogy between solar power and grid power, maps cleanly onto 3d printing and manufacturing (trad-printing?). Politics is _most frequently_ about money and the economic surplus, and only rarely about justice or ideology. The funny thing is, that the adjective that is most frequently use to describe markets is "efficient". Yet, whenever technologies that threaten to erode someone's business model appear, the market starts abusing the political infrastructure to introduce inefficiencies and frictions into the adoption of the technologies.
Even though lobbying is not _technically_ illegal, we should probably learn to treat companies that engage in it (to the detriment of society) as if it were. Avoid their products if you can, and get your friend-group to do it as well. Build off-ramps. Maintain and share lists of executives who work at these companies (to put pressure on their reputations -- after all, what is wealth worth, if ordinary people refuse to take your money, or to give you any of their attention?). The market's distinctive feature is that it makes things fungible: currency, goods, and even people. Eliminate or reduce fungibility, and you get a very different kind of dynamic, one that has the potential to reverse the trend of rising inequality (and rent-seeking behavior, and unfair one-sided arrangements, etc) over night.
In fact, the strategy of any company is to find a way to make an entire class of companies/merchants (not competitors) fungible, while making themselves non-fungible. Most moats are built out of the pieces or remnants of someone else's moat.
Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too hung over to tell.
> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing...
I'd say the real groups behind this are the anti-gun ideologues, the "do whatever it takes to stop my panic attacks over Bad Things maybe happening" left-wing control freaks, and the old-fashioned "big state" authoritarian crowd.
And the only reason they're paying attention to 3d printers is that some pro-gun ideologues and provocative makers have been talking up the concept of 3d printing guns.
> The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts.
"state-certified algorithm" has a really nice tyrannic ring to it. I am sure once this has passed the rich people can finally sleep at night knowing they are safe from roving gangs of armed Mangiones.
Lets imagine a similar situation but instead of with an additive manufacturing process they try to regulate a subtractive manufacturing process: a traditional CNC machine. There is no way to prevent the CNC system from machining gun parts as along as the machining is done in discrete steps with the same work piece. The software can't know what sitting on the CNC table.
In additive manufacturing it is more difficult but not impossible to print a bunch of pieces that look nothing like a gun part but and in the end be assembled into a gun.
In both the above cases there would need to be sophisticated surveillance software to even come close to detecting "gun-ness."
While I don't have a horse in the gun control race, I do have one in the open-source, running a local OS, running what software I want, and controlling what that software does races.
The 3d printer gun legislation has been rearing its head in a bunch of states this year, and generally with very similar patterns. I suspect some of the pro-gun-control groups have been pushing it to lawmakers given most legislation is basically copy-pastes from lobbying groups at both the state and federal level. Colorado, Washington, New York, and now California have all floated legislation attempting to make device-level restrictions around the issue. I only followed Washington's in depth, and they ended up removing all the requirements on manufactures, but did criminalize possession of files which I suspect won't hold up to a first amendment challenge.
471 comments
I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?
So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Either way, this is bad legislation.
> You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
Why would you buy a pipe at Home Depot? A gun barrel is not a firearm, and is not required to be registered or serialized. You can drive to Arizona or Nevada and buy an actual barrel, with rifling, manufactured to meet well-known specifications, without showing an ID. Until this year, you could have a barrel shipped to your California residence without an ID. There's no need to build the Shinzo Abe contraption.
> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.
> Either way, this is bad legislation.
California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.
> Out come the zip guns. Homemade gun. You pull the hook back, catch that bullet square, ping. Hit you in the head, man, you got serious problems.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gun-safety-advocates-war...
> Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.
Probably more accurate to say politicians are trying to take actions which will be seen publicly as fighting against gun crime. It seems like a stretch to say anyone earnestly believes that 3D printed guns are a real problem in the landscape of existing gun crime in America
> California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.
California and New York have been done more for gun rights than anyone else by passing absurd laws that get struck down by the judiciary, setting precedent.
However, due to the adversarial nature of the judiciary system, opposition is required to set precedent. It'd be great if the overstepping didn't ever happen but we don't know what is overstepping until SCOTUS rules.
California and New York have played a pivotal role in defining the edges of the second amendment.
> Like everything in the United States, it’s actually gun manufacturers that want to clamp down on this cottage industry which threatens their profits.
I have 0 reason to believe this.
That is some pretty wild speculation, and a terribly risky proposition for any company because they would instantly get blackballed by the 2a community.
It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music. It is a group that has decided that one issue is more important than anything else to them. And they vote. For you, if you are for them, but for your opponent, if you are not. They will primary you. They do not care if D or R is next to your name. In fact they love pro-gun D politicians, because it’s a chance to pull that party into respecting all constitutional rights.
The NRA is massively successful because of this. They do one thing, and everyone in it knows that. They don’t have to agree on anything else, because if you can’t have guns, the rest of the politics is irrelevant.
A company that made the slightest anti-2A movement would be dead by sunset the next day. No store would carry their product. No consumer in the know would buy their product.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20251027/from-printers-to-pa...
The gun lobby has a long history of trying to ban low cost market entrants.
Like you say, you just need to build a key metal piece, and voila, the rest is buying parts that can be delivered to you, in some cases fully assembled.
You could also just buy black powder guns directly to your home (idk about in CA or NY though) which are not treated as "firearms" by the ATF.
The only people shooting 3D printed guns are enthusiasts usually, who have other guns.
The barrel will be metal. In designs made for the US market, it will almost certainly be an actual manufactured gun barrel, since gun parts other than the receiver are not closely tracked in the US. In designs for Western Europe, the metal parts will be either milled or things you can buy at the hardware store[1].
The barrel and chamber being made of something tougher than you can get from an FDM machine is basically a requirement for making a gun that doesn't explode in your face when you shoot.
1: Here's an image of all of the parts going into a gun designed to be made in the EU. Per the wikipedia article, the barrel rifling can be added with electrochemical machining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9#/media/File:FGC-9_Compon...
For example, one legislator always sponsors a bill (which goes nowhere every year) to outlaw chemtrails. This year's version[0] includes the plot from the SF novel Termination Shock[1]. The word "artillery" was not in any previous session's version, nor was sulfur.
Links:
0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb60.html
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)#
> any real attempt to regulate guns
Any real attempt would need to be at the national level, not that I would advocate for it, but it's simply a pipe dream to create a "gun free zone" in a country with 100s of millions of firearms. There are plenty of gun enthusiasts in California, they just don't flaunt it or talk about it.
lots of companies got fat and happy selling you plastic crap for a fortune, now 3d printers let you make plastic crap at home for pennies.
If they must pass these laws, it must include protections for printing consumer goods parts, if they won't add that I will not vote for you.
contact your state reps and tell them that.
> If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm
While I totally agree with you that this is all about lies, there is still one difference in that most regular firearms are metal-based. With 3D printing one could print plastic or similar materials.
Again, I am not saying this is a reason to explain this lobbyism here, but we also need to be objective when debunking the lies of the other side. For instance, one difference is metal detection (naturally plastic-based weapons would also tend to break more easily, so this whole legislation is a total lie to begin with anyway; California is currently broken. I am surprised about that, usually you'd think other US states are more broken, but California is now in the top 3 lobbyist-controlled states - and from there the disease spreads slowly).
> I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
I agree that this legislation is not good, but you apparently aren’t aware of the large communities dedicated to 3D printing guns.
The first 3D printed gun was making headlines 13 years ago and since then it’s turned into a semi-underground fascination.
You aren’t going to be fashioning a gun out of a pipe from Home Depot more easily than the designs these groups are playing with.
Many of the subreddits, Discords, Facebook groups and other communities have started to get shut down since a 3D printed gun was used in a high profile murder recently.
There are a lot of comments in this comment section from people unaware of how big these communities are. I’m not supporting these legislative attempts to interfere with 3D printers but you really should know some of the context.
> what's special about 3d printers?
They can make guns made out of plastic and metal detectors are kind of the primary way we try to find guns on people.
You are probably right about the lobbying group, I agree.
Edit: I'm not saying it makes sense, but this is the angle the congress folks are taking, sheesh.
If legal arms dealers want the state to step in because of some decentralizing technology, then for the government it would be yet another cost center to combat this phenomenon. So lobbyists need to come up with a kind of reward, and design more "palatable" proposals, so that income can be derived by somehow initiating government control into the whole decentralized technology instead of just the illegitimately decentralized subsection...
but punishing "the rest" for actions of a few would mean financing it with taxes, instead of scapegoating the legitimate majority of 3D printer users.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ramset-MasterShot-0-22-Caliber-P...
They are typically stocked with material and ready to deploy at a moment's notice. When the time comes that you need a weapon, casually walking into Home Depot won't be an option.
What they actually hate is people who buy bags of glock parts from ebay (contains everything but the frame) and then print the frame. The frame being the handle part, everything below the slide but none of the internals. That's the legal 'gun' when it comes to most glocks and clones. The new ruger rmx, a newer glock clone, is different, the firing group (trigger and all the associated bits there) is the serialized part. The frame is, of course, very easy to print.
All the regulations around firearms are super fucking stupid, the way they classify different parts and try and make them illegal. Like.. in a lot of states if you have a rifle (ar or otherwise), you are not allowed to have a vertical foregrip for stabalization. However if your foregrip is like 5 degrees off pure vertical... legal.
This 3d printer 'ban' is unenforcable, it's a fucking tool, you can build anything with tools. Sure it's easier and takes less skill to download a glock 19 frame model off the internet and hit print, but there is, apparently, a lot of work that goes into making the gun work with that frame well enough for the gun to actually cycle.
Even though lobbying is not _technically_ illegal, we should probably learn to treat companies that engage in it (to the detriment of society) as if it were. Avoid their products if you can, and get your friend-group to do it as well. Build off-ramps. Maintain and share lists of executives who work at these companies (to put pressure on their reputations -- after all, what is wealth worth, if ordinary people refuse to take your money, or to give you any of their attention?). The market's distinctive feature is that it makes things fungible: currency, goods, and even people. Eliminate or reduce fungibility, and you get a very different kind of dynamic, one that has the potential to reverse the trend of rising inequality (and rent-seeking behavior, and unfair one-sided arrangements, etc) over night.
In fact, the strategy of any company is to find a way to make an entire class of companies/merchants (not competitors) fungible, while making themselves non-fungible. Most moats are built out of the pieces or remnants of someone else's moat.
Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too hung over to tell.
https://matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/winner-art...
https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing...
I'd say the real groups behind this are the anti-gun ideologues, the "do whatever it takes to stop my panic attacks over Bad Things maybe happening" left-wing control freaks, and the old-fashioned "big state" authoritarian crowd.
And the only reason they're paying attention to 3d printers is that some pro-gun ideologues and provocative makers have been talking up the concept of 3d printing guns.
Do we never patch one security hole until we patch all security holes?
(I'm not defending this particular legislation, just saying that this isn't the way to defeat it)
> The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts.
"state-certified algorithm" has a really nice tyrannic ring to it. I am sure once this has passed the rich people can finally sleep at night knowing they are safe from roving gangs of armed Mangiones.
In additive manufacturing it is more difficult but not impossible to print a bunch of pieces that look nothing like a gun part but and in the end be assembled into a gun.
In both the above cases there would need to be sophisticated surveillance software to even come close to detecting "gun-ness."
While I don't have a horse in the gun control race, I do have one in the open-source, running a local OS, running what software I want, and controlling what that software does races.