> The required technology is not possible - 3D printers read code, not intent; they cannot tell what a shape is for.
"Anthropic announces Project Disarm, a new model designed for 3d printer manufacturers to quickly infer whether the intent of an stl file is a weapon. The printer first submits the job to the cloud, and only after it's approved will it print."
Not that I want this future, just that I can imagine it.
Based on the fact that Claude Opus 4.8 decided I needed a cybersecurity exemption to debug a stupid pure virtual call bug (basically virtual method called inside of destructor) that I had already found, oh boy, I sure would love to have my 3D prints analyzed by Anthropic safe guards. We should also ensure that nothing shaped like a dildo can be printed without scanning our face and genitalia and keeping it on file with Persona while we're at it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.
I'm getting a lot of refusals these days from multiple LLMs on multiple fronts for silly stuff, a lot more than I had for a while. If this is where things are really going, I think open weight models have a big future.
"H.R. 148867 makes all large language models subject to safety certification, introduces penalties for unlicensed training and use of uncertified models"
Frankly who cares about dildos when your personal freedom and private property of you and your family is at stake.You can buy uncountable dildo models in a shop.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
Ummm, well, seems in historical perspective that quite a few instances of rebels using improvised molotov cocktails against tyrannical governments. When it's a country that the US disapproves of, seems they support this activity as "freedom fighters". But when this behavior occurs in protests inside the homeland, obviously the authorities come down hard.
The future is almost certainly the terrible path: "applications phoning home to judge whether a use case is approved by the company." All writing is on the wall, and directionally that's the way software and hardware has been moving. We have unfortunately normalized the idea that users must have this ongoing tethered relationship to the product manufacturers and software developers, who measure, change, and control the user's usage at their whim.
Yes, I can imagine it too. And, if such a 'safety nanny' is enacted into law, I'm confident it will A. Refuse to print a significant number of innocent projects, or B. Be trivially circumvented by bad actors. The odds are high that it will manage to do both.
Totally circumvented by everyone, basically. You can hook up an arduino to most consumer 3d printers and throw away the motherboard that comes with them. Aside from being stupid and dangerous, this is going to create some excellent makerscale marketing opportunities.
Finally a llm trained on manufacturing weapons. "AI remove all the safe metal from a lower reciever so that the dangerous part can be safely destroyed without endangering the environment "
A dedicated model for this purpose could easily run locally. Recognizing shapes is not exactly cutting age AI.
The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)
The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.
It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.
Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.
It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.
To mitigate that, and as a token acknowledgement to privacy concerns, OpenMappleSoft will introduce a device side fuzzy hashing scheme whose output it turns out you can reverse to recover the original weapon schematics.
When I was a kid I saw someone with a makeshift shotgun made out of a steel pipe, a strong spring, and and a rough striker. Not very effective, but it was working.
There are several snarky knee-jerk reactions in the comments here, but state assemblies pass things all the time that ultimately fail to pass or get vetoed. Now the public will debate it, contact their state senators to give their opinions...it's all part of the process.
California constantly passes all kinds of weird, pointless, and burdensome gun laws. There are so many of them, and they're so poorly written, that no lawyer in the state who can confidently tell you what's legal and what isn't until a court chimes in. There's no meaningful process around any of that.
The only thing that's different about this one is that it mentions a technology geeks care about. But I doubt that's enough. As another commenter noted, you can no longer hide behind "we have no technology to distinguish between guns and non-guns". We have AI that's supposedly PhD-level and will soon automate all jobs. Looking at STL files sounds like a job.
That's actually one of my fears about LLMs: they make thought policing cheap. There are profound privacy and cost barriers to having a Facebook employee review all your private messages. There are no such barriers to having a robot watch all your IMs in real time.
If this fails it'll be because the tech industry expresses disapproval too loudly to ignore.
The legislators don't care about the underlying criticism. Almost no legislators have ever used a 3d printer or written any software, beyond maybe simple assigned programs if they had a required intro-to-programming course. Few are "tech" people. The rest don't understand this technology, or any technology really, beyond it being a black box for specific purposes. They see 3d printing and plastic guns and think something must be done, because the 3d printing black boxes are producing dangerous weapons.
The problem, as far as they are concerned, is enforcement. The law can say that X is illegal and ban selling it, but if you can 3D-print it, and its use is already illegal either way, then the law is moot.
Note that this isn't really limited to guns either. I foresee a similar moral panic wrt 3D printing "killer drones" (i.e. parts that allow one to attach explosive to a drone) and software that allows you to circumvent various restrictions on drone firmware. All it'll take is one high profile attack using a drone...
Europe favors comprehensive regulation, with laws or directives dealing with families of related issues. California does regulation in a very American way, with individual bills targeting specific issues. It just does more of that than the average state.
Describing California as "the Europe of the United States" ignores its essential narcissism -- defining California in terms of Europe would be met with contemptuous pashaws, even if the balkanized ethnic enclaves found there, at a scale larger than anywhere in the U.S. -- not even New York, resemble Europe. The Asian communities will also wonder if you can find Vietnam on a map -- would guess you think it is in the Mediterranean.
and I would imagine close to 100% of the US 3d printing nerds that live there have the means to easily move to another state and continue their 3d printing nerdom.
There is a reason why California is leading the nation in migration out of the state.
Nah I haven't been in California, or lived in the US, since COVID. My reaction here could easily be outdated but I have it because even back then people would say basically exactly what you were saying despite the clear evidence of high demand.
I tried to photo copy a dollar bill when I was a kid on a dinky inkjet printer. It printed half way then spit out something about counterfeit prevention. I scanned the bill, printed the top half, fed the paper back in, and printed the bottom half. This can only actually stop the completely unmotivated.
You managed to defeat the first layer of defense - the warning. The yellow identifying dots were present on your printed copy, should you have decided become a precocious criminal successful enough to warrant the attention of the Secret Service.
That leads into a great example of how most OS "telemetry" is anything but safe or innocent:
1. Your printer probably puts a secret code into everything you print (not just money-like things) with the time and a serial number of the printer. [0]
2. Windows and MacOS constantly sends the serial-numbers of your connected devices back to the mothership. [1][2]
3. So when you print out a flyer that somehow annoys the regime, they read out the serial number, then call a buddy at Microsoft/Apple.
4. Now there are thugs knocking at your door to talk about how your picture was criminally mean to Dear Leader.
Digressing a bit, the link [2] feels off to me borderline scam-like. The URL points to "littlesnitchfirewall" which is not the official link to the well known macOS firewall application: https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch, and this doesn't seem to be affiliated with Objective development in any way.
Also, the home page of that "blog" points to a 404 not found, and the footer of the blog says: "Official blog of NetworkMonitor — network monitoring and macOS privacy insights." and I can't seem to find any application made for the Mac called "NetworkMonitor".
My mistake, I may have fallen for an impostor site when trying to find an approachable source, unfortunately the edit-window has closed.
Originally the comment was Windows/Microsoft-centric, and then I thought I'd better broaden it so that nobody makes the mistake of thinking Apple is significantly safer.
My assumption about his involvement with Everytown is that he sees his position in society through a Marxist lens for threat modeling, and armed proles are one of the bigger threats the plutocrats face.
NY is pushing the same sort of stuff. The question to ask is how many people are actually being killed with 3D printed weapons? I don't have that info, but I would guess they are statistical outliers and would have been replaced by other homemade weapons if not available. Politicians love to "fix" problems that aren't really problems in the first place.
The problem is there is a lot of garbage about it. Ghost guns are a real issue, but ghost guns are not 3D printed guns.
3D printed is a very niche case. They're only good for one shot ever, they are not reliable even for that. And they're bulky. The one thing they do is make it much harder for a metal detector to find them.
Ghost guns made by CNC milling equipment are nearly identical to what you would buy from the manufacturer, except they do not have a serial number and you won't have the background check for a firearms purchase.
But politicians are reacting to the ghost guns by going after the printed guns.
There are plenty of 3D printed guns that are good for more than one shot. The classic examples are 3D printed Glock-style frames and AR-15 lower receivers. As far as US gun laws are concerned, those parts are the firearm and the rest of the parts are uncontrolled. So you print those, buy barrels, triggers, magazines, etc to finish the build and voila, ghost gun.
Sir are you a licensed chef of good standing in OnlyChef's database? That knife is dangerous. We can issue you a government approved plastic version if you need to cut something, but SoylentGreen(tm) is Ready-to-Scoop(tm)!
There is a law in California that has been interpreted to mean that all clubbing weapons are illegal. So if you by a length of pipe and keep it around (e.g. under your bed) explicitly for self-defense purposes, you have committed a crime.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, keeping a shotgun in your home for self-defense purposes would be fine, as long as you aren't planning ahead of time to use it as a club.
[edit]
My information is slightly out-of-date; there was an injunction against enforcement in 2024 from Fouts v Bonta. I have no clue the injunction is or is not still in effect, so ask your lawyer before carrying a club.
This isn't just California. A lot of states have laws regulating the carrying of weapons, and include bats and clubs in those statutes, the definition of which often hinges on the intent of their use.
This is why many may have heard lawyers say "if you're going to carry a baseball bat in your car, make sure to also carry a ball and mitt"
I think so many people in the US are so focused on the topic of guns as weapons that we sometimes forget that we have laws regarding other weapons as well.
Better yet, carry a mini shovel. Every car needs one anyway as part of the emergency kit (getting stuck in mud happens!), but a properly sharpened shovel also doubles as a very nasty weapon, much more so than a baseball bat.
A single shopping to trip to Walmart or Home Depot can buy items that can be repurposed into bombs and physical and chemical weapons with only a little bit of know-how. Are we going to require mandatory ID and shopping cart analysis to all shopping too?
It's the striker strip that can be used in producing meth. The strip contains red phosphorus. Strike anywhere matches are the only kind that don't need a special strip. The strike anywhere kind were probably restricted due to their sensitivity to shock and friction which makes them more useful and more dangerous than safety matches.
I am not aware of this being a regulatory matter in any state, California included. Retailers choose not to carry them because they are expensive to ship due to their hazardous materials classification and an attractive theft / crime target due to their (inaccurate) drug association, but it hasn’t led to any blanket regulation at any state level that I know of. I do think they’re banned from workplaces in California though, but that’s because they’re dangerous, not because of meth.
In general I agree with the 3D printing and open source community that bills like these are bad ideas. However, I want to ask this question in the spirit of helping craft better arguments:
Given that it is extremely well known that most commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency, why is this considered technically unworkable?
I agree that compliance would be onerous, but that's different from insisting that it's not possible.
With counterfeit currency, the whole point of the counterfeit is to look indistinguishable from the original. This makes it very easy to detect - you know exactly what to look for and you can block it with high confidence, because anything that is not sufficiently similar to the expected image is also too low-quality to be of use. There's also a fairly limited number of banknote designs in the world, and they are only updated rarely.
Not so with guns. Literally hundreds of existing designs, thousands if you account for all the variations. But more importantly, a working firearm is fundamentally an engineering problem with too many solutions. Real world designs tend to be as simple as they can be while still functioning (which is why most modern guns today are very similar internally - the field has converged, what difference remains is mostly legacy path dependent quirks). But if the goal is to defeat a filter, they can be easily made into something more complicated, looking very different but working largely the same.
And if you make the filter fuzzy enough to catch such things, it will also trigger on many completely unrelated things.
More generally, "Does this image represent US currency?" and "Does this 3D mesh represent a dangerous gun part?" are different kinds of questions.
Checking if an image is US currency is simple. Not only can an image similarity hash be used, but the design of the currency can be changed to make checking easier. The checking program just has to run a textbook algorithm and compare the result with a handful of hashes (we only have a few denominations of bills).
We can be confident that the checking program will always see substantial portions of the bill, so it can always see the pattern. If someone chopped the bill into tiny pieces, it would look fake when glued together. Looking like a real bill is the thing we want to control, and that's something we can reliably measure with simple algorithms.
Checking if a 3D shape is a gun part is an unsolvable problem. (It would be equivalent to making a program that can detect hidden "subversive" meanings in text.) The checker would have to understand how the piece could operate in the hands of a skilled person. Parts could be printed in multiple pieces, or have material removed after printing, so it'd have to anticipate all possible post-processing steps.
Even if the problem is limited to "match against these known gun part hashes", gun parts are not defined by their overall appearance. The files can be mutated until they no longer trip the detector, yet can be easily post-processed into functional components. (Also, a similarity hash for 3D toolpaths may not exist.)
(Such a hashing regime would be useless to stop "3D-printed guns" as a concept, because the design could be changed to not match the hash at all, without post-processing.)
Because you don't really have to do any additional steps once the ink is on the paper like you do with a 3D printed firearm.
Looking at just the silhouette or shape, you couldn't really tell the difference between the body of a firearm that was later going to receive a metal tube from the hardware store or a plastic bracket that I'm going to use to support a shelf.
And even if you could accurately tell the difference, how do you know I'm not helping my nephew build a Nerf gun?
That does not sound stupid, but safe? I giant truck that has no chance of stopping, controlled by a computer? Just build railways and then there are no issues, no fancy AI to control them.
You misunderstand the mechanism. Its not because states copy other states. Its because the corrosive political elements are embedded everywhere, but most prominently have a foothold in California, Washington, and New York state. There is an interstate conspiracy and agenda to ruin America. Louis Rossman covered it recently in his video "The destruction of 3D printing: Bloomberg is behind it"
It does not. The gun lobby routinely lies about California regulations to try and get their way. They're on year 13 of boycotting the California handgun market, for example; new handgun models in the state are required to adopt microstamping technology, but firearms manufacturers are ideologically opposed to this technology, so they falsely claim that it doesn't exist.
Are 3D-printed guns even remotely reliable, or is it just a moral panic? A brass tube and a pin is probably less likely to fail than 3d printed materials.
They’re not printing the metal parts. They’re printing the frame (as in “polymer framed handgun”).
The frame is the part that gets the serial number and is considered the controlled part of the gun. Rather than the trigger, the springs, the barrel, etc.
Other than the frame, which requires an FFL for transfer, especially across state lines, the rest of the parts can be ordered and shipped from anywhere and are not controlled.
Mind, that’s changing, again notably in CA, as they now talk about “gun pre-cursor” parts.
The 3D printed frames are similar to the “80% lowers” which are aluminum blocks that are “80%” complete AR-15 lowers (the lower receiver, again, the controlled part of an AR-15).
With straight forward machining and some jigs, those chunks of metal can be finished into an operational lower receiver, and the rest of the rifle can be assembled from disparate parts ordered from anywhere.
The original “ghost gun” before 3D printers enabled folks to assemble Glocks in their garage.
Other countries regulate the pressure-bearing parts instead. It probably started off with a safety rationale (those parts are generally proof tested), but those parts ALSO tend to be the ones that are more difficult for someone to produce at home.
It is fearmongering. You technically can print an all-plastic firearm that works for a round or so until they explode, but only after you have already printed and tested and refined multiple times over, and best case it is still an inferior material to metal. I would put it in the same category as "Yeah you can turn a tree trunk into a cannon, tell me when not to come over when you use it." You can probably make a similarly reliable firearm out of fired clay if you put in the same effort.
Some parts in regular firearms can be printed in plastic, guns with polymer parts have existed since polymers existed, but it is only marginally simpler than machining it out of metal. After all you can buy a metal CNC machine for handful of bucks more than a 3d printer and you don't have to worry about shitty materials breaking immediately.
And there are already plenty of examples of hardware store pipe guns that if someone spent more than a day or two working on it would by far surpass anything anyone can print.
People normally don't make guns that are entirely 3d printed. Homemade guns often get the parts exposed to highest stresses commercially.
Fwiw, when I paid attention to my local police department's released body cam vids, maybe around 1/3 of the guns they showed as evidence were polymer80s (edit: which I mistakenly assumed were 3d printed, but it turns out they aren't so feel free to disregard that fun fact)
Polymer80 aren't 3d printed. They were injected molded as non-receivers and then the customer has to subtract some extra materials.
Polymer80 is defunct but still sold under a slightly different modified mold that someone mysterious somewhere owns and is selling through some other companies("76%" instead of 80%)
In the US I believe there's many metal 'spare parts' for guns available, including the barrel, so don't need to print the whole thing. So they're usually not talking about entirely printed guns.
A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)
So what the ATF does is take an essential part not substantially influenced by wear and declare it to be the gun. Trade in anything that sufficiently resembles this part is treated as trade in guns. Other parts are not considered guns, they're just pieces of metal or plastic. Then there are the parts that you're not supposed to have. But is that an oil filter or a silencer? When it's on the gun it's obvious, when it's listed on a website as an oil filter...
I know very little about guns but know 3d printing quite well. My understanding is that a fully 3d printed gun is not reliable, you need to acquire actual gun parts for the path where the bullet fires (the barrel?). Then can use 3d printing for the rest
They're pretty damn reliable if you either use a hybrid model (FGC-9) where the barrel is "explosion proof pipe" from china that is then electrically machined (easy with 3d printed mandrel) to form a nice rifled barrel.
Or you just 3d print the "receiver" for something like an Ar-15, which isn't load bearing. If you use the right materials and the beefier designs it will lats hundreds to thousands of rounds. The rest of the parts can be bought through the mails unregulated.
As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.
Note that in particular banning of 3d printing severely decreases chances for bringing back manufacturing - high labor and other costs makes domestic manufacturing feasible only when it is highly automated and highly customizable.
> As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.
My bet is the US militaro-industrial complex is busy preparing juicy contracts to sell shitload of drones and drones-related tech to the US government now that they understood that drones in warfare were a thing (Ukraine vs Russia showed it and Iran-vs-the-world showed it too).
The US has something like 12 tech companies in the top 20 biggest companies by market cap in the world: do you really think the US is "falling behind in drone tech" because a country that has never invented anything (besides mass killings of their own citizens) since religious extremists took over managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets?
That a country bent on violence (including towards its own citizens) where pick-up trucks armed with .50 cal, AK47s and explosive are the norm can slap explosive on DJI drones is resourceful but I wouldn't exactly call it "passing ahead in drone tech".
I don't gamble but I'd make an exception and bet big that the US is going to end up right next to China, at the very top, when it comes to drone tech. While I fully expect the EU to fall behind in drone tech.
> a country that has never invented anything … managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets
And de-facto won the war as a result. That is reality. That is the power of that weaponry, and that is the falling behind. And that after 4 years of such a war in Ukraine.
I agree it is very possible that US would be at some point able to build up those capabilities. Though, limited to established players, it most probably would be very expensive and thus go against the key feature - cheapness - which in itself allows for the other key feature- mass scale of the drone weapons.
Why does California since Arnold left office feel the need to regulate above the average other states regulate? [in fairness gov Brown would veto some of the crazier ideas that arrived at his desk]
Why do the pols feel like they have to pick fights in so many places? I doubt there’s a majority of voters who want this.
This feels exactly like a feels good general public appeal law though. The average person doesn’t know or care much about 3D printers and is horrified by the level of gun violence in America and wants to see something done.
All they have to do if frame it as an unnecessary freedom that only conservatives and wackos want to keep and they will 100% support it.
They see their state as a sort of oasis in the country and will do whatever it takes to keep the guns out. They really believe they’re just a few laws away from solving any issue a “reasonable” American could face.
Well, from the point of view of Californian politicians, was it their anti-balance-billing AB72 that was over-regulation before No Surprises Act? Or the CCPA? Or the Auto-Renewal Law? And looking back even farther: was it CalOPPA that was overreach requiring privacy policies? Paid family leave and sick leave?
Some made life hard for Californians like the CARB gasoline blend requirement but I think if you proposed removing any of those laws you'd find yourself downvoted here and called a corporate bootlicker on Reddit - which is not a poll of all people but should give you an idea of the fact that they're not unpopular.
It seems overall that they're pretty much just on the frontier of laws that would be considered progressive - increase taxes, consumer protection, control corporations, prison reduction. I think those positions are overall popular. It just seems like you disagree with them. I also prefer many of these rules not be in place but where you like CCPA and hate the road tax, I like the road tax. Overall, the positions seem pretty coherently in-line with the politics viewpoints.
So, I suppose the answer to your original question is: they're slowly grinding forward on a progressive-politics agenda in a public and straightforward manner that's generally popular among the electorate.
The last time California Republicans had some power around 2009-12 they used it to manufacture crises and shut down the government. Since then voters have shut them out of power, including by passing 2010's Prop 25 which stripped the minority of the 2/3 veto they used to have.
This doesn’t have to be unconstitutional, just regulate the intermediary in such a way that it forces the behaviors you are trying to regulate directly
In this case you can say
“You need a license to do this activity”
[adds all the requirements in the bill to the licensing authority]
“Unlicensed activity is forbidden”
so now you can get your tiny LLMs added to 3D printers so that license holders can operate again, without specifically mandating unworkable technology or getting a freedom of expression challenge from the manufacturers you just invented court standing for
This is such a dumb law. We have millions of guns in the state, 3D printed guns are never going to be more than a blip in the statistics for gun deaths.
Lawful gun use means the guns must be registered and users need to be licensed and go through background checks. Presumably part of the concern with 3d printed guns is that anybody can print them without going through that registration, licensing and background check process.
The 10th amendment to the Constitution reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I'm seriously questioning the absurdity of banning something that remains available a 15-minute drive away, behind a purely informal border. I don't think, for example, that recent abortion bans had reduced the number of abortions in their respective states to zero.
1) For the vast majority of Californians, the nearest state border is 3-5 hours away. 2) those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.
Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.
About half of Americans lack any access to intercity transport that isn't a private car.[1]
About 15% of rural Americans aren't within 25 miles of any intercity transit, much less interstate; low-income residents are disproportionally represented in that group. That figure jumps to 25% if you exclude suburbs, and in some states that figure is as high as 62%.[2]
Even as intercity bus demand has increased due to the declining quality of air travel in the US,[3] rural intercity bus access has declined. Greyhound served many rural routes until its slow collapse before being acquired by FlixBus, which is more focused on urban access than Greyhound was. The deregulation of intercity bus access in 1982, which led to the closure of many intercity routes (disproportionally in the rural Midwest) that required subsidization from more profitable routes, was a major factor.[4]
So "what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state" is a non-starter of a question, because most of the Americans who'd _need_ an interstate bus ticket can't even get to a bus stop without first owning a car... with which they could simply drive to another state.
A lot of rural areas don't have good transit. Even if they do, it's hours round trip. Here's an example. North Dakota has an abortion ban. Someone in Minot would need to travel almost 5 hours to Moorhead, MN or almost 7 hours to Billings, MT. Now that's not any different really than before the ban, because the only clinic in ND that provided abortions was across the river from Moorhead in Fargo. But what if that clinic in Moorhead closes? Or what if Montana bans abortion? It's banned in South Dakota, so people out in western ND, SD, or anywhere in Montana are going to have to travel even further. There are many small communities around here with no bus lines or trains coming through so they're stuck if they don't have a good car.
California has a huge influence on the American economy. When it makes a law, companies and other states pay attention. The farmers, senators and representatives in my state, Iowa, are still wringing their hands and pulling out their hair over California's law which "unfairly" manipulates the hog market by requiring all pork products sold in California to come from pigs which are humanely treated according to California's definition of humane.
US states aren't as small as you're imagining them to be. Almost everyone in California lives more than 15 minutes away from the nearest state border, and the largest urban areas are 3+ hours away.
Procedurally the US is closer to a EU style alliance of sovereign nations than a single one. Practically the federal government has long since overgrown it's constitutional role as the equivalent of the EU bodies but if you're looking at a US state and wondering why it's acting like a sovereign nation the answer is generally because it is one, on paper.
Assuming this is a sincere question from someone who doesn’t know US history:
States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.
Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.
Photocopiers and printers have included anti-counterfeiting tech for decades, so there is precedent for this kind of thing. And this is addressing a real growing problem:
Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.
I just fundamentally don't understand the idea that nobody's allowed to restrict firearms manufacturing unless they can solve complex riddles about the nature of parts. I understand that you perceive this to be a deep and interesting point, but to me it seems enragingly obtuse. Let's start with blacklisting DefCAD and iterate from there, what's wrong with that?
Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.
How long until people get police showing up at their door because they tried to print something harmless but gun-shaped (like a light gun for retro games, or Nerf-style toys) and were flagged by the AI 'firearm detector'?
If you want to have a voice in how the regulation is implemented, perhaps you should offer suggestions for how to implement it better. That's how it works in most industries; legislators propose to enact regulation X, manufacturers respond that X would have undesirable consequences and Y would be better, and then they discuss to figure out how to best balance all the competing interests.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.
Again, it seems like there's a critical insight that's gone missing between the first and second lines of your post. It's unsurprising that a manufacturer might prefer to be regulated less rather than more, and there are a number of cases where I ultimately agree with some manufacturer or another on that. Perhaps it's the case that gun crime would be best resolved with boots on the ground; I could imagine being persuaded by someone who explains where the boots are going to come from and why they're not already there. Maybe I could even be persuaded that 3D printing is more important than crime reduction, although I'm less able to imagine what would convince me of that.
It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?
> For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!".
Who exactly is the "firearms manufacturer?" I've owned and used 3D printers for years. Not once has anything I've used or seen from any 3D printer manufacturer or other related supplier have anything to do with guns.
Then I'd expect you won't be affected by this ban on manufacturing guns with 3D printers. Perhaps there's some changes we should make to better ensure you won't be affected; if so by all means you should suggest them.
We try! But most California restrictions on handguns have been struck down by the courts, and many of the surviving restrictions manufacturers simply refuse to comply with. They've been boycotting microstamping technology for over a decade, blatantly lying about commercial viability as an excuse for their policy preference not to do it. (I'm slightly sympathetic, because it is true that the first manufacturer to comply will probably themselves get boycotted by anti-gun-regulation zealots.)
But money counterfeiting is a different proposition: the printer is blocking exactly known patterns found on real currency. In fact, many bill designs incorporate patterns that are easily machine detectable for this purpose.
Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?
I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.
Yeah, if it was the UK cracking down it'd make more sense, but IIRC the US already has more guns than people.
And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)
> The required technology is not possible - 3D printers read code, not intent; they cannot tell what a shape is for.
"Anthropic announces Project Disarm, a new model designed for 3d printer manufacturers to quickly infer whether the intent of an stl file is a weapon. The printer first submits the job to the cloud, and only after it's approved will it print."
Not that I want this future, just that I can imagine it.
Based on the fact that Claude Opus 4.8 decided I needed a cybersecurity exemption to debug a stupid pure virtual call bug (basically virtual method called inside of destructor) that I had already found, oh boy, I sure would love to have my 3D prints analyzed by Anthropic safe guards. We should also ensure that nothing shaped like a dildo can be printed without scanning our face and genitalia and keeping it on file with Persona while we're at it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.
I'm getting a lot of refusals these days from multiple LLMs on multiple fronts for silly stuff, a lot more than I had for a while. If this is where things are really going, I think open weight models have a big future.
"H.R. 148867 makes all large language models subject to safety certification, introduces penalties for unlicensed training and use of uncertified models"
And China wins the AI race
Who cares of the races when CHILDREN are at stake!
Hey, let's be fair, a number of politicians and ultra rich psychopaths care a lot about children, it was covered in those documents...
The politicians still care about their races?
So many ridiculous bills get introduced in the house you can find one that says anything.
You didn't think this one was real, or did you?
I don't doubt that it is but I didn't check. The point is that you can probably find a HR to propose allowing aliens to land in the grand canyon.
The existence of a house resolution mean that one representative wrote a thing, not that it's on the precipice of becoming law.
Frankly who cares about dildos when your personal freedom and private property of you and your family is at stake.You can buy uncountable dildo models in a shop.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
Ummm, well, seems in historical perspective that quite a few instances of rebels using improvised molotov cocktails against tyrannical governments. When it's a country that the US disapproves of, seems they support this activity as "freedom fighters". But when this behavior occurs in protests inside the homeland, obviously the authorities come down hard.
The future is almost certainly the terrible path: "applications phoning home to judge whether a use case is approved by the company." All writing is on the wall, and directionally that's the way software and hardware has been moving. We have unfortunately normalized the idea that users must have this ongoing tethered relationship to the product manufacturers and software developers, who measure, change, and control the user's usage at their whim.
You can no longer just buy a tool and use it.
> whether a use case is approved by the company
Echoes of Network Neutrality problems, where BigCo is permitted to block or degrade sites about how to cancel your BigCo service.
Yes, I can imagine it too. And, if such a 'safety nanny' is enacted into law, I'm confident it will A. Refuse to print a significant number of innocent projects, or B. Be trivially circumvented by bad actors. The odds are high that it will manage to do both.
Totally circumvented by everyone, basically. You can hook up an arduino to most consumer 3d printers and throw away the motherboard that comes with them. Aside from being stupid and dangerous, this is going to create some excellent makerscale marketing opportunities.
They will also refuse to print 3D printer parts, especially spares for the printer to print them.
Finally a llm trained on manufacturing weapons. "AI remove all the safe metal from a lower reciever so that the dangerous part can be safely destroyed without endangering the environment "
A dedicated model for this purpose could easily run locally. Recognizing shapes is not exactly cutting age AI.
The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)
The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.
It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.
Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.
It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.
Knowing how governments do this stuff its going to be something lazy/easy to bypass like a list of stl files/hashes that are banned
To mitigate that, and as a token acknowledgement to privacy concerns, OpenMappleSoft will introduce a device side fuzzy hashing scheme whose output it turns out you can reverse to recover the original weapon schematics.
When I was a kid I saw someone with a makeshift shotgun made out of a steel pipe, a strong spring, and and a rough striker. Not very effective, but it was working.
You missed the step where a DMV-clone of a state bureaucracy reviews the LLMs output before nixing the request a few weeks after the LLMs result.
If that becomes current law I don’t want to ever hear about Europe being over-regulated compared to the US…
There are several snarky knee-jerk reactions in the comments here, but state assemblies pass things all the time that ultimately fail to pass or get vetoed. Now the public will debate it, contact their state senators to give their opinions...it's all part of the process.
California constantly passes all kinds of weird, pointless, and burdensome gun laws. There are so many of them, and they're so poorly written, that no lawyer in the state who can confidently tell you what's legal and what isn't until a court chimes in. There's no meaningful process around any of that.
The only thing that's different about this one is that it mentions a technology geeks care about. But I doubt that's enough. As another commenter noted, you can no longer hide behind "we have no technology to distinguish between guns and non-guns". We have AI that's supposedly PhD-level and will soon automate all jobs. Looking at STL files sounds like a job.
That's actually one of my fears about LLMs: they make thought policing cheap. There are profound privacy and cost barriers to having a Facebook employee review all your private messages. There are no such barriers to having a robot watch all your IMs in real time.
> There are no such barriers to having a robot watch all your IMs in real time.
Or your literal thoughts depending on how far we're able to push neuralink type technology.
A law like this just passed in New York State.
If this fails it'll be because the tech industry expresses disapproval too loudly to ignore.
The legislators don't care about the underlying criticism. Almost no legislators have ever used a 3d printer or written any software, beyond maybe simple assigned programs if they had a required intro-to-programming course. Few are "tech" people. The rest don't understand this technology, or any technology really, beyond it being a black box for specific purposes. They see 3d printing and plastic guns and think something must be done, because the 3d printing black boxes are producing dangerous weapons.
Are these laws already on the books places like Europe, Japan with strict gun control laws?
Good laws for gun control probably are enough to cover also 3D printed guns.
The problem, as far as they are concerned, is enforcement. The law can say that X is illegal and ban selling it, but if you can 3D-print it, and its use is already illegal either way, then the law is moot.
Note that this isn't really limited to guns either. I foresee a similar moral panic wrt 3D printing "killer drones" (i.e. parts that allow one to attach explosive to a drone) and software that allows you to circumvent various restrictions on drone firmware. All it'll take is one high profile attack using a drone...
CA != USA.
USA has plenty of saner places. In fact, one could argue that CA is a local minimum for sanity in USA
Americans are not allowed to buy Kinder eggs.
You have to compare Europe to California.
Calieurnia. :)
Regulatory speaking, California is America's Europe
Europe favors comprehensive regulation, with laws or directives dealing with families of related issues. California does regulation in a very American way, with individual bills targeting specific issues. It just does more of that than the average state.
Without the robust train system, but that is changing slowly.
California is in America, not Europe, whether you wish to accept that or not.
Downvotes for this. Incredible. California really is in America folks.
california is the europe of the united states, for better or for worse.
Describing California as "the Europe of the United States" ignores its essential narcissism -- defining California in terms of Europe would be met with contemptuous pashaws, even if the balkanized ethnic enclaves found there, at a scale larger than anywhere in the U.S. -- not even New York, resemble Europe. The Asian communities will also wonder if you can find Vietnam on a map -- would guess you think it is in the Mediterranean.
Well that's one state, and the one that fancies itself as the most European in spirit, at that.
It's 1/10th the US population though, and probably 1/2 the population of US 3d printing nerds.
They can cross state lines, take a trip to Vegas, visit the casinos and makerspaces...
and I would imagine close to 100% of the US 3d printing nerds that live there have the means to easily move to another state and continue their 3d printing nerdom.
There is a reason why California is leading the nation in migration out of the state.
Because real estate is super expensive because everyone keeps moving there?
Nah I haven't been in California, or lived in the US, since COVID. My reaction here could easily be outdated but I have it because even back then people would say basically exactly what you were saying despite the clear evidence of high demand.
I tried to photo copy a dollar bill when I was a kid on a dinky inkjet printer. It printed half way then spit out something about counterfeit prevention. I scanned the bill, printed the top half, fed the paper back in, and printed the bottom half. This can only actually stop the completely unmotivated.
You managed to defeat the first layer of defense - the warning. The yellow identifying dots were present on your printed copy, should you have decided become a precocious criminal successful enough to warrant the attention of the Secret Service.
That leads into a great example of how most OS "telemetry" is anything but safe or innocent:
1. Your printer probably puts a secret code into everything you print (not just money-like things) with the time and a serial number of the printer. [0]
2. Windows and MacOS constantly sends the serial-numbers of your connected devices back to the mothership. [1][2]
3. So when you print out a flyer that somehow annoys the regime, they read out the serial number, then call a buddy at Microsoft/Apple.
4. Now there are thugs knocking at your door to talk about how your picture was criminally mean to Dear Leader.
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12506
[2] https://littlesnitchfirewall.com/macos-telemetry
Digressing a bit, the link [2] feels off to me borderline scam-like. The URL points to "littlesnitchfirewall" which is not the official link to the well known macOS firewall application: https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch, and this doesn't seem to be affiliated with Objective development in any way.
Also, the home page of that "blog" points to a 404 not found, and the footer of the blog says: "Official blog of NetworkMonitor — network monitoring and macOS privacy insights." and I can't seem to find any application made for the Mac called "NetworkMonitor".
My mistake, I may have fallen for an impostor site when trying to find an approachable source, unfortunately the edit-window has closed.
Originally the comment was Windows/Microsoft-centric, and then I thought I'd better broaden it so that nobody makes the mistake of thinking Apple is significantly safer.
Do printers still do that? I wonder if the tracking dots are still there as well, haven’t used a printer in a while
Louis Rossman believes these bills are partly funded/lobbied for by Bloomberg.
https://youtu.be/E1B2cWEaWDw?is=xwpLZoyVSi6psztQ
What is the assumed intention?
My assumption about his involvement with Everytown is that he sees his position in society through a Marxist lens for threat modeling, and armed proles are one of the bigger threats the plutocrats face.
Why does Bloomberg get into so much activism?
NY is pushing the same sort of stuff. The question to ask is how many people are actually being killed with 3D printed weapons? I don't have that info, but I would guess they are statistical outliers and would have been replaced by other homemade weapons if not available. Politicians love to "fix" problems that aren't really problems in the first place.
The problem is there is a lot of garbage about it. Ghost guns are a real issue, but ghost guns are not 3D printed guns.
3D printed is a very niche case. They're only good for one shot ever, they are not reliable even for that. And they're bulky. The one thing they do is make it much harder for a metal detector to find them.
Ghost guns made by CNC milling equipment are nearly identical to what you would buy from the manufacturer, except they do not have a serial number and you won't have the background check for a firearms purchase.
But politicians are reacting to the ghost guns by going after the printed guns.
There are plenty of 3D printed guns that are good for more than one shot. The classic examples are 3D printed Glock-style frames and AR-15 lower receivers. As far as US gun laws are concerned, those parts are the firearm and the rest of the parts are uncontrolled. So you print those, buy barrels, triggers, magazines, etc to finish the build and voila, ghost gun.
Roll call from the Assembly vote: https://legiscan.com/CA/rollcall/AB2047/id/1702219
All those terrible republicans against this common sense bill.
If you're in San Francisco, note that Catherine Stefani and Matt Haney both voted for this ridiculous bill.
Roll call: https://legiscan.com/CA/rollcall/AB2047/id/1702219
Yeah you. Better get your printer air gapped because they are going to brick it in the name of getting re-elected
Next they will ban hardware store ? Because you could make a weapon with that pipe
Sir are you a licensed chef of good standing in OnlyChef's database? That knife is dangerous. We can issue you a government approved plastic version if you need to cut something, but SoylentGreen(tm) is Ready-to-Scoop(tm)!
Fun fact:
There is a law in California that has been interpreted to mean that all clubbing weapons are illegal. So if you by a length of pipe and keep it around (e.g. under your bed) explicitly for self-defense purposes, you have committed a crime.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, keeping a shotgun in your home for self-defense purposes would be fine, as long as you aren't planning ahead of time to use it as a club.
[edit]
My information is slightly out-of-date; there was an injunction against enforcement in 2024 from Fouts v Bonta. I have no clue the injunction is or is not still in effect, so ask your lawyer before carrying a club.
This isn't just California. A lot of states have laws regulating the carrying of weapons, and include bats and clubs in those statutes, the definition of which often hinges on the intent of their use.
This is why many may have heard lawyers say "if you're going to carry a baseball bat in your car, make sure to also carry a ball and mitt"
https://legalclarity.org/is-it-legal-to-have-a-baseball-bat-...
I think so many people in the US are so focused on the topic of guns as weapons that we sometimes forget that we have laws regarding other weapons as well.
If you're in MA you better thing twice before walking around with your zoobow, klackers or kung-fu sticks! https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Cha...
Better yet, carry a mini shovel. Every car needs one anyway as part of the emergency kit (getting stuck in mud happens!), but a properly sharpened shovel also doubles as a very nasty weapon, much more so than a baseball bat.
A single shopping to trip to Walmart or Home Depot can buy items that can be repurposed into bombs and physical and chemical weapons with only a little bit of know-how. Are we going to require mandatory ID and shopping cart analysis to all shopping too?
They'll also have to ban motors and microcontrollers. As they can be used to build 3D printers and drones.
Maybe they'll ban Github, too - as it hosts unregulated open source software that can power these scary tools.
For a long time, you couldn’t buy “strike anywhere” matches because they could be used in producing meth.
It's the striker strip that can be used in producing meth. The strip contains red phosphorus. Strike anywhere matches are the only kind that don't need a special strip. The strike anywhere kind were probably restricted due to their sensitivity to shock and friction which makes them more useful and more dangerous than safety matches.
Loading a tennis ball full of the heads of strike anywhere matches is a core childhood memory.
I am not aware of this being a regulatory matter in any state, California included. Retailers choose not to carry them because they are expensive to ship due to their hazardous materials classification and an attractive theft / crime target due to their (inaccurate) drug association, but it hasn’t led to any blanket regulation at any state level that I know of. I do think they’re banned from workplaces in California though, but that’s because they’re dangerous, not because of meth.
This legislation seems to come out of nowhere and get rubber stamped. Who even came up with this, and why?
* Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D)
* Dr. Darshana R. Patel (D)
* Tim Grayson (D)
“That’s what you get for voting for fascist Republicans! Turns out elections have consequences.” /s
This offends me, because I believe code is speech, and speech should not be restricted.
In general I agree with the 3D printing and open source community that bills like these are bad ideas. However, I want to ask this question in the spirit of helping craft better arguments:
Given that it is extremely well known that most commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency, why is this considered technically unworkable?
I agree that compliance would be onerous, but that's different from insisting that it's not possible.
With counterfeit currency, the whole point of the counterfeit is to look indistinguishable from the original. This makes it very easy to detect - you know exactly what to look for and you can block it with high confidence, because anything that is not sufficiently similar to the expected image is also too low-quality to be of use. There's also a fairly limited number of banknote designs in the world, and they are only updated rarely.
Not so with guns. Literally hundreds of existing designs, thousands if you account for all the variations. But more importantly, a working firearm is fundamentally an engineering problem with too many solutions. Real world designs tend to be as simple as they can be while still functioning (which is why most modern guns today are very similar internally - the field has converged, what difference remains is mostly legacy path dependent quirks). But if the goal is to defeat a filter, they can be easily made into something more complicated, looking very different but working largely the same.
And if you make the filter fuzzy enough to catch such things, it will also trigger on many completely unrelated things.
> commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency
They will refuse to print images that contain the EURion constellation, a cluster of points with specific distances between them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)
More generally, "Does this image represent US currency?" and "Does this 3D mesh represent a dangerous gun part?" are different kinds of questions.
Checking if an image is US currency is simple. Not only can an image similarity hash be used, but the design of the currency can be changed to make checking easier. The checking program just has to run a textbook algorithm and compare the result with a handful of hashes (we only have a few denominations of bills).
We can be confident that the checking program will always see substantial portions of the bill, so it can always see the pattern. If someone chopped the bill into tiny pieces, it would look fake when glued together. Looking like a real bill is the thing we want to control, and that's something we can reliably measure with simple algorithms.
Checking if a 3D shape is a gun part is an unsolvable problem. (It would be equivalent to making a program that can detect hidden "subversive" meanings in text.) The checker would have to understand how the piece could operate in the hands of a skilled person. Parts could be printed in multiple pieces, or have material removed after printing, so it'd have to anticipate all possible post-processing steps.
Even if the problem is limited to "match against these known gun part hashes", gun parts are not defined by their overall appearance. The files can be mutated until they no longer trip the detector, yet can be easily post-processed into functional components. (Also, a similarity hash for 3D toolpaths may not exist.)
(Such a hashing regime would be useless to stop "3D-printed guns" as a concept, because the design could be changed to not match the hash at all, without post-processing.)
Because you don't really have to do any additional steps once the ink is on the paper like you do with a 3D printed firearm.
Looking at just the silhouette or shape, you couldn't really tell the difference between the body of a firearm that was later going to receive a metal tube from the hardware store or a plastic bracket that I'm going to use to support a shelf.
And even if you could accurately tell the difference, how do you know I'm not helping my nephew build a Nerf gun?
What are the odds of this passing successfully?
A grim day for 3D printing if so.
The California legislature has a history of passing stupid stuff that later gets vetoed by Newsom. They tried to ban self-driving trucks last year.
That does not sound stupid, but safe? I giant truck that has no chance of stopping, controlled by a computer? Just build railways and then there are no issues, no fancy AI to control them.
A giant truck that has no chance of stopping, controlled by a human is even more dangerous, but we don't outlaw those.
How did you determine that it's even more dangerous?
Last year 43,230 people died in the US from motor vehicles driven by humans.
It will be a grim day for democracy as well
If it becomes law, then other US states and countries will try to copy it as well.
Doesn't NY already have something similar?
You misunderstand the mechanism. Its not because states copy other states. Its because the corrosive political elements are embedded everywhere, but most prominently have a foothold in California, Washington, and New York state. There is an interstate conspiracy and agenda to ruin America. Louis Rossman covered it recently in his video "The destruction of 3D printing: Bloomberg is behind it"
The actual bill in question: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
It seems more precise to say that 3D printers sold/transferred in California would need built-in anti-firearm-printing controls?
I don't see how this directly bans students/teachers/businesses from owning 3d printers, which is what the title seems to say.
It does not. The gun lobby routinely lies about California regulations to try and get their way. They're on year 13 of boycotting the California handgun market, for example; new handgun models in the state are required to adopt microstamping technology, but firearms manufacturers are ideologically opposed to this technology, so they falsely claim that it doesn't exist.
There's also this Chip "Security" Act on the federal level: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/chips-security-act-ga...
Are 3D-printed guns even remotely reliable, or is it just a moral panic? A brass tube and a pin is probably less likely to fail than 3d printed materials.
They’re not printing the metal parts. They’re printing the frame (as in “polymer framed handgun”).
The frame is the part that gets the serial number and is considered the controlled part of the gun. Rather than the trigger, the springs, the barrel, etc.
Other than the frame, which requires an FFL for transfer, especially across state lines, the rest of the parts can be ordered and shipped from anywhere and are not controlled.
Mind, that’s changing, again notably in CA, as they now talk about “gun pre-cursor” parts.
The 3D printed frames are similar to the “80% lowers” which are aluminum blocks that are “80%” complete AR-15 lowers (the lower receiver, again, the controlled part of an AR-15).
With straight forward machining and some jigs, those chunks of metal can be finished into an operational lower receiver, and the rest of the rifle can be assembled from disparate parts ordered from anywhere.
The original “ghost gun” before 3D printers enabled folks to assemble Glocks in their garage.
Wait. Do you mean I can simply buy barrels, a trigger mechanism, all without any special license, but not the frame?
Correct.
Other countries regulate the pressure-bearing parts instead. It probably started off with a safety rationale (those parts are generally proof tested), but those parts ALSO tend to be the ones that are more difficult for someone to produce at home.
It is fearmongering. You technically can print an all-plastic firearm that works for a round or so until they explode, but only after you have already printed and tested and refined multiple times over, and best case it is still an inferior material to metal. I would put it in the same category as "Yeah you can turn a tree trunk into a cannon, tell me when not to come over when you use it." You can probably make a similarly reliable firearm out of fired clay if you put in the same effort.
Some parts in regular firearms can be printed in plastic, guns with polymer parts have existed since polymers existed, but it is only marginally simpler than machining it out of metal. After all you can buy a metal CNC machine for handful of bucks more than a 3d printer and you don't have to worry about shitty materials breaking immediately.
And there are already plenty of examples of hardware store pipe guns that if someone spent more than a day or two working on it would by far surpass anything anyone can print.
People normally don't make guns that are entirely 3d printed. Homemade guns often get the parts exposed to highest stresses commercially.
Fwiw, when I paid attention to my local police department's released body cam vids, maybe around 1/3 of the guns they showed as evidence were polymer80s (edit: which I mistakenly assumed were 3d printed, but it turns out they aren't so feel free to disregard that fun fact)
Polymer80 aren't 3d printed. They were injected molded as non-receivers and then the customer has to subtract some extra materials.
Polymer80 is defunct but still sold under a slightly different modified mold that someone mysterious somewhere owns and is selling through some other companies("76%" instead of 80%)
In the US I believe there's many metal 'spare parts' for guns available, including the barrel, so don't need to print the whole thing. So they're usually not talking about entirely printed guns.
A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)
This. Guns contain many wear items.
So what the ATF does is take an essential part not substantially influenced by wear and declare it to be the gun. Trade in anything that sufficiently resembles this part is treated as trade in guns. Other parts are not considered guns, they're just pieces of metal or plastic. Then there are the parts that you're not supposed to have. But is that an oil filter or a silencer? When it's on the gun it's obvious, when it's listed on a website as an oil filter...
I know very little about guns but know 3d printing quite well. My understanding is that a fully 3d printed gun is not reliable, you need to acquire actual gun parts for the path where the bullet fires (the barrel?). Then can use 3d printing for the rest
They're pretty damn reliable if you either use a hybrid model (FGC-9) where the barrel is "explosion proof pipe" from china that is then electrically machined (easy with 3d printed mandrel) to form a nice rifled barrel.
Or you just 3d print the "receiver" for something like an Ar-15, which isn't load bearing. If you use the right materials and the beefier designs it will lats hundreds to thousands of rounds. The rest of the parts can be bought through the mails unregulated.
I heard a billionaire is funding this, he’s probably afraid of the one famous instance of someone like him getting killed by one of those.
Which 3D Printers should I be buying right now?
Err, the email list has like 13+ bad addresses? I get a lot of "Address not found" responses.
Many firearm companies were founded by someone who made their own firearm design. Banning people from manufacturing things is anti innovation.
Then, well, let's start downloading:
https://spreadthesignal.com/files
https://guncadindex.com/search
https://defcad.com/library/
Why is a 3d printer more dangerous than a CNC?
They're inexpensive and you can learn the basics of using one in a few hours.
(But doesn't the bill also cover subtractive manufacturing?)
NY is controlling both 3D printers and CNC machines.
One of numerous awful policies and proposed policies that make me glad to have left California.
As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.
Note that in particular banning of 3d printing severely decreases chances for bringing back manufacturing - high labor and other costs makes domestic manufacturing feasible only when it is highly automated and highly customizable.
> As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.
My bet is the US militaro-industrial complex is busy preparing juicy contracts to sell shitload of drones and drones-related tech to the US government now that they understood that drones in warfare were a thing (Ukraine vs Russia showed it and Iran-vs-the-world showed it too).
The US has something like 12 tech companies in the top 20 biggest companies by market cap in the world: do you really think the US is "falling behind in drone tech" because a country that has never invented anything (besides mass killings of their own citizens) since religious extremists took over managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets?
That a country bent on violence (including towards its own citizens) where pick-up trucks armed with .50 cal, AK47s and explosive are the norm can slap explosive on DJI drones is resourceful but I wouldn't exactly call it "passing ahead in drone tech".
I don't gamble but I'd make an exception and bet big that the US is going to end up right next to China, at the very top, when it comes to drone tech. While I fully expect the EU to fall behind in drone tech.
> a country that has never invented anything … managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets
And de-facto won the war as a result. That is reality. That is the power of that weaponry, and that is the falling behind. And that after 4 years of such a war in Ukraine.
I agree it is very possible that US would be at some point able to build up those capabilities. Though, limited to established players, it most probably would be very expensive and thus go against the key feature - cheapness - which in itself allows for the other key feature- mass scale of the drone weapons.
Why does California since Arnold left office feel the need to regulate above the average other states regulate? [in fairness gov Brown would veto some of the crazier ideas that arrived at his desk]
Why do the pols feel like they have to pick fights in so many places? I doubt there’s a majority of voters who want this.
This feels exactly like a feels good general public appeal law though. The average person doesn’t know or care much about 3D printers and is horrified by the level of gun violence in America and wants to see something done.
Which is sad, considering that we have the lowest violent crime rate since the 1950's. https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
That's a decline from peak lead brain fueled murdering spree though. The situation is still far worse than basically every other developed country.
You think too highly of California voters.
All they have to do if frame it as an unnecessary freedom that only conservatives and wackos want to keep and they will 100% support it.
They see their state as a sort of oasis in the country and will do whatever it takes to keep the guns out. They really believe they’re just a few laws away from solving any issue a “reasonable” American could face.
Well, from the point of view of Californian politicians, was it their anti-balance-billing AB72 that was over-regulation before No Surprises Act? Or the CCPA? Or the Auto-Renewal Law? And looking back even farther: was it CalOPPA that was overreach requiring privacy policies? Paid family leave and sick leave?
Some made life hard for Californians like the CARB gasoline blend requirement but I think if you proposed removing any of those laws you'd find yourself downvoted here and called a corporate bootlicker on Reddit - which is not a poll of all people but should give you an idea of the fact that they're not unpopular.
They have passed decent laws like the privacy law although my preference would be a nation-wide law for this to benefit all Americans.
That said these politicians have pushed:
The ban on disinfectant soaps
Stop Shirley bill (charge you for public records in order to suppress access to public information)
Effort to sideline charter schools by teachers unions
Reduced sentences for murderers (this isn't unarmed robbery, etc., rather murderers)
Per mile traveled tax (for a state with the highest gas prices in the lower 48)
Sanction unsafe needle litter (as if there weren’t enough in playgrounds already)
Strangers can assume custody of children without parental consent
Allow politicians to dip into taxpayer money to fund campaigns.
Leniency towards solicitation of minors(!) this was unbelievably passed.
It seems overall that they're pretty much just on the frontier of laws that would be considered progressive - increase taxes, consumer protection, control corporations, prison reduction. I think those positions are overall popular. It just seems like you disagree with them. I also prefer many of these rules not be in place but where you like CCPA and hate the road tax, I like the road tax. Overall, the positions seem pretty coherently in-line with the politics viewpoints.
So, I suppose the answer to your original question is: they're slowly grinding forward on a progressive-politics agenda in a public and straightforward manner that's generally popular among the electorate.
The last time California Republicans had some power around 2009-12 they used it to manufacture crises and shut down the government. Since then voters have shut them out of power, including by passing 2010's Prop 25 which stripped the minority of the 2/3 veto they used to have.
Blatant first amendment violation
This doesn’t have to be unconstitutional, just regulate the intermediary in such a way that it forces the behaviors you are trying to regulate directly
In this case you can say
“You need a license to do this activity”
[adds all the requirements in the bill to the licensing authority]
“Unlicensed activity is forbidden”
so now you can get your tiny LLMs added to 3D printers so that license holders can operate again, without specifically mandating unworkable technology or getting a freedom of expression challenge from the manufacturers you just invented court standing for
This works under every governance system
also I would love to get the contract for the embedded firearm detecting LLM
do you guys even America? catch up
This is such a dumb law. We have millions of guns in the state, 3D printed guns are never going to be more than a blip in the statistics for gun deaths.
They’re just waiting for the union to fall apart and then those will be next.
Lawful gun use means the guns must be registered and users need to be licensed and go through background checks. Presumably part of the concern with 3d printed guns is that anybody can print them without going through that registration, licensing and background check process.
Also don't they require real metal parts anyway?
I'll really get downvoted on this "turning ever more red" HN platform but...
All democrats present voted yes. All republicans voted no.
WTF is going on in US?
We collectively went from singing the praises of "essential workers" to striving to replace and deport them in a 5-year period.
why do your states constantly behave as if they are sovereign nations?
The 10th amendment to the Constitution reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Haha hilarious, nice one, do the sixth next, or the second
I can't tell if this is a joke or a serious question.
I'm seriously questioning the absurdity of banning something that remains available a 15-minute drive away, behind a purely informal border. I don't think, for example, that recent abortion bans had reduced the number of abortions in their respective states to zero.
1) For the vast majority of Californians, the nearest state border is 3-5 hours away. 2) those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.
Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.
>those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.
really? what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state?
About half of Americans lack any access to intercity transport that isn't a private car.[1]
About 15% of rural Americans aren't within 25 miles of any intercity transit, much less interstate; low-income residents are disproportionally represented in that group. That figure jumps to 25% if you exclude suburbs, and in some states that figure is as high as 62%.[2]
Even as intercity bus demand has increased due to the declining quality of air travel in the US,[3] rural intercity bus access has declined. Greyhound served many rural routes until its slow collapse before being acquired by FlixBus, which is more focused on urban access than Greyhound was. The deregulation of intercity bus access in 1982, which led to the closure of many intercity routes (disproportionally in the rural Midwest) that required subsidization from more profitable routes, was a major factor.[4]
So "what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state" is a non-starter of a question, because most of the Americans who'd _need_ an interstate bus ticket can't even get to a bus stop without first owning a car... with which they could simply drive to another state.
1: https://itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-united-...
2: https://www.bts.gov/data-spotlight/85-rural-residents-have-r...
3: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/bus-travel-tickets-airl...
4: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/greyhound-bus-tran...
A lot of rural areas don't have good transit. Even if they do, it's hours round trip. Here's an example. North Dakota has an abortion ban. Someone in Minot would need to travel almost 5 hours to Moorhead, MN or almost 7 hours to Billings, MT. Now that's not any different really than before the ban, because the only clinic in ND that provided abortions was across the river from Moorhead in Fargo. But what if that clinic in Moorhead closes? Or what if Montana bans abortion? It's banned in South Dakota, so people out in western ND, SD, or anywhere in Montana are going to have to travel even further. There are many small communities around here with no bus lines or trains coming through so they're stuck if they don't have a good car.
Do different EU member states have different laws? And are EU citizens free to drive across a national border and be subject to those different laws?
I believe the answer to both of those is yes, which leads to my next question, which is, do you think that's also absurd?
California has a huge influence on the American economy. When it makes a law, companies and other states pay attention. The farmers, senators and representatives in my state, Iowa, are still wringing their hands and pulling out their hair over California's law which "unfairly" manipulates the hog market by requiring all pork products sold in California to come from pigs which are humanely treated according to California's definition of humane.
US states aren't as small as you're imagining them to be. Almost everyone in California lives more than 15 minutes away from the nearest state border, and the largest urban areas are 3+ hours away.
You have zero comprehension of the vast scale of America. Do you also believe you can drive to another state and buy guns?
Procedurally the US is closer to a EU style alliance of sovereign nations than a single one. Practically the federal government has long since overgrown it's constitutional role as the equivalent of the EU bodies but if you're looking at a US state and wondering why it's acting like a sovereign nation the answer is generally because it is one, on paper.
The 10th amendment is why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Assuming this is a sincere question from someone who doesn’t know US history:
States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.
Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.
Photocopiers and printers have included anti-counterfeiting tech for decades, so there is precedent for this kind of thing. And this is addressing a real growing problem:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/santa-rosa-167-gun...
https://da.santaclaracounty.gov/da-task-force-seizes-ghost-g...
https://www.vvng.com/3d-printed-firearm-recovered-after-man-...
Here's a series of models, which of these is a gun part? https://imgur.com/a/p3UtJqW
Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.
Can you send me these models? I would like to print and bring them to the next committee hearing. My senator is on that committee.
I will also be bringing an ergonomic grip for my camera.
My email is in my profile.
I just fundamentally don't understand the idea that nobody's allowed to restrict firearms manufacturing unless they can solve complex riddles about the nature of parts. I understand that you perceive this to be a deep and interesting point, but to me it seems enragingly obtuse. Let's start with blacklisting DefCAD and iterate from there, what's wrong with that?
Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.
How long until people get police showing up at their door because they tried to print something harmless but gun-shaped (like a light gun for retro games, or Nerf-style toys) and were flagged by the AI 'firearm detector'?
If you want to have a voice in how the regulation is implemented, perhaps you should offer suggestions for how to implement it better. That's how it works in most industries; legislators propose to enact regulation X, manufacturers respond that X would have undesirable consequences and Y would be better, and then they discuss to figure out how to best balance all the competing interests.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.
I would rather just accept more crime than accept draconian regulation telling me what I can do with a piece of hardware I own
Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead
Again, it seems like there's a critical insight that's gone missing between the first and second lines of your post. It's unsurprising that a manufacturer might prefer to be regulated less rather than more, and there are a number of cases where I ultimately agree with some manufacturer or another on that. Perhaps it's the case that gun crime would be best resolved with boots on the ground; I could imagine being persuaded by someone who explains where the boots are going to come from and why they're not already there. Maybe I could even be persuaded that 3D printing is more important than crime reduction, although I'm less able to imagine what would convince me of that.
It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?
> For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!".
Who exactly is the "firearms manufacturer?" I've owned and used 3D printers for years. Not once has anything I've used or seen from any 3D printer manufacturer or other related supplier have anything to do with guns.
Then I'd expect you won't be affected by this ban on manufacturing guns with 3D printers. Perhaps there's some changes we should make to better ensure you won't be affected; if so by all means you should suggest them.
Why not focus on the actual gun problem, handguns, and not histrionics about ghost guns and SBRs?
We try! But most California restrictions on handguns have been struck down by the courts, and many of the surviving restrictions manufacturers simply refuse to comply with. They've been boycotting microstamping technology for over a decade, blatantly lying about commercial viability as an excuse for their policy preference not to do it. (I'm slightly sympathetic, because it is true that the first manufacturer to comply will probably themselves get boycotted by anti-gun-regulation zealots.)
But money counterfeiting is a different proposition: the printer is blocking exactly known patterns found on real currency. In fact, many bill designs incorporate patterns that are easily machine detectable for this purpose.
Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?
I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.
Yellow dots doxxing me whenever I print something is equally despicable, client side scanning on my iPhone is equally despicable.
Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.
Until America bans actual guns I don't want to hear about the "growing problem" of 3D printed guns.
Yeah, if it was the UK cracking down it'd make more sense, but IIRC the US already has more guns than people.
And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)
The establishment is desperate to create/maintain moats to maintain hegemony over society