Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?
Edit, reading further it's even more insane:
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.” That’s a lot of shop & manufacturing equipment!
The actual wording of the law, and the way it was interpreted when I was young was that a person who does not hold an FFL may not make a firearm with the intention of selling it, but after making it, they could change their mind and then sell it.
Since, the BATF decided to interpret the prohibition as a thought-crime, enforcing a prohibition making such sales illegal, since like The Shadow, they know what lurks in the hearts of men.
The one transfer which has not yet been tested in the courts to my knowledge is an individual having made firearms, passing away, then leaving them in their will to their heirs....
Gun nut Eric Raymond was cheering when the first printable guns came out. Checkmate gun grabbers, you'll never prevent us from having our shooty-shootys now! Haha! I thought, well the answer to that is simple: simply declare 3D printers to be weapons. You know, like how the Feds declared encryption to be "munitions".
Weird how this is happening simultaneously in many states. Washington is considering a vague 3d printer and CNC law to address ghost guns. Gun crimes are mostly committed with regular pistols but that isn’t stopping politicians from passing all sorts of restrictions under the guise of keeping people safe. Meanwhile these states have serious budget problems that go unaddressed …
This will cause 3D printer usability to go down massively. A bit like the multicolored tracking dots - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots that causes the driver to tell you "you can't print black and white as you're out of yellow".
If you haven't bought a 3D printer yet then I think it's a good time to invest in one. This is going to be one of those technologies that slowly the government will erode our access to, so getting on board now is the best course of action.
I can more or less understand where the legislator might be coming from: laser printers and copiers are already mandated to include fingerprinting in the output and disrupt any attempt of copying money.
4th Amendment, unreasonable search. And of course the 2nd, but the former is more worrying. Also if printing is speech, then you can add the 1st to the list as well.
This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem!
Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.
(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)
I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.
> Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns.
They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877
I haven't printed a full firearm but I've printed some replacement/ergonomic parts for my legally purchased firearms. And there are people printing guns - you don't hear about it because they keep their mouth shut about it.
The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.
People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.
Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.
If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.
We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.
Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York
Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.
Why would you waste everyone's time posting such nonsense? It's not that I support this legislation, but arguing against with counterfactual statements is unhelpful noise.
> Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram
The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.
Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.
I really dislike this whole debate because I never wanted to be lumped in with 3D gun printing weirdos.
When I first told my very non-technical somewhat new friend about my 3D printer, they looked really concerned and told me they weren’t comfortable with it because of how people make weapons with them.
I’ve had to spend a lot of time building trust and showing that I’m not one of those weirdos.
Ultimately I don’t think any kind of printed gun banning law has a tangible impact (it’s not like guns with serial numbers aren’t regularly getting away with murder), but what I don’t like is that the law and discussion around it validates this stupidity and continues to lump me in with gun weirdos.
It’s weird to own a gun. It’s weird to print a gun. I don’t even think the 2nd amendment is very necessary and is clearly not capable of stopping tyranny (and the amendment itself says that’s not its purpose anyway).
At this point we could probably get a coalition of Trump cult members who have no consistent ideology (Trump doesn’t like guns) and “liberal pansies” to just repeal the 2nd amendment and become a normal country.
Policy in the pursuit of easy political narrative wins looks like this. US gun crime is a national issue, and therefore unsolvable in the current political climate, so useless posturing like this is what we're left with.
The real fix is something like a nationwide licensing system like for cars, with auditing of weapons and weapon storage.
Hmmm... this is literally the intro of the narrative arc in the game that I'm making.
Governments confiscating 3D Printers, powerful GPUs, robotic parts to prevent "simple people" the access to "dangerous technologies".
For their own good of course.
Any state laws trying to restrict the 2nd amendment are always going to be useless. You're not going to stop someone who's determined at causing harm with firearms in a country where firearms outnumber people. All these little "bandaid" solutions do is allow for fishing expeditions by police and prosecutors.
On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.”
...what? This some of the stupidest, most out of touch garbage I've ever read and clearly made by uneducated lawmakers being out of their depth.
> The obvious problem: you cannot reliably detect firearms from geometry alone.
The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.
For hundreds of years people have been making guns without 3D printers and CNC mills. All that is needed is some metal machining skills, a lathe, and some other tools.
perhaps people printing their own guns at home is actually quite bad and in fact should be controlled in some way without it being seen as a fundamental incursion on your rights.
Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?
I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.
I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.
143 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 93.7 ms ] threadEdit, reading further it's even more insane:
> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.” That’s a lot of shop & manufacturing equipment!
This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.
Since, the BATF decided to interpret the prohibition as a thought-crime, enforcing a prohibition making such sales illegal, since like The Shadow, they know what lurks in the hearts of men.
The one transfer which has not yet been tested in the courts to my knowledge is an individual having made firearms, passing away, then leaving them in their will to their heirs....
Or maybe 3D printers already do this in a way we don't see.
They want to restart it? They want to go to the screen where you can switch users or sign out?
Do they think it's just a fancier way of saying delete?
I.e don't buy your printer in New York. Pick it up out of state. Problem solved.
Yes, this is rent seeking, and yes New York is gonna New York, but not a big deal.
Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.
(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)
I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.
They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877
I would suspect it is at least partly because the gun that killed the United Healthcare CEO was partly 3D printed.
People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.
Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.
If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.
We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.
Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.
This is demonstrably untrue: https://gnet-research.org/2025/01/08/beyond-the-fgc-9-how-th...
Why would you waste everyone's time posting such nonsense? It's not that I support this legislation, but arguing against with counterfactual statements is unhelpful noise.
https://i.imgur.com/gGIAApA.png
Hard to trust an article like this when the legal analysis and suggestions are being outsourced to an LLM.
The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.
Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.
When I first told my very non-technical somewhat new friend about my 3D printer, they looked really concerned and told me they weren’t comfortable with it because of how people make weapons with them.
I’ve had to spend a lot of time building trust and showing that I’m not one of those weirdos.
Ultimately I don’t think any kind of printed gun banning law has a tangible impact (it’s not like guns with serial numbers aren’t regularly getting away with murder), but what I don’t like is that the law and discussion around it validates this stupidity and continues to lump me in with gun weirdos.
It’s weird to own a gun. It’s weird to print a gun. I don’t even think the 2nd amendment is very necessary and is clearly not capable of stopping tyranny (and the amendment itself says that’s not its purpose anyway).
At this point we could probably get a coalition of Trump cult members who have no consistent ideology (Trump doesn’t like guns) and “liberal pansies” to just repeal the 2nd amendment and become a normal country.
The real fix is something like a nationwide licensing system like for cars, with auditing of weapons and weapon storage.
On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.
...what? This some of the stupidest, most out of touch garbage I've ever read and clearly made by uneducated lawmakers being out of their depth.
The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.
just a thought from across the pond.
I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.
I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.