It's ridiculous that this is even being discussed. The people proposing the bill must have zero understanding of how a 3D printer works.
It makes as much sense as requiring saw manufacturers to implement protections that restrict what can be cut out with a saw.
Or pen manufacturers being required to enforce copyright.
Any form of this bill will 100% fail to attain its stated objective, while having horrendous not-quite-unintended consequences.
And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints? That's how the industry literally began.
(Not to mention: what do they think would happen to the hundreds of millions of existing "dumb" 3D printers? They won't disappear because there's a law).
I've always felt that it you want to really impact gun violence, tax the hell out of ammo and gunpowder. Like $20/bullet. For those who believe in self-defense, a handful of bullets is all you need your entire life, and ideally they'll go unused.
Could probably create exceptions for bullets used at the gun range, so you can become proficient and safe.
Tricky part would be hunting, but restricting such a tax to ammo used for handguns is probably an 80% solution.
Because the 2A and related jurisprudence exists and so that will be struck down in court in about 10wk whereas a "novel" convoluted regulation like micro managing printers will take 10yr.
California already restricts access to ammunition. Only California residents can purchase ammunition in the state, and only after going through a background check. It is also illegal for a California resident to buy ammunition out of state and import it without a background check. It is legal for a non-resident to take ammo into the state, but they cannot transfer it to a California resident, and California residents cannot transfer ammo to them. This creates lots of issues for hunters. The laws are so byzantine that hunting organizations have guides about what is and isn't allowed.[1]
Even though I'd bought multiple firearms in California, this background check always rejected me, probably because my name doesn't fit in their databases. Somewhere between 10% and 16% of legal firearm owners in California are denied ammunition due to this faulty system.
> The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts.
"state-certified algorithm" has a really nice tyrannic ring to it. I am sure once this has passed the rich people can finally sleep at night knowing they are safe from roving gangs of armed Mangiones.
A 3D printer, at least of the Prusa variety, is really just a bunch of stepper motors and a dumb motor driver executing a series of effectively "rotate by X steps" commands, which is what the gcode file is. It doesn't know what it's printing. It doesn't even know that it's a printer.
If they wanted a gate on designs it would have to happen in slicing software, not the actual printer.
"Error, you cannot print toiletpart.stl because there is no open permit for the the address at which this printer is registered, contact a licensed plumber during normal business hours"
Don't laugh, this sort of regulatory capture type crap is exactly where it'll trickle down to if they get what they want for guns.
I'm so glad I left California 6 years ago. They are going to regulate and tax their startups and innovators away to other states. This is supremely stupid.
guns democratize mass murder. With a gun, I can kill a bunch of people before police can stop me. A knife? At best I can kill one or two in a public place before people run away and eventually a different group is going to stop me pretty quickly.
I'm not in the interest of rehashing decades of the same arguments about guns in society on HackerNews, and per Poe's law, I can't actually tell if you're sincere or not. Assuming you are, it bears summary:
You basically have it with "it reduces the blast radius". Guns are a great tool for damaging soft tissue to the point of death. Gun control advocates believe, with less access to guns, people will kill less.
It is also worth adding that most gun deaths in thbe US are from suicides. Means reduction is well-understood as a way to decrease suicides.
> So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?
We don't need to get stuck in a hypothetical, since we can look at other countries and see how they manage these public goods. Guns are unique in that they're exclusively for killing, and provide scant other value outside sport.
Notably, nowhere that had success in tighter gun regulation needed to censor 3D printing. This legislation is something 'both sides' of the gun debate should be able to get behind and oppose. There is very little potential benefit for the cause of "gun control", and very much potential harm.
In the UK to own a gun you need to have a good reason to do so. This is usually by being a member of a gun club, and getting a license to own a gun. Once you have a club membership and a license you then need to start speaking to the police to purchase a gun alongside having a gun box that is secure and certified by the police. Its an awful lot of hassle so the only people with guns are those who are interested in it.
Police dont tend to have guns apart from specially trained units(?) so you only see these quite rarely. Northern Ireland is a bit of an exception all police in NI have a gun, and are trained to quite a high standard to just be able to use it. NI's police actually go over to England reguarly enough to help when police with guns are required.
> California's proposed legislation to put the burden of blocking 3D-printed firearms onto printer manufacturers
I can only assume California has solved all its major problems if policing 3D printers is at the top of the agenda. It's like when someone complains their neighbor can afford two yachts and they can only afford one, you know they are doing pretty well if that's their major concern.
> On January 13, 2014 a certain State Senator (no reason to name names) held a press conference where he held a modern rifle in his hands and stated, “This is a ghost gun. This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”
Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense, and it was appropriately memed into oblivion.
Most anti-gun activists and legislators seem to have no more knowledge than this - which is to say, none.
> Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense
Most people in California who vote on these matters have not held a BB gun, let alone a semi automatic.
They have 0 idea that you just cannot buy actual guns from a grocery store in California anymore!
They think you can just buy a gun at Walmart like you can buy a can of Coke. I was able to pull up clips made in 2023 and 2025 that were literally claiming that. Hasn't been true since atleast 2009, likely even earlier.
A few years ago a local Walmart was clearing our their air gun and rifle selection after there had been a shooting on the east coast that was all over the news. Since ammo have become really expensive, I bought out the whole shelf of air rifles so I could continue to target practice with a focus on my breathing.
People called the cops on me. Multiple people verbally abused me as a gun nut and recorded me buying them on their phones. I had air guns - *children* *toys*. They thought it was the real deal!
The local sherrif's department received nearly a 100 calls that hour when we spoke. When I asked them why they even bothered to turn up because they know no Walmart in a 300 mile radius have ever sold a rifle in the last 20 years as was described to them over the phone, they just shrugged and said "politics".
Hence "assault weapons" which are not a particular type of gun but a list of scary characteristics associated with military weapons—bayonet lugs, folding stocks, and the like—used by legislators to FUD their way into being seen as "doing something" about guns.
In the United States we even have a word for an assault weapon on four legs—pitbulls. Most breed-specific legislation, where it exists, targets pitbulls which are not a single breed nor group of related breeds, but basically any large muscular dog with a short snout and blocky head. The American Pit Bull Terrier is one such breed but far from the only one targeted by BSL.
I think it was Toyotomi Hideyoshi who said something like, the law is not obligated to logic, but it still must be followed.
I'm surprised the EFF didn't address the issue that traditional printer manufacturers already comply with law enforcement, specifically that a fingerprint of yellow tracking dots [1] are printed and printers will often refuse to or fail to copy images of money.
My point is there's already precedent for printers cooperating with authorities so one can see this as simply an extension to 3D printer manufacturers.
I suspect it's a losing battle for the EFF and 3D printer manufacturers to resist some kind of fingerprinting or even the prohibition of things that are guns.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's just what I expect to happen. And if you want to argue against it, you should address the printer tracking dot issue or argue how this is different.
The 3d printer gun legislation has been rearing its head in a bunch of states this year, and generally with very similar patterns. I suspect some of the pro-gun-control groups have been pushing it to lawmakers given most legislation is basically copy-pastes from lobbying groups at both the state and federal level. Colorado, Washington, New York, and now California have all floated legislation attempting to make device-level restrictions around the issue. I only followed Washington's in depth, and they ended up removing all the requirements on manufactures, but did criminalize possession of files which I suspect won't hold up to a first amendment challenge.
Personally, I see this as an assault on 3d printing more than any real attempt to regulate guns.
I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?
So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
I could ask LLM to find me "legal" parts that are 1:1 with gun parts or even better find metal parts in craftcloud3d.com or sendcutsend.com. With big enough database it could find right items on Amazon. It's impossible to legislate.
Lets imagine a similar situation but instead of with an additive manufacturing process they try to regulate a subtractive manufacturing process: a traditional CNC machine. There is no way to prevent the CNC system from machining gun parts as along as the machining is done in discrete steps with the same work piece. The software can't know what sitting on the CNC table.
In additive manufacturing it is more difficult but not impossible to print a bunch of pieces that look nothing like a gun part but and in the end be assembled into a gun.
In both the above cases there would need to be sophisticated surveillance software to even come close to detecting "gun-ness."
While I don't have a horse in the gun control race, I do have one in the open-source, running a local OS, running what software I want, and controlling what that software does races.
Sorry if it is a dumb question, but why in USA people try to regulate 3D printing instead of banning sale of bullets without a firearm owner license? What stops people from buying Chinese printers or components on AliExpress? Or using an open source printer? At the same time, if you cannot buy bullets, your plastic gun is worthless.
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[ 622 ms ] story [ 956 ms ] threadIt makes as much sense as requiring saw manufacturers to implement protections that restrict what can be cut out with a saw.
Or pen manufacturers being required to enforce copyright.
Any form of this bill will 100% fail to attain its stated objective, while having horrendous not-quite-unintended consequences.
And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints? That's how the industry literally began.
(Not to mention: what do they think would happen to the hundreds of millions of existing "dumb" 3D printers? They won't disappear because there's a law).
Sigh.
You really don't have to go that far. A very high quality control board (eg. an original Prusa) is like 90$ and cheap ones go for 25$.
You could buy the licensed printer and swap the board. Or maybe even just flash the firmware on the licensed printer
Could probably create exceptions for bullets used at the gun range, so you can become proficient and safe.
Tricky part would be hunting, but restricting such a tax to ammo used for handguns is probably an 80% solution.
Even though I'd bought multiple firearms in California, this background check always rejected me, probably because my name doesn't fit in their databases. Somewhere between 10% and 16% of legal firearm owners in California are denied ammunition due to this faulty system.
1. https://calwaterfowl.org/navigating-californias-new-ammuniti...
"state-certified algorithm" has a really nice tyrannic ring to it. I am sure once this has passed the rich people can finally sleep at night knowing they are safe from roving gangs of armed Mangiones.
If they wanted a gate on designs it would have to happen in slicing software, not the actual printer.
Don't laugh, this sort of regulatory capture type crap is exactly where it'll trickle down to if they get what they want for guns.
But like all humans we're often ok as long as it is "our guy" or "our algorithm".
In the U.K., where I feel guns are only showpieces (do even cops have them?), stabbing is a known problem.
In India, where ammo is way more expensive than machetes and knives, people are literally murdered with them.
The only argument I can understand, when it comes to banning guns, is that it reduces the blast radius that an evil person can have.
So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?
If that's the proposal, what's my plan when coyotes and mountain lions attack my child and I on our regular walks on rural property?
You basically have it with "it reduces the blast radius". Guns are a great tool for damaging soft tissue to the point of death. Gun control advocates believe, with less access to guns, people will kill less.
It is also worth adding that most gun deaths in thbe US are from suicides. Means reduction is well-understood as a way to decrease suicides.
> So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?
We don't need to get stuck in a hypothetical, since we can look at other countries and see how they manage these public goods. Guns are unique in that they're exclusively for killing, and provide scant other value outside sport.
Notably, nowhere that had success in tighter gun regulation needed to censor 3D printing. This legislation is something 'both sides' of the gun debate should be able to get behind and oppose. There is very little potential benefit for the cause of "gun control", and very much potential harm.
Police dont tend to have guns apart from specially trained units(?) so you only see these quite rarely. Northern Ireland is a bit of an exception all police in NI have a gun, and are trained to quite a high standard to just be able to use it. NI's police actually go over to England reguarly enough to help when police with guns are required.
I can only assume California has solved all its major problems if policing 3D printers is at the top of the agenda. It's like when someone complains their neighbor can afford two yachts and they can only afford one, you know they are doing pretty well if that's their major concern.
> On January 13, 2014 a certain State Senator (no reason to name names) held a press conference where he held a modern rifle in his hands and stated, “This is a ghost gun. This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”
Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense, and it was appropriately memed into oblivion.
Most anti-gun activists and legislators seem to have no more knowledge than this - which is to say, none.
Most people in California who vote on these matters have not held a BB gun, let alone a semi automatic.
They have 0 idea that you just cannot buy actual guns from a grocery store in California anymore!
They think you can just buy a gun at Walmart like you can buy a can of Coke. I was able to pull up clips made in 2023 and 2025 that were literally claiming that. Hasn't been true since atleast 2009, likely even earlier.
A few years ago a local Walmart was clearing our their air gun and rifle selection after there had been a shooting on the east coast that was all over the news. Since ammo have become really expensive, I bought out the whole shelf of air rifles so I could continue to target practice with a focus on my breathing.
People called the cops on me. Multiple people verbally abused me as a gun nut and recorded me buying them on their phones. I had air guns - *children* *toys*. They thought it was the real deal!
The local sherrif's department received nearly a 100 calls that hour when we spoke. When I asked them why they even bothered to turn up because they know no Walmart in a 300 mile radius have ever sold a rifle in the last 20 years as was described to them over the phone, they just shrugged and said "politics".
In the United States we even have a word for an assault weapon on four legs—pitbulls. Most breed-specific legislation, where it exists, targets pitbulls which are not a single breed nor group of related breeds, but basically any large muscular dog with a short snout and blocky head. The American Pit Bull Terrier is one such breed but far from the only one targeted by BSL.
I think it was Toyotomi Hideyoshi who said something like, the law is not obligated to logic, but it still must be followed.
My point is there's already precedent for printers cooperating with authorities so one can see this as simply an extension to 3D printer manufacturers.
I suspect it's a losing battle for the EFF and 3D printer manufacturers to resist some kind of fingerprinting or even the prohibition of things that are guns.
I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's just what I expect to happen. And if you want to argue against it, you should address the printer tracking dot issue or argue how this is different.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
How is this different?
Edit: I appreciate the responses! Thank you
I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?
So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Either way, this is bad legislation.
In additive manufacturing it is more difficult but not impossible to print a bunch of pieces that look nothing like a gun part but and in the end be assembled into a gun.
In both the above cases there would need to be sophisticated surveillance software to even come close to detecting "gun-ness."
While I don't have a horse in the gun control race, I do have one in the open-source, running a local OS, running what software I want, and controlling what that software does races.
If you pull nonsense like this in a two party system, there are enough people with blind spots that it tilts the results against you.
My favorite example of such a blind spot is a friend being flabbergasted that someone funny could be evil.