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.
People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?
Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.
Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
You're welcome to come up with a better litmus test, but it's beyond clear that lawmakers writing gun control regulation have less than a wikipedia level understanding of the topic. See "shoulder thing that goes up", the weird obsession with the Thompson, the entire concept of an Assault Weapon, etc.
That case started over a year ago, I would have expected the topic to come up long ago if this was motivated by the shooting. Granted, lawmaking takes longer than public sentiment lasts, but I didn't really hear much about 3D-printed guns at the time.
Right, because most people recognize that the US has become sufficiently polarized and radicalized that "If enough people are mad at you, a complete stranger might shoot you" is not a theory of change we want to encourage. Yes, even for causes we agree with, most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is, and even how civil and thoughtful you are in pursuing it.
Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.
Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.
The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.
Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.
This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.
My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…
i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.
It's just very easily substitutable with regular knives? Plus the Offensive Weapons Act already covers them? I would be very surprised if it has made a difference.
(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)
I thought "Alt" in the title is meant in the sense of "stop", as in "halt", but on second thoughts maybe that only works in French (where h is always silent)?
But doesn't Ctrl+Alt+Del bring up the screen to switch users or sign out? "Task Manager" is one item in the list of options you get, but it's not the main one or anything, in fact it's the last:
Would have made more sense to say Ctrl+Shift+Esc since that just directly brings up the task manager. All in all I would say it is a slightly weird title, but I assume enough people get what they want to say with it.
I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?
It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.
Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"
I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.
I want all my tools to dumbly operate on whatever I'm working on. Imagine if lathes were required to try to guess whether you're reboring a rifle barrel and stopped themselves from running. Or if a bandsaw had to detect whether what you are cutting was gun shaped. Totally ridiculous. [EDIT: Looks like these examples were already brought up in the article, since they're obvious]
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".
It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary
"The government has been notified that you are attempting to 3D print a copyrighted Door Wedge™ without a license. Local law enforcement has been notified, please prepare to be arrested."
or worse...
"You are trying to print a design that is 87% similar to Egg Cup™. Acquire a limited run license for $3000 for ten runs which expires in six months? Y/N"
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.
If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.
SCOTUS has ruled before that 2A does not afford freedom to own any kind of weapon. There are limits on explosives for example.
They tend to lean on whether it is reasonable that the Founders might have had access to such a weapon with their technology. Machine gun is just a rifle with automatic rechamber. Not an unreasonable upgrade for 1700s technology. Maybe, I dunno; political people don't have to actually care about the details.
There are limits. And if cases like this made it there they might rule that no Founder was smelting the materials. That they would have had to collaborate, in some "market dictates options" ruling to limit hermits going in a rampage. Also everyone a weapons assembly line in their home is anti-corporate capitalism.
"George Washington understood the value of civic life and sound economics! He would not have tolerated such insular selfishness! He did not make his own weapons! He engaged in trade!"
Not saying it's realistic but politics is not never controlled by people living in reality. Making shit up seems as reasonable as anything.
The only weapon class I know of that's outright illegal to own is anti-aircraft missiles. That carries life imprisonment just for possession, with no violent intent. Because the government never wants to give up its air supremacy. This is why whenever you hear of feds concocting an international weapons conspiracy they always have to add anti-air bazookas to the charges because it's the only thing that actually can unequivocally be proven as illegal to own[0].
Basically everything else can be owned with an NFA tax stamp. Nuclear weapons my understanding is the difficulty is more with laws on handling the material than specifically owning one as a weapon, so I'm unsure those are even outright illegal either.
Explosives are actually one of the ones with looser restrictions. Even felons can own and re-instate their explosives rights, because bafflingly when congress de-funded the firearms rights restoration process for felons they forgot to do the one for explosives. Felons can also own and manufacture explosive black powder without scrutiny or paperwork, even ones intended to go in a black powder gun.
Here the law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g it says "shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment not less than 25 years or to imprisonment for life." Even conspiring to acquire them is as illegal as possession!
Fully automatic assault rifles, anti-aircraft guns (that still operate), anti-aircraft missiles (that still operate), land mines over a certain size, or any Comp B. Those are on the naughty list.
There’s a whole community of folks building semi-automatic auto-return triggers that are “technically” semi automatic, but with just a gentle squeeze, fire off another. If you maintain that grip, the return mechanism engages, returning the trigger to firing position, where your pressure causes it to fire again… it’s called a Forced Reset Trigger.
The solution that is difficult but clear: Repeal the 2nd. Get grass roots support for it. Propagandize the shit out of it, get the message out that anyone who opposes the government having the power to implement license requirements for firearms, and total bans on certain classes of weapon, is objectively in support of more gun violence.
In the meantime, go full lawfare on gun and ammo manufacturers, gun lobbyists, and pro-gun advocates. Sue, and keep suing. Go for ten-figure verdicts. Keep them so tied up in court that they can't operate effectively, and they can't get out of it without major egg on their face.
There would have to be a very long period of peace, first. Periods of government instability, as we have now, actually cause American citizens to want to reaffirm their rights, not relinquish them. And, the 2nd amendment represents something symbolically beyond its function: a unified collective will against tyranny, corruption, and evil.
A large fraction of the harm from firearms comes from their ability to fire rapidly which didn’t exist when the constitution was written. As such it was making a very different balance of risk between the general public and individuals.
The Girardoni repeating air rifle predates the ratification of the constitution by ~11 years and was taken on the Lewis and Clark expedition ~13 years later. Really the whole discussion around 2A is usually nonsense because it ignores the context that the entire Bill of Rights had a completely different meaning prior to the 14th amendment leading to incorporation over the last century (and other expansions of federal power via commerce clause); that is, the Bill of Rights originally did not apply to the states.
Very obviously individuals were expected to be part of the militia, which was the military at the time (c.f. the Militia Acts 2 years after ratification requiring individual gun ownership and very clearly laying out that all able-bodied white male citizens aged 18-45 were part of the militia), but also states could regulate weapons if they wanted.
I didn’t say we could ban compressed air powered guns, I specifically said percussion caps. The Girardoni was way less dangerous than a modern handgun.
Sure, but compressed air guns are deadly (you can find videos of people using them on deer on youtube, or if you want something less graphic, you can find ballistic gel test videos), and a repeating rifle did exist at the time and was used a couple years later by an official American expedition commissioned by Jefferson. So fast-firing weapons were not some alien technology. The wider context also makes it clear that 2A was supposed to give individuals the right to own whatever weapons the military uses because at the time, there was no standing military. Individuals were summoned and expected to bring their own weapons, hence the law requiring them to own them.
In the 230 intervening years, we've vastly increased the scope of the federal government and developed a formal military, so one might argue we ought to amend the constitution to change exactly what's allowed under 2A (e.g. it should be straightforward to have a nuclear weapons ban added with unanimous agreement), but as it stands, 2A (+14A) clearly gives individuals the right to own the arms necessary to run a functioning ("well-regulated") militia, which in 2026 means at least semi-automatic firearms.
> So fast-firing weapons were not some alien technology.
Thrown stones are a fast firing deadly weapon. They, compressed air guns, and ball musket etc aren’t used by modern military forces in combat because they are less dangerous.
A rule that allows compressed air weapons yet bans percussion caps is quite reasonable and could pass constitutional scrutiny.
Grenades a clear requirement for a modern infantry are also banned, thus eliminating any argument that a modern standards of military efficiency apply.
Banding heavy machine guns yet another invention after the constitution was written didn’t, so there’s clear present this wouldn’t either.
Except "it was made after the constitution was written" is a standard you've made up -- there is existing case law from SCOTUS that 2A protects guns "in common use"
Actually things that are new after the constitution was written is regularly brought up before the court it’s a very common argument. The thing was written a long time ago, everyone involved in the process acknowledges that fact. The degree to which papers applies to electronic data should be familiar to you.
Supreme court rulings are arbitrary as they regularly reverse or update standards, sometimes multiple times.
Yes, if your argument is found to be right in the future, then it will be right. Currently it is not, and it is unlikely to be any different until the composition of the court changes. Until then, the only other path to change it is an amendment.
1. The second amendment wasn't written because the authors thought guns were inert. It was written precisely because they could impart deadly force.
2. As someone else pointed out, early repeating rifles did exist then.
3. If the meaning of the constitution is only to be evaluated against the technology available at the time -- what does that say about the validity of the 1st or 4th amendments with modern technology?
Firearms (ops Arms) was used rather than weapons suggesting some level of consideration here. They had cannons and warships back then. That bit about a well regulated militia suggests limits on what exactly was permissible.
But obviously we don’t have direct knowledge of every conversation.
The point about cannons and warships actually makes it very clear about what the authors' intent was re: balance of risk; at the time, private ownership of artillery was completely legal and unregulated. Private citizens owned warships with dozens of live cannons that could bombard coastal cities, and didn't even need to file paperwork to do so! A warship can cause quite a bit more mayhem than a glock.
Crime exited when the constitution was written, suggesting the framers were only concerned with interactions at the state level is to insult their intelligence. Not to mention specific text like people’s rights to a jury trial etc.
Principally concerned between the state and the people, not only. The context was the nature of England at the time. It was viewed as an oppressive force.
I don’t think we even disagree per se, but it’s hard to argue the constitution wasn’t written primarily with the thought of what England and how it exercised authority in mind. Individual roadmen and ruffians, let’s say, existed but weren’t existential threats to shape the tone of the new nation’s foundation, were they?
Lawlessness is a complete breakdown of state power and just as threatening to a new country as foreign powers.
The degree of importance they place on individual factors here is obviously debatable, but they just had two governments fail. England and the articles of confederation didn’t work so there was a larger emphasis on practicality over idealism.
Their proposal is about getting lines like this ratified:
"No person, firm or corporation shall sell or deliver any three-dimensional printer in the state of New York unless such printer is equipped with blocking technology,"
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S9005
They don't like firearms in the hands of the public.
The goal is to be an indirect ban that's hard to challenge. California has had significant success with strategies such as requiring "microstamping technology" (but it could be anything - it's just a limiting mechanism) in conjunction with an approved handgun roster to limit handgun sales in the state. This is almost certain to be a similar strategy.
What's "blocking technology", then? I'm repeating an argument from the article, which itself is an argument older than the microprocessor:
> But the answer to misuse isn’t surveillance built into the tool itself. We don’t require table saws to scan wood for weapon shapes. We don’t require lathes to phone home before turning metal. We prosecute people who make illegal things, not people who own tools.
I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.
For example[0]:
> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.
…
> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.
Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.
Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.
Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.
Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"
A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
You can buy jigs to complete what are called 80% receivers with a drill press (and (optionally a router) - could do it on your kitchen table in an evening for a couple hundred bucks.
Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.
I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".
Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.
Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.
If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.
I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.
Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.
Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".
How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.
Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.
Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?
We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.
Good point, as a further example see all the "luck" countries like Ukraine have been having with even slightly modified "consumer" drone stuff applied to this kind of application
> 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.
What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?
Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.
The most insane thing about this is that it is not illegal to manufacture firearms in the United States. Providing that you do not sell or distribute the firearm, it is entirely legal to manufacture a firearm in the USA for personal use only. Laws vary state by state, of course, and it may be different in the state of New York, but assuming that this federal law has not been overridden by some state law in New York, then this proposed regulation is 100% nonsensical.
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.
You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.
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.
The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.
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.
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.
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!
Exactly. The zip gun people are mostly just weird nerds, and not professional assassins. The latter seems to be doing it the old fashioned way which leaves no traces - buy cheap gun, file off serials, throw it in the river after.
Zip guns may get past a metal detector, but not the standard x-ray luggage scan. To the extent it'll make it past the x-ray screeners, it's because they let all kinds of stuff through, because it's a poor way to screen for dangerous things, and they are not high-skill employees, they are relatively cheap labor.
Source: I used to travel every week flying home Friday, cycle clothes out of my travel bags, and be on the road again on Sunday night. I learned to my horror I'd been flying with a pair of scissors for at least 5 weeks - during which, TSA forced me to open a Christmas present for my sister and throw away some hand lotion which was in too big of a bottle.
There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.
Back in college I was flying home immediately after the end of the semester for a family reunion. Flew there, attended, then flew back. On the flight back, I got stopped for additional search by TSA. Immediately, I remembered that I had left my lab dissection kit in my backpack which included a razor blade and long, pointed, pick-like tool. But it turns out that neither of those are what got me stopped....I had also forgotten a half full bottle of gatorade. They were however happy to confiscate my dissection kit as well, after I had (stupidly) informed them of it.
Same thing happened to me -- had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it. They looked at their "regulations" and vice grips weren't on it so they let me through. You know who didn't let it through though - I left it in the bag and the Chinese security confiscated it on the way back.
btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
> btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
I've done that too. You travel so aggressively, eventually you have some oopsies.
I went through a stint where I was driving for work, and working with a bunch of people in a woodsy state. A guy would take us shooting, and he asked me to buy a box of ammo to replace what I shot - so 20 bucks for 500 rounds of .22 caliber ammo.
Next time I flew was the first time I had actually been selected for TSA precheck - you know, the Trusted Traveler program and you can guess what I left in my carry-on. I was very apologetic and had to talk to a very grumpy city police officer, but it was fine. I paid a fine of $130, and that was it - they offered to let me check my bag to keep the munitions too!
It has never even come up with my 3 Global Entry interviews either. And yes - I live in a blue state.
Obviously don't do it. It wasn't a problem for me, but very much YMMV. I know someone else who got dinged for having a banana they bought in a foreign airport, and that continues to come up in their Global Entry interviews. Live ammunition < Bananas, apparently.
Eh. I accidentally did that. We were on a trip to visit family and a relative took my kids to a shooting range. One of them didn’t completely empty their pockets afterward and we realized that when the TSA agent asked why we had a bullet in our carryon. My blood kinda froze, then the same agent asked if I’d like him to discard it for me. I said I’d appreciate that very much and he did so. He went on to say that, being near the headquarters of Bass Pro, that this happens all the time. I used it as a teachable moment to explain to my kids that this might be their one-time free pass and to never, ever, do that again.
3D printed guns haven't been zip guns in a long time. That reads as willful ignorance. Only the receiver or frame are controlled. Every other part can be purchased online without any checks. Hoffman Tactical's Orca and a myriad of pistol frame can be used to produce weapons on par with commercial weapons. Many commercial pistols are polymer frames. A good 3d printed pistol frame is no different than a cast nylon polymer frame.
If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.
3d printing ghost guns with a 100% plastic construction is a silly thing only done for clickbait, and probably comprises less than a tenth of a percent of 3d printing gun related activity. Most people are printing frames, parts, flair, accessories, mounts, things like that, and using sensible real metal parts for things involving explosive forces and danger.
Not is it only dumb, but it is plain unimplementable. Are they saying the HMI interfaces on CNC machines need to be able to parse the GCode generated by any of dozens of CAM software options out there and divine if it might be gun related? That is not possible.
> 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?
Even in countries with strict gun control, like the UK, the most serious criminals can get hold of guns. And if lesser criminals 3D printed a gun, they'd struggle to get hold of ammo for it. So they stick to knives.
Reading up on this, the remaining UK incidents seem to involve mostly "converted blank-firing copies", with the NCA describing 3D printed firearms as "low status". And as you say ammo is highly controlled here.
The only time a 3d printed gun is useful is if your country is occupied and you have a chance to secretly shoot one of the occupiers if only you could get a gun past their confiscation. Otherwise it is an interesting toy that you might shoot once to say you did it.
I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.
Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits, so at least there is a log and provenance chain someone could use in case it's used for bad stuff? Sounds like if you'd want to avoid that (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example), you could use a offline 3D printer.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
The implication with this type of argument is that if someone is willing to break the law against murder, they'd be willing/able to break the laws around legally purchasing or owning a gun.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
What are you referring to as "it" here? When OP mentioned getting a gun from "off the street", that's referring to obtaining one illegally, without a provenance chain or any permitting.
If you want to shoot a CEO, its far easier to buy an untraceable gun on the streets (or obtain a non-serialized 80% lower receiver that you drill yourself) rather than an unreliable fully 3D-printed gun.
Ah, I wasn't familiar with "off the street" meaning that, I thought they were saying "go to a store and buy a gun". Thanks!
Is it that easy to acquire even illegal firearms in the US, that you can just walk around in NYC to the shadier streets and find randoms willing to sell them to you?
I can't directly attest to that (never bought an illegal gun) but from my understanding, yes, people have no challenge obtaining illegal guns.
However, you really don't even need to do that. You could just drive across the NY border to a state with looser gun laws, buy one there, shave off the serial number, and bring it back to NY. You could also just steal a gun from one of the many Americans who already own one.
You can also legally buy an unfinished lower receiver in many states (the part of a gun that is typically serialized). Since it's technically unfinished, it doesn't require a serial number. Then you drill a few holes into it and assemble it with off the shelf, also un-serialized gun parts.
I'm not sure if it's still this way but when I was a kid you could buy old guns at rural flea markets or antiques shops. I've never attempted to purchase an illicit firearm, but I can't imagine it's any harder than buying illegal drugs.
> (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example)
Dude literally sat in a McDonalds with all the evidence on him including the 3D printed gun. The idea of phantom murderers wielding 3D printed weapons is nothing more than a rich guy/CEO anxiety fantasy.
If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.
It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".
To get it through security somewhere with metal detectors. That's probably the only reason to specifically fear a 3D-printed gun in a nation full of proper guns.
Of course, 3D printed plastic ammo isn't likely to be very effective.
(Maybe they're worried that before long, 3D printing with metal will almost as easy and affordable as plastic 3D printing is now, and people will be printing off entire arsenals of very effective firearms?)
So what are you going to do behind the metal detectors with your plastic gun and no bullets? If you want to do huge amounts of harm (and kill yourself in the process) in the US it’s pretty clear you can do that without the need of a slow plastic gun that may just explode.
Is this a real question? Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses. Printing a gun does not. Printing a gun also does not need to wait for a multi-day delay from a background check. Depending on the printer, it could just take multiple days to print.
Asking why someone would want to do this is just not trying very hard in the conversation is actually pretty myopic.
> Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses.
It is illegal for the government to make a registry of gun owners. There is an electronic check to clear you as a legal gun owner but there is no registry.
It’s only theoretically non searchable, IIRC each submitted document has to be OCRed every time a search is ran on the documents, and this is enough of a legal fig leaf to qualify it as not a registry. A sizeable GPU farm would make this basically a moot point.
Oh I agree. It is very likely that the electronic checks are recorded and could be used as a non-official registry of gun owners. I removed my comment to that effect because it is speculation. But, electronic records are so easily recorded that I have little doubt that the electronic checks are in fact an illegal registry.
Seven states have required gun registries. It is not illegal for a state to have a registry. It is illegal for the federal government to have a gun registry with exceptions for NFA controlled arms.
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.
No thanks. We don't need law enforcement checking weapon storage in private homes. And there's already a national background check system for most legal firearm transfers.
I didn't say it was politically feasible. I'm just saying that's how you control gun crime.
It's mostly handguns, and about half of firearm homicides are with illegally trafficked arms. They can be trafficked because there's no way to account for the guns.
All this rests on the assumption that anyone actually wants to solve gun homicide. A lot of people SAY they do, and that's how you get shit like 3D printer bans.
The real fix is to leave it alone. You're wasting political capital by pushing for gun control yet again. You'd want the Trump administration to have access to a database of gun owners like the Black Panthers? Seriously?
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.
The idea that we should let government software run on our printers to prevent the rate case where someone both wants to print a gun and do some crime with it is absurd. There are more important 1st and 4th amendment considerations here
NYC doesn't have a gun problem. They regulate the shit out of guns to no effect. They should regress closer to the national mean and spend the resources on stuff that matters more. And even if they do want to regulate it, micromanaging everyone's 3d printers is not the way to do it both because of bad efficacy and bad precedent.
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 …
It is not weird in the slightest. These things are coordinated at the state level all the time.
This is probably one of those good tests of "is your 'conspiracy theory' meter properly calibrated", because if it's going off right now and you are in disbelief, you've got it calibrated incorrectly. This is so completely routine that there's an entire branch of law codified in this way called the "Uniform Commercial Code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code and see the organization running this' home page at https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc .
And that's just a particular set of laws with an organization dedicated to harmonizing all the various states laws for their particular use cases. It's not the one and only gateway to such laws, it's just an example of a cross-state law coordination so established that it has an entire organization dedicated to it. Plenty of other stuff is coordinated at the state level across multiple states all the time.
Washington state is pursuing a similar law at a similar time. Presumably pushed by the same advocacy organization, whichever one it is. The Washington one seems impossible to actually comply with -- how the hell is the computer in a CNC machine going to figure out what geometries are gun-like? A de facto ban on additive or subtractive manufacturing is pretty dumb.
I wrote as good an opposition as I could. Basically, I opposed it on multiple principles.
From the top, I absolutely detest this kind of censorship. But the bill states that the implementation will be defined (or rendered infeasible - yeah right) AFTER the bill passes. Said decision will be punted to a "working group" of industry folks. That alone stinks, since it places a lot of abuse potential outside of duly elected representation.
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.
Not all AI assisted writing is "slop," especially if, as your screenshot shows, significant portions of the article were written by a human. Drawing attention to any and all hints of AI assisted writing is not the public service announcement you think it is.
Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.
I actually think AI-human collaboration is quite beneficial. I have a more fundamental issue that it's just bad writing when you use pure LLM generated text. My general feeling is "why should you expect me to spend my time reading something that you didn't care enough to spend your time writing?"
Also, most of the suggestions provided in the AI generated section are just useless. While I think this law is terrible, the suggestions provided completely contradict what the lawmakers are intending. I'll explain what I mean with some of the suggestions provided.
> Narrow the Scope to Intent, Not the Tool
This is essentially a suggestion to throw out the entire law as written. Sure, but this is meaningless advice to lawmakers.
> Drop Mandatory File Scanning
This is the same suggestion as before but rephrased.
> Exempt Open-Source and Offline Toolchains
This is asking them to create a massive loophole in their own law making it useless. Once again, essentially just asking them to throw out the entire law.
> Add safe harbor for sellers and educators who don’t modify equipment or participate in unlawful manufacture.
Two fundamentally different concepts here jammed into one idea. Do you want to add safe harbor for sellers who don't modify equipment or do you want to throw out the entire law and have it not apply to anybody who doesn't participate in unlawful manufacture? These are very different ideas, it makes no sense to treat them as one cohesive concept.
All of these are signals that not much thought went into this. If a human had used AI for ideas and writing assistance, but participated in the writing process as an active contributor, I think they would have caught things like this. I don't think they would have chosen to make multiple bullet points semantically identical. I think they would have chosen to actually cite specific aspects of the law and propose concrete solutions.
Another example, one of their suggestions is to improve the working groups to add specific members. Genuinely a fairly good idea. Having actually read the law, I would have cited the specific passage, which requires that the working group "SHALL INCLUDE EXPERTS IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIGITAL SECURITY, FIREARMS REGULATION, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY, AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DISCIPLINES DETERMINED BY THE DIVISION TO BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS PRESCRIBED HEREIN." I would question, who do they consider to be experts in additive manufacturing? Why does it seem that the working group will be far more heavily weighed towards policy experts as opposed to 3D printing experts? The article suggests that "standards will default to large vendors" yet there is no evidence here that vendors will be included at all.
Yet another case of lawmakers proliferating the “you should not have root access” meme. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern political landscape and a backdoor to much less well intentioned actions (intentional and unintended).
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".
> 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.
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.
This seems like a problem with your friend moreso than with 3D printing in general. Most people I know who hear about 3D printing don't immediately think of making weapons. Toys and weird gadgets tend to come to mind first, or maybe an office accessory like my laptop stands. The fact that your friend immediately jumped to the conclusion that it's for making weapons says a lot about the way they think about the world.
I agree that the law seems to validate the viewpoint, but I disagree that it's a common one, nor that you should have had to spend time building that trust.
A normal country? Like Iran that just slaughters or imprisons anybody that speaks or acts against the government. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back. Before then we would prefer to resolve our grievances peacefully in court.
No, most countries are not like Iran. There are enough examples of governments deciding to slaughter unarmed people within their boarders that the majority in the US sees giving up private guns as a folly of the greatest order.
If a populace gives up their weapons they become ultimately powerless against armed aggressors. 2A first purpose is to make citizens the first line of defense against invasion. This is supposed to be in place of a standing army from a time that a town could be wiped off the map by invading forces before any military force could be dispatched.
Yes, a permanent standing army is unconstitutional (Article 1 Section 8).
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.
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.
And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?
Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.
Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
You're welcome to come up with a better litmus test, but it's beyond clear that lawmakers writing gun control regulation have less than a wikipedia level understanding of the topic. See "shoulder thing that goes up", the weird obsession with the Thompson, the entire concept of an Assault Weapon, etc.
Actual shootings with 3D printed guns are relatively rare but it’s come up because Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one.
That case started over a year ago, I would have expected the topic to come up long ago if this was motivated by the shooting. Granted, lawmaking takes longer than public sentiment lasts, but I didn't really hear much about 3D-printed guns at the time.
NY legislators have been pushing for this in public statements over the past year.
e.g. https://d12t4t5x3vyizu.cloudfront.net/ritchietorres.house.go...
And they're still doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.
EDIT: I think you mean "allegedly"
Right, because most people recognize that the US has become sufficiently polarized and radicalized that "If enough people are mad at you, a complete stranger might shoot you" is not a theory of change we want to encourage. Yes, even for causes we agree with, most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is, and even how civil and thoughtful you are in pursuing it.
Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.
Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.
The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygxGrxCEOp0
[2] https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/BWA-Ammo-V...
Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.
This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.
My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…
Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?
Preemptive regulation is absurd.
i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.
It's just very easily substitutable with regular knives? Plus the Offensive Weapons Act already covers them? I would be very surprised if it has made a difference.
(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)
Would they really do less stabbing if they had to use a mundane kitchen knife instead of a 'tacticool' knife or 'ninja sword'?
Not necessarily a lot less but I’m sure removing the aesthetic/cool factor reduces how often they’re carried
I don't think they know what Ctrl+Alt+Delete means.
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?
The folks at adafruit probably do know, but it does make sense if you expand the words: "Control, Alter, and Delete"
That's more charitable. Alt is still short for Alternate though, not Alter.
I thought "Alt" in the title is meant in the sense of "stop", as in "halt", but on second thoughts maybe that only works in French (where h is always silent)?
It's clearly meant to be part of the Ctrl-Alt-Del key sequence that interrupts Windows computers to bring up the task manager.
But doesn't Ctrl+Alt+Del bring up the screen to switch users or sign out? "Task Manager" is one item in the list of options you get, but it's not the main one or anything, in fact it's the last:
https://www.lifewire.com/thmb/hzx6btMYEqZJfSAL3WVxXuW3-jw=/1...
Would have made more sense to say Ctrl+Shift+Esc since that just directly brings up the task manager. All in all I would say it is a slightly weird title, but I assume enough people get what they want to say with it.
I mean, technically it’s short for alter on the way to being short for alternate
That's bullshit (IMO) and the post author (Phillip Torrone - I believe that's one of the owners of Adafruit) is obviously ignorant in this regard.
That said, what he's actually talking about in the post makes a lot of sense. That is the important part.
I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?
Reminds me of people who think penultimate is just super-duper-ultimate.
Or “epicenter”.
All prefixes eventually become intensifiers?
"Irregardless"
Alter the control, and delete!
In modern Windows, the three-key salute is a way to lock your session securely. Maybe that's what they mean: locking it up?
It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.
This is what Shift+Ctrl+Esc does.
I'm behind the times! That's what it used to be until Windows XP, the last Windows version I used on a daily basis was Windows 2000 up to 2005.
Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"
It has been used as an idiom to mean stopping or restarting something (the former in this case) for decades: https://wordspy.com/words/ctrl-alt-delete/
I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.
It means restart. It has never meant stop. Even the link you provide says:
> n. A metaphoric mechanism with which one can reset, restart, or rethink something.
That's what's confusing. The headline makes no sense because it's not about restarting.
Maybe we should just install this keypad on our printers and be done with it:
https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/ctrl-alt-del...
Hey, it's similar to Weird Al's song:
Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you
Perhaps they were using Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the Task Manager so that they can kill an unruly process?
Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.
This is more like installing anti-virus on your 3d printer.
I don’t want an antivirus on my (hypothetical because I don’t have one) 3D printer. I want it to dumbly print whatever it is I send to it.
I want all my tools to dumbly operate on whatever I'm working on. Imagine if lathes were required to try to guess whether you're reboring a rifle barrel and stopped themselves from running. Or if a bandsaw had to detect whether what you are cutting was gun shaped. Totally ridiculous. [EDIT: Looks like these examples were already brought up in the article, since they're obvious]
But you’re OK with a screwdriver that could be used to assemble a gun without even checking what it’s torquing? /s
It's the same as control open-apple reset.
I don't think there's a reading that suggests it's a good thing for 3D printers. The rest of the page confirms that.
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".
It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary
"The government has been notified that you are attempting to 3D print a copyrighted Door Wedge™ without a license. Local law enforcement has been notified, please prepare to be arrested."
or worse...
"You are trying to print a design that is 87% similar to Egg Cup™. Acquire a limited run license for $3000 for ten runs which expires in six months? Y/N"
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.
It's not illegal to make your own firearm, you just can't sell it.
If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.
True, a terrible patchwork of different state laws makes it very easy to unknowingly violate a law.
They want to make it illegal
Maybe they should look more at how other countries quite successfully banned fire arms. Hint: it wasn't by banning printers.
They could attempt it, but the Second Amendment is quite clear that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to ban firearms and ammunition.
SCOTUS has ruled before that 2A does not afford freedom to own any kind of weapon. There are limits on explosives for example.
They tend to lean on whether it is reasonable that the Founders might have had access to such a weapon with their technology. Machine gun is just a rifle with automatic rechamber. Not an unreasonable upgrade for 1700s technology. Maybe, I dunno; political people don't have to actually care about the details.
There are limits. And if cases like this made it there they might rule that no Founder was smelting the materials. That they would have had to collaborate, in some "market dictates options" ruling to limit hermits going in a rampage. Also everyone a weapons assembly line in their home is anti-corporate capitalism.
"George Washington understood the value of civic life and sound economics! He would not have tolerated such insular selfishness! He did not make his own weapons! He engaged in trade!"
Not saying it's realistic but politics is not never controlled by people living in reality. Making shit up seems as reasonable as anything.
>SCOTUS has ruled before that 2A does not afford freedom to own any kind of weapon. There are limits on explosives for example.
This is largely machine guns and explosives. Pistols, rifles, etc are ordinary weapons in common use*
*NYC authorities may not agree
The only weapon class I know of that's outright illegal to own is anti-aircraft missiles. That carries life imprisonment just for possession, with no violent intent. Because the government never wants to give up its air supremacy. This is why whenever you hear of feds concocting an international weapons conspiracy they always have to add anti-air bazookas to the charges because it's the only thing that actually can unequivocally be proven as illegal to own[0].
Basically everything else can be owned with an NFA tax stamp. Nuclear weapons my understanding is the difficulty is more with laws on handling the material than specifically owning one as a weapon, so I'm unsure those are even outright illegal either.
Explosives are actually one of the ones with looser restrictions. Even felons can own and re-instate their explosives rights, because bafflingly when congress de-funded the firearms rights restoration process for felons they forgot to do the one for explosives. Felons can also own and manufacture explosive black powder without scrutiny or paperwork, even ones intended to go in a black powder gun.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68365597
Here the law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g it says "shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment not less than 25 years or to imprisonment for life." Even conspiring to acquire them is as illegal as possession!
Fully automatic assault rifles, anti-aircraft guns (that still operate), anti-aircraft missiles (that still operate), land mines over a certain size, or any Comp B. Those are on the naughty list.
There’s a whole community of folks building semi-automatic auto-return triggers that are “technically” semi automatic, but with just a gentle squeeze, fire off another. If you maintain that grip, the return mechanism engages, returning the trigger to firing position, where your pressure causes it to fire again… it’s called a Forced Reset Trigger.
Sawed off shotguns, sawed off barrels in general.
My point overall was government is fine with arbitrary exceptions that would get Stan's dad going all "Oh I'm sorry, I thought this was America."
The solution that is difficult but clear: Repeal the 2nd. Get grass roots support for it. Propagandize the shit out of it, get the message out that anyone who opposes the government having the power to implement license requirements for firearms, and total bans on certain classes of weapon, is objectively in support of more gun violence.
In the meantime, go full lawfare on gun and ammo manufacturers, gun lobbyists, and pro-gun advocates. Sue, and keep suing. Go for ten-figure verdicts. Keep them so tied up in court that they can't operate effectively, and they can't get out of it without major egg on their face.
There would have to be a very long period of peace, first. Periods of government instability, as we have now, actually cause American citizens to want to reaffirm their rights, not relinquish them. And, the 2nd amendment represents something symbolically beyond its function: a unified collective will against tyranny, corruption, and evil.
"anyone who opposes the government must be stopped"
are you sure?
What a dystopia. If anything the situation in Minnesota should teach liberal Americans that they all need to arm themselves massively.
Yes, and remind me what happened to the liberal American that armed himself in Minnesota?
He attempted to be a hero by drawing on a federal officer.
Forearms yes, percussion caps no.
A large fraction of the harm from firearms comes from their ability to fire rapidly which didn’t exist when the constitution was written. As such it was making a very different balance of risk between the general public and individuals.
The Girardoni repeating air rifle predates the ratification of the constitution by ~11 years and was taken on the Lewis and Clark expedition ~13 years later. Really the whole discussion around 2A is usually nonsense because it ignores the context that the entire Bill of Rights had a completely different meaning prior to the 14th amendment leading to incorporation over the last century (and other expansions of federal power via commerce clause); that is, the Bill of Rights originally did not apply to the states.
Very obviously individuals were expected to be part of the militia, which was the military at the time (c.f. the Militia Acts 2 years after ratification requiring individual gun ownership and very clearly laying out that all able-bodied white male citizens aged 18-45 were part of the militia), but also states could regulate weapons if they wanted.
> Girardoni repeating air rifle
Not a firearm.
I didn’t say we could ban compressed air powered guns, I specifically said percussion caps. The Girardoni was way less dangerous than a modern handgun.
Sure, but compressed air guns are deadly (you can find videos of people using them on deer on youtube, or if you want something less graphic, you can find ballistic gel test videos), and a repeating rifle did exist at the time and was used a couple years later by an official American expedition commissioned by Jefferson. So fast-firing weapons were not some alien technology. The wider context also makes it clear that 2A was supposed to give individuals the right to own whatever weapons the military uses because at the time, there was no standing military. Individuals were summoned and expected to bring their own weapons, hence the law requiring them to own them.
In the 230 intervening years, we've vastly increased the scope of the federal government and developed a formal military, so one might argue we ought to amend the constitution to change exactly what's allowed under 2A (e.g. it should be straightforward to have a nuclear weapons ban added with unanimous agreement), but as it stands, 2A (+14A) clearly gives individuals the right to own the arms necessary to run a functioning ("well-regulated") militia, which in 2026 means at least semi-automatic firearms.
> So fast-firing weapons were not some alien technology.
Thrown stones are a fast firing deadly weapon. They, compressed air guns, and ball musket etc aren’t used by modern military forces in combat because they are less dangerous.
A rule that allows compressed air weapons yet bans percussion caps is quite reasonable and could pass constitutional scrutiny.
It might be quite reasonable, but it would also quite clearly require an amendment to do in the US, which is what you originally replied to.
Grenades a clear requirement for a modern infantry are also banned, thus eliminating any argument that a modern standards of military efficiency apply.
Banding heavy machine guns yet another invention after the constitution was written didn’t, so there’s clear present this wouldn’t either.
Except "it was made after the constitution was written" is a standard you've made up -- there is existing case law from SCOTUS that 2A protects guns "in common use"
Actually things that are new after the constitution was written is regularly brought up before the court it’s a very common argument. The thing was written a long time ago, everyone involved in the process acknowledges that fact. The degree to which papers applies to electronic data should be familiar to you.
Supreme court rulings are arbitrary as they regularly reverse or update standards, sometimes multiple times.
Yes, if your argument is found to be right in the future, then it will be right. Currently it is not, and it is unlikely to be any different until the composition of the court changes. Until then, the only other path to change it is an amendment.
I agree it’s the composition of the Supreme Court that’s at issue not the constitution.
Saying what arguments are right doesn’t make sense in these contexts only what is the current precedent.
1. The second amendment wasn't written because the authors thought guns were inert. It was written precisely because they could impart deadly force.
2. As someone else pointed out, early repeating rifles did exist then.
3. If the meaning of the constitution is only to be evaluated against the technology available at the time -- what does that say about the validity of the 1st or 4th amendments with modern technology?
Air guns existed sure. There’s a reason those aren’t used by the military today, they just aren’t that dangerous.
They're deadly and rapid fire.
But again, in historical context, the point of the 2A was to permit people to own the most deadly weapons of war that existed at that time.
> They’re deadly and rapid fire
So are a pile of stones, it’s the degree of risk to the public that matters not some arbitrary classification.
Ignoring differences is degree here isn’t enough to win the argument.
That is an argument that people make today.
Where was that part of the decision making process in 1789?
Firearms (ops Arms) was used rather than weapons suggesting some level of consideration here. They had cannons and warships back then. That bit about a well regulated militia suggests limits on what exactly was permissible.
But obviously we don’t have direct knowledge of every conversation.
> Firearms was used rather than weapons
Where? The constitution says neither. It says "Arms"
Regardless, the constitution specifically makes reference to the private ownership of cannons and warships.
> To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque
Arms at the time meant man portable weapons as distinct from cannons or trebuchet etc.
Just posted about firearms so many times used the wrong word here.
The point about cannons and warships actually makes it very clear about what the authors' intent was re: balance of risk; at the time, private ownership of artillery was completely legal and unregulated. Private citizens owned warships with dozens of live cannons that could bombard coastal cities, and didn't even need to file paperwork to do so! A warship can cause quite a bit more mayhem than a glock.
Legal yes, protected by the constitution without constraint no.
Both the use of Arms being man portable weapons and militia makes a very clear distinction.
The balance of power being considered then was between the state and the people. Fear over a standing army was real.
Crime exited when the constitution was written, suggesting the framers were only concerned with interactions at the state level is to insult their intelligence. Not to mention specific text like people’s rights to a jury trial etc.
Principally concerned between the state and the people, not only. The context was the nature of England at the time. It was viewed as an oppressive force.
The right to a jury trial is another example of favoring the individual instead of say, the Star Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber
I don’t think we even disagree per se, but it’s hard to argue the constitution wasn’t written primarily with the thought of what England and how it exercised authority in mind. Individual roadmen and ruffians, let’s say, existed but weren’t existential threats to shape the tone of the new nation’s foundation, were they?
Lawlessness is a complete breakdown of state power and just as threatening to a new country as foreign powers.
The degree of importance they place on individual factors here is obviously debatable, but they just had two governments fail. England and the articles of confederation didn’t work so there was a larger emphasis on practicality over idealism.
It's not about banning, it's about taxing. Distilling liquor without paying taxes is illegal.
Their proposal is about getting lines like this ratified:
"No person, firm or corporation shall sell or deliver any three-dimensional printer in the state of New York unless such printer is equipped with blocking technology," https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S9005
They don't like firearms in the hands of the public.
The goal is to be an indirect ban that's hard to challenge. California has had significant success with strategies such as requiring "microstamping technology" (but it could be anything - it's just a limiting mechanism) in conjunction with an approved handgun roster to limit handgun sales in the state. This is almost certain to be a similar strategy.
> Distilling liquor without paying taxes is illegal.
One can always expect the "don't thread on me" country to have some of the craziest, most intrusive rules at the most random places.
This is handled without banning glass containers.
Nobody banned anything here either.
What's "blocking technology", then? I'm repeating an argument from the article, which itself is an argument older than the microprocessor:
> But the answer to misuse isn’t surveillance built into the tool itself. We don’t require table saws to scan wood for weapon shapes. We don’t require lathes to phone home before turning metal. We prosecute people who make illegal things, not people who own tools.
I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.
For example[0]:
> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.
…
> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.
0: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111
Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.
Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.
Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor
In Washington state I believe you need to serialize each firearm as well.
Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"
Mentioned in TFA
A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
You can buy jigs to complete what are called 80% receivers with a drill press (and (optionally a router) - could do it on your kitchen table in an evening for a couple hundred bucks.
Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.
https://www.makera.com/products/carvera-air?srsltid=AfmBOopy...
Desktop CNC machines are here bruh.
Not uh
I have one on my desk...
I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".
Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.
Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.
If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.
I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.
Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.
Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".
How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.
Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.
Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?
We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.
Good point, as a further example see all the "luck" countries like Ukraine have been having with even slightly modified "consumer" drone stuff applied to this kind of application
> 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.
I think it's still not a viable problem to solve.
What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?
Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.
The most insane thing about this is that it is not illegal to manufacture firearms in the United States. Providing that you do not sell or distribute the firearm, it is entirely legal to manufacture a firearm in the USA for personal use only. Laws vary state by state, of course, and it may be different in the state of New York, but assuming that this federal law has not been overridden by some state law in New York, then this proposed regulation is 100% nonsensical.
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.
You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.
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.
The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.
Eyes on the prize, friend, and don't capitulate prematurely.
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.
I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).
If you want to be really simple you can make a slam fire shotgun with two pipes and a nail, no machining skills required
I will just continue to use my non-regulated printer and open source slicer. Fortunately I have a copy of the source.
If anyone needs help printing parts for a Voron just let me know. (Not a real offer for the public, but for friends absolutely.)
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.
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!
This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.
Exactly. The zip gun people are mostly just weird nerds, and not professional assassins. The latter seems to be doing it the old fashioned way which leaves no traces - buy cheap gun, file off serials, throw it in the river after.
Zip guns may get past a metal detector, but not the standard x-ray luggage scan. To the extent it'll make it past the x-ray screeners, it's because they let all kinds of stuff through, because it's a poor way to screen for dangerous things, and they are not high-skill employees, they are relatively cheap labor.
Source: I used to travel every week flying home Friday, cycle clothes out of my travel bags, and be on the road again on Sunday night. I learned to my horror I'd been flying with a pair of scissors for at least 5 weeks - during which, TSA forced me to open a Christmas present for my sister and throw away some hand lotion which was in too big of a bottle.
There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.
Back in college I was flying home immediately after the end of the semester for a family reunion. Flew there, attended, then flew back. On the flight back, I got stopped for additional search by TSA. Immediately, I remembered that I had left my lab dissection kit in my backpack which included a razor blade and long, pointed, pick-like tool. But it turns out that neither of those are what got me stopped....I had also forgotten a half full bottle of gatorade. They were however happy to confiscate my dissection kit as well, after I had (stupidly) informed them of it.
Same thing happened to me -- had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it. They looked at their "regulations" and vice grips weren't on it so they let me through. You know who didn't let it through though - I left it in the bag and the Chinese security confiscated it on the way back.
btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
> btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.
I've done that too. You travel so aggressively, eventually you have some oopsies.
I went through a stint where I was driving for work, and working with a bunch of people in a woodsy state. A guy would take us shooting, and he asked me to buy a box of ammo to replace what I shot - so 20 bucks for 500 rounds of .22 caliber ammo.
Next time I flew was the first time I had actually been selected for TSA precheck - you know, the Trusted Traveler program and you can guess what I left in my carry-on. I was very apologetic and had to talk to a very grumpy city police officer, but it was fine. I paid a fine of $130, and that was it - they offered to let me check my bag to keep the munitions too!
It has never even come up with my 3 Global Entry interviews either. And yes - I live in a blue state.
Obviously don't do it. It wasn't a problem for me, but very much YMMV. I know someone else who got dinged for having a banana they bought in a foreign airport, and that continues to come up in their Global Entry interviews. Live ammunition < Bananas, apparently.
Traveling with ammo is not wise, but the number of people who accidentally try to fly with firearms is astronomical and penalties are usually light.
> had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it.
There must be a billion things in the "sterile" area of your average airport that would make better clubs than vise-grips.
Eh. I accidentally did that. We were on a trip to visit family and a relative took my kids to a shooting range. One of them didn’t completely empty their pockets afterward and we realized that when the TSA agent asked why we had a bullet in our carryon. My blood kinda froze, then the same agent asked if I’d like him to discard it for me. I said I’d appreciate that very much and he did so. He went on to say that, being near the headquarters of Bass Pro, that this happens all the time. I used it as a teachable moment to explain to my kids that this might be their one-time free pass and to never, ever, do that again.
3D printed guns haven't been zip guns in a long time. That reads as willful ignorance. Only the receiver or frame are controlled. Every other part can be purchased online without any checks. Hoffman Tactical's Orca and a myriad of pistol frame can be used to produce weapons on par with commercial weapons. Many commercial pistols are polymer frames. A good 3d printed pistol frame is no different than a cast nylon polymer frame.
If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/@HoffmanTactical
https://www.youtube.com/@PrintShootRepeat
3d printing ghost guns with a 100% plastic construction is a silly thing only done for clickbait, and probably comprises less than a tenth of a percent of 3d printing gun related activity. Most people are printing frames, parts, flair, accessories, mounts, things like that, and using sensible real metal parts for things involving explosive forces and danger.
Not is it only dumb, but it is plain unimplementable. Are they saying the HMI interfaces on CNC machines need to be able to parse the GCode generated by any of dozens of CAM software options out there and divine if it might be gun related? That is not possible.
> 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?
Even in countries with strict gun control, like the UK, the most serious criminals can get hold of guns. And if lesser criminals 3D printed a gun, they'd struggle to get hold of ammo for it. So they stick to knives.
Reading up on this, the remaining UK incidents seem to involve mostly "converted blank-firing copies", with the NCA describing 3D printed firearms as "low status". And as you say ammo is highly controlled here.
The only time a 3d printed gun is useful is if your country is occupied and you have a chance to secretly shoot one of the occupiers if only you could get a gun past their confiscation. Otherwise it is an interesting toy that you might shoot once to say you did it.
I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.
Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits, so at least there is a log and provenance chain someone could use in case it's used for bad stuff? Sounds like if you'd want to avoid that (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example), you could use a offline 3D printer.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
The implication with this type of argument is that if someone is willing to break the law against murder, they'd be willing/able to break the laws around legally purchasing or owning a gun.
> Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits
What are you referring to as "it" here? When OP mentioned getting a gun from "off the street", that's referring to obtaining one illegally, without a provenance chain or any permitting.
If you want to shoot a CEO, its far easier to buy an untraceable gun on the streets (or obtain a non-serialized 80% lower receiver that you drill yourself) rather than an unreliable fully 3D-printed gun.
Ah, I wasn't familiar with "off the street" meaning that, I thought they were saying "go to a store and buy a gun". Thanks!
Is it that easy to acquire even illegal firearms in the US, that you can just walk around in NYC to the shadier streets and find randoms willing to sell them to you?
I can't directly attest to that (never bought an illegal gun) but from my understanding, yes, people have no challenge obtaining illegal guns.
However, you really don't even need to do that. You could just drive across the NY border to a state with looser gun laws, buy one there, shave off the serial number, and bring it back to NY. You could also just steal a gun from one of the many Americans who already own one.
You can also legally buy an unfinished lower receiver in many states (the part of a gun that is typically serialized). Since it's technically unfinished, it doesn't require a serial number. Then you drill a few holes into it and assemble it with off the shelf, also un-serialized gun parts.
> that you can just walk around in NYC to the shadier streets and find randoms willing to sell them to you?
You know someone who knows someone.
I'm not sure if it's still this way but when I was a kid you could buy old guns at rural flea markets or antiques shops. I've never attempted to purchase an illicit firearm, but I can't imagine it's any harder than buying illegal drugs.
> (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example)
Dude literally sat in a McDonalds with all the evidence on him including the 3D printed gun. The idea of phantom murderers wielding 3D printed weapons is nothing more than a rich guy/CEO anxiety fantasy.
If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.
It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".
And not for the first time:
2025: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228
2023 (before Mangione): https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A8132
Maybe there are others.
Wait, so this is in the budget bill proposed by the supposed adults in the room, not from the usual types in the peanut gallery of the legislature?
But not CNC machines?
Looks like them too, both subtractive and additive manufacturing. Not bending sheet metal though.
The legislations includes CNC mills.
And muzzleloaders are pretty well unregulated.
invest in manual mills now, profit later.
Yeah they should also ban metal working in New York...
The stupidest thing is you can go to another state and buy a gun in Walmart, why even bother to build a plastic gun in the US?
To get it through security somewhere with metal detectors. That's probably the only reason to specifically fear a 3D-printed gun in a nation full of proper guns.
Of course, 3D printed plastic ammo isn't likely to be very effective.
(Maybe they're worried that before long, 3D printing with metal will almost as easy and affordable as plastic 3D printing is now, and people will be printing off entire arsenals of very effective firearms?)
So what are you going to do behind the metal detectors with your plastic gun and no bullets? If you want to do huge amounts of harm (and kill yourself in the process) in the US it’s pretty clear you can do that without the need of a slow plastic gun that may just explode.
Is this a real question? Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses. Printing a gun does not. Printing a gun also does not need to wait for a multi-day delay from a background check. Depending on the printer, it could just take multiple days to print.
Asking why someone would want to do this is just not trying very hard in the conversation is actually pretty myopic.
> Legally buying guns in the US come with registration of serial numbers, names, and addresses.
It is illegal for the government to make a registry of gun owners. There is an electronic check to clear you as a legal gun owner but there is no registry.
It’s only theoretically non searchable, IIRC each submitted document has to be OCRed every time a search is ran on the documents, and this is enough of a legal fig leaf to qualify it as not a registry. A sizeable GPU farm would make this basically a moot point.
Oh I agree. It is very likely that the electronic checks are recorded and could be used as a non-official registry of gun owners. I removed my comment to that effect because it is speculation. But, electronic records are so easily recorded that I have little doubt that the electronic checks are in fact an illegal registry.
can the police not use a found weapon's serial number to determine its owner? how can they do that if there's no registry with that info?
Seven states have required gun registries. It is not illegal for a state to have a registry. It is illegal for the federal government to have a gun registry with exceptions for NFA controlled arms.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057
Obviously to have an unregistered gun?
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.
Meanwhile gun crime is near record lows, but it's still a "gun violence epidemic"
Insincere actors like to lump in suicides by firearm.
No thanks. We don't need law enforcement checking weapon storage in private homes. And there's already a national background check system for most legal firearm transfers.
I didn't say it was politically feasible. I'm just saying that's how you control gun crime.
It's mostly handguns, and about half of firearm homicides are with illegally trafficked arms. They can be trafficked because there's no way to account for the guns.
All this rests on the assumption that anyone actually wants to solve gun homicide. A lot of people SAY they do, and that's how you get shit like 3D printer bans.
The real fix is to leave it alone. You're wasting political capital by pushing for gun control yet again. You'd want the Trump administration to have access to a database of gun owners like the Black Panthers? Seriously?
They can require whatever the want. Good luck stopping people from just building their own printers without such "blocking technology".
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.
just a thought from across the pond.
Should people be allowed to own basic metalworking tools, or is that something else that would be OK to be 'controlled in some way'?
Maybe we shouldn't let people write their own software either, as there's all sorts of crime they could get up to...
The idea that we should let government software run on our printers to prevent the rate case where someone both wants to print a gun and do some crime with it is absurd. There are more important 1st and 4th amendment considerations here
NYC doesn't have a gun problem. They regulate the shit out of guns to no effect. They should regress closer to the national mean and spend the resources on stuff that matters more. And even if they do want to regulate it, micromanaging everyone's 3d printers is not the way to do it both because of bad efficacy and bad precedent.
I'm glad there's an ocean between us.
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 …
It is not weird in the slightest. These things are coordinated at the state level all the time.
This is probably one of those good tests of "is your 'conspiracy theory' meter properly calibrated", because if it's going off right now and you are in disbelief, you've got it calibrated incorrectly. This is so completely routine that there's an entire branch of law codified in this way called the "Uniform Commercial Code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code and see the organization running this' home page at https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc .
And that's just a particular set of laws with an organization dedicated to harmonizing all the various states laws for their particular use cases. It's not the one and only gateway to such laws, it's just an example of a cross-state law coordination so established that it has an entire organization dedicated to it. Plenty of other stuff is coordinated at the state level across multiple states all the time.
Washington state is pursuing a similar law at a similar time. Presumably pushed by the same advocacy organization, whichever one it is. The Washington one seems impossible to actually comply with -- how the hell is the computer in a CNC machine going to figure out what geometries are gun-like? A de facto ban on additive or subtractive manufacturing is pretty dumb.
I wrote as good an opposition as I could. Basically, I opposed it on multiple principles.
From the top, I absolutely detest this kind of censorship. But the bill states that the implementation will be defined (or rendered infeasible - yeah right) AFTER the bill passes. Said decision will be punted to a "working group" of industry folks. That alone stinks, since it places a lot of abuse potential outside of duly elected representation.
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.
Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram:
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.
Not all AI assisted writing is "slop," especially if, as your screenshot shows, significant portions of the article were written by a human. Drawing attention to any and all hints of AI assisted writing is not the public service announcement you think it is.
Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.
I actually think AI-human collaboration is quite beneficial. I have a more fundamental issue that it's just bad writing when you use pure LLM generated text. My general feeling is "why should you expect me to spend my time reading something that you didn't care enough to spend your time writing?"
Also, most of the suggestions provided in the AI generated section are just useless. While I think this law is terrible, the suggestions provided completely contradict what the lawmakers are intending. I'll explain what I mean with some of the suggestions provided.
> Narrow the Scope to Intent, Not the Tool
This is essentially a suggestion to throw out the entire law as written. Sure, but this is meaningless advice to lawmakers.
> Drop Mandatory File Scanning
This is the same suggestion as before but rephrased.
> Exempt Open-Source and Offline Toolchains
This is asking them to create a massive loophole in their own law making it useless. Once again, essentially just asking them to throw out the entire law.
> Add safe harbor for sellers and educators who don’t modify equipment or participate in unlawful manufacture.
Two fundamentally different concepts here jammed into one idea. Do you want to add safe harbor for sellers who don't modify equipment or do you want to throw out the entire law and have it not apply to anybody who doesn't participate in unlawful manufacture? These are very different ideas, it makes no sense to treat them as one cohesive concept.
All of these are signals that not much thought went into this. If a human had used AI for ideas and writing assistance, but participated in the writing process as an active contributor, I think they would have caught things like this. I don't think they would have chosen to make multiple bullet points semantically identical. I think they would have chosen to actually cite specific aspects of the law and propose concrete solutions.
Another example, one of their suggestions is to improve the working groups to add specific members. Genuinely a fairly good idea. Having actually read the law, I would have cited the specific passage, which requires that the working group "SHALL INCLUDE EXPERTS IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIGITAL SECURITY, FIREARMS REGULATION, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY, AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DISCIPLINES DETERMINED BY THE DIVISION TO BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS PRESCRIBED HEREIN." I would question, who do they consider to be experts in additive manufacturing? Why does it seem that the working group will be far more heavily weighed towards policy experts as opposed to 3D printing experts? The article suggests that "standards will default to large vendors" yet there is no evidence here that vendors will be included at all.
Seems like a boon for small batch 3d printing companies.
Yet another case of lawmakers proliferating the “you should not have root access” meme. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern political landscape and a backdoor to much less well intentioned actions (intentional and unintended).
Just reject printing everything or nearly everything :)
Inform users where this censorship filter is implemented, so users can go change the source file value from 1 to 0 :)
Malicious compliance is highly appropriate for a malicious law.
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".
They also declared that a shoelace is a machine gun until they declared that it's not
https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/ctdm3/oldie_but_goody...
https://imgur.com/7N6zc
"preventing firearms printing", aka "securing big companies' income from spare parts selling with 500% margin"
> 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.
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.
This seems like a problem with your friend moreso than with 3D printing in general. Most people I know who hear about 3D printing don't immediately think of making weapons. Toys and weird gadgets tend to come to mind first, or maybe an office accessory like my laptop stands. The fact that your friend immediately jumped to the conclusion that it's for making weapons says a lot about the way they think about the world.
I agree that the law seems to validate the viewpoint, but I disagree that it's a common one, nor that you should have had to spend time building that trust.
A normal country? Like Iran that just slaughters or imprisons anybody that speaks or acts against the government. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back. Before then we would prefer to resolve our grievances peacefully in court.
Most countries aren’t Iran. Are the French unable to protest without the 2nd amendment?
Did the 2nd amendment save Mark Pretti from that exact situation happening to him?
You might want to read up on French history if you think they are not capable of bloodshed.
No, most countries are not like Iran. There are enough examples of governments deciding to slaughter unarmed people within their boarders that the majority in the US sees giving up private guns as a folly of the greatest order.
If a populace gives up their weapons they become ultimately powerless against armed aggressors. 2A first purpose is to make citizens the first line of defense against invasion. This is supposed to be in place of a standing army from a time that a town could be wiped off the map by invading forces before any military force could be dispatched.
Yes, a permanent standing army is unconstitutional (Article 1 Section 8).
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.
That's more so another example of a law that shouldn't exist.