hckrnws

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if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error

My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.

This is part of the wider problem and heavily relates to the right to repair

Cory talked about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs

> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician

At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.

That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.

Who issues Eurion-marked boarding passes?

That strikes me as extremely counterproductive given the actually sensitive part of a BP is (outside of the US) unsigned, publicly-documented barcode.

Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.

EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.

On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.

In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.

Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.

The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.

Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.

And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.

This is never going to work, or scale.

There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.

Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?

What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?

Will you ban old hardware?

What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?

These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.

As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.

> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.

Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed on the street in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less, if all those Iranians had easy access to guns, and not just the government.

Drones are not enough, you still need boots on the ground for you to claim control over a territory, and boots on the ground think twice about signing up for service if that includes facing armed mobs with guns on a daily basis.

So no, mobs with guns are not obsolete.

Mob with guns would be useless against the Iranian Guards which are pretty much elite commandos.

Goat herders with guns in Afghanistan kicked the U.S. army out of their country.

This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.

The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.

Pretty sure Iranians with 3D printed guns would not be able to kick their own army out of Iran.

But could they do the same to goat herders with bigger guns, drones, bombs, etc?

What's the commando to civilian ratio in Iran?

Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.

So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed...

It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.

Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.

Actually I tried to use it just for fun on some vouchers, but it didn't work on the copy machines I tried. They just happily photocopied the vouchers.

Tried the same, doesn't do anything on my scanner. Interestingly, there are regions of banknotes my scanner refuses to scan. But had no time to investigate further.

Is this true? Couldn't I put the mark on a page of my book and photocopiers would still detect and refuse to copy that page?

Yes, absolutely. It's a pattern of five rings, well-documented although Omron appears to keep the exact details pretty tightly held.

They don't have to be exact circles, they just have to be some dots in about the right place. In the UK, the Bank of England issued notes with Elgar on them and the EURion constellation picked out in musical notes ;-)

No idea why this comment is getting downvoted so hard. This was exactly what I thought of too, and it provides a concrete answer to the question.

There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.

Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.

We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.

Just print the code to do what ever is disallowed on a t-shirt, ala DVDCSS. Is that not a legitimate way around things like this?

Prusa is still kicking... if open source hardware is your priority.

Prusa had been moving towards proprietary licensing (if they release files at all) for a while now, due to their open source design files being used to undercut the original with cheaper clones.

3D printer hardware is pretty simple. All the magic happens in software, and there's plenty of open-source options.

Sovol open source hardware and software.

AnyCubic AMS is great

None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.

Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).

Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.

But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.

Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)

Prusa used to be king.

Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.

This _cannot_ be true

I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.

To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.

I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.

But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.

Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.

I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.

You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.

In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.

That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.

With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.

They must be able to control their printers from their phone.

The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "

Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".

Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.

But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.

Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.

I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.

But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.

IP/BigCo lawyers are probably the main lobbyists behind this article in the bill so I would think soonish

I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.

I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...

Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...

The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.

They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.

>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.

My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.

I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?

More likely the videos of FPV drones from Ukraine showing that an inexpensive quadcopter can be a very effective weapon of war.

And that radio jamming no longer neutralizes that threat.

That could be used to justify banning drones in general, or banning all drones which aren't radio controlled (not that those are being used domestically). And "it can be used for war" is a bit silly in a country where you can buy guns at the grocery store. Not to mention that cars can be very effective weapons as well, and those haven't been banned yet.

The far more likely explanation is that they just don't want people filming them. They can't legally stop someone with a cellphone from filming them, but that hasn't stopped them from using up-to-lethal force against observers. On the other hand, you can't exactly beat a flying drone into submission, so the obvious move is to observe using drones instead.

Luckily for ICE the FAA already has the mechanics in place to criminalize flying drones in certain places, so with their magic "no drones anywhere we operate" NOTAM they can now punish observers with a year of jail time.

they also don't publish the NOTAMs ahead of time. So, they're effectively allowing ICE to retroactively make flying a drone illegal if an agent takes issue with the color of your cheesburger bun.

It's my understanding that they are no longer the border people as Trump extended their reach to every square inch of the USA

To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.

[dead]

The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.

EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.

My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.

All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.

Yep. Democracy is working according to a non-minority in the country. Agree to disagree?

It is not democracy anymore. It is authoritarian regime dismantling the democracy.

67% of people didn't vote against it.

Sure. I'll bite.

The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.

They forgot.

They dont care.

They missed the registration deadline.

They're homeless, and no address.

They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.

They're in prison/jail.

The candidates suck, so you dont vote.

Can't afford to take time off work.

They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.

To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.

It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...

Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.

The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.

"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children. Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.

Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children.

Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned?

It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more.

As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'.

> Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.

So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles.

It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow".

> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

Holy crap, the dog whistles.

Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor"

Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves.

And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?

> mandate required voting

I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.

A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.

It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.

They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.

> A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.

Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.

Living in a civilized society with other people should have its social responsibilities, amongst others.

Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people.

Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes.

On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes.

Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?

There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.

An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.

The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).

Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.

The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.

If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA

Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state.

I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.

> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.

Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.

> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

In Argentina, elections are held on Sundays.

>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).

So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).

So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.

>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.

>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.

More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?

I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).

"less than 50%" being 49.8%. Kind of winning on a technicality there.

[dead]

> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.

> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.

> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.

> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for?

When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?

> When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

They are weighted - the House is allocated by population, and the Senate by state.

>Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.

>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.

Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)

>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.

> > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.

> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.

That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.

I think he actually did get more than half the votes this time.

"Staying home" is not actually a vote, as much as people want it to be in their heart of hearts.

edit: sorry, I was wrong, he did not quite clear 50% -- looked it up and he got 49.8%.

The measure that interests me os the percentage of eligible voters that picked Trump - 31.6%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...

Multiple polls have found that if everyone had voted, Trump would have won by even more. https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2...

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

The average person who doesn’t vote is a low-trust individual who is skeptical about government and institutions. Those people are Trumpier than average.

I mean you can make up all the excuses you want for losing an election but you still lost. Doesn’t make the result illegitimate

"you" lost? Did this guy you're replying to run for office? This whole my team vs your team bullshit is really one of the big problems in our country. No independent thought. Just stick with what news says. Always vote my team. Dumb. Here's a news bulletin for you, everybody lost.

Parent posted a list of excuses for why people didn’t vote. Doesn’t change an election

I think people not being able to vote because their right to vote has been taken from them, or their vote was made pointless through gerrymandering, or because of other acts of voter suppression does change elections. The ability for it to change the outcome of a race is why voter suppression happens.

People who don't bother to vote for any reason changes elections. It also makes it very hard to make claims about what the majority of Americans want, since so many didn't make their opinions known

You can't gerrymander a presidential election. How would that work? It's not district-based.

A majority of Americans either wanted Trump or didn't care enough to vote against him.

In my experience in Texas, the right-wingers have this system set up where votes that were legally cast can be denied validity by some sort of "citizens election integrity board." I had no issue voting in Travis County but when I moved to a more conservative suburban county address I ran into this. There's a multitude of ways for anti-democratic forces in the US to deny citizens their rights. And it really hardened my opinion of these sorts of people that would do that to me and others. If they say my rights aren't valid how valid are their own, certainly nothing I should respect given their treatment of myself and others. That's why I have no tolerance for the right-wing I've seen their real face.

When democracy votes for something you don’t like just call it populism

[dead]

Selling oneself into slavery is not an exercise in bodily autonomy.

Electing fascists is not an exercise in democracy.

I do not think the current government in the US is fascist, but electing fascists would indeed be an exercise in democracy. The entire point of democracy is that it's the will of the people, whether right or wrong.

This is precisely why democracy was never seen as a tenable system for millennia. Thinkers of the past always assumed that the people would be incapable of picking the most skilled leaders, and would instead end up picking the most charismatic leaders. This is precisely what Plato's endlessly cited allegory of the Ship of State [1] is about.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State

Good job no-one has elected any fascists then

I’ll just build my own 3D printer lol. Did it college 15 years ago. I’ll do it again.

"And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?"

You see how it's impossible to regulate technology? I don't want my tax dollars funding impossible missions.

> And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?

Yep, that's exactly what the fed undercover will say.

And sure, they can't catch everyone, but they don't have to. They just need to catch and visibly prosecute enough people to create a chilling effect. It's about making it harder, not making it impossible.

Whether the cost/benefit here justifies those gains is a different question.

The RIAA tried that. It did not go well for them, and piracy has never been more prevalent or easy.

Are you sure about that? All the normies use streaming services for music and movies. Techies around here tend to too. The normies don't know about and can't work torrents. They can't even work their own file system. The techies decry it as "inconvenient".

I would unironically love to see the diy 3d printer scene come back.

It never went away. The Voron continues to be a popular DIY 3D printer, tho many people choose to buy ready-made printers.

DIY used to just be “the way”. Today “the way” is Bambu. But the scene has also grown a lot, so I could see the market size of DIY staying the same or growing, even if its lost a lot of market share.

It's just the difference between having 3d printers as a hobby vs 3d printing as a hobby.

Open Source and DIY 3d printer scene is very active.

I’ve unclogged enough nozzles in my lifetime thanks

You can do that if it is still legal.

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.

I don't get it - afaik you can get every single part of a gun except for the lower receiver/pistol frame without any restriction - as those parts are legally defined as the 'gun' - the rest are just replacement parts.

Even for those, you can get 80% finished parts for those - just drill a few holes, and file off some tidbits, and you get an almost factory-spec gun.

I'm no expert on US gun law, but afaik, some states even allow you to make your own guns without registration, as the law defines gun manufacturing as manufacturing with the intent of selling them.

So there's plenty of options, many of them better than making a gun with a printer.

But even all this is typically overkill, I dont think criminals go to these lengths to make their own guns, they just get them from somewhere.

The only usable part a plastic 3D printer will make for you is the receiver, which is the whole point, to circumvent that very narrow legal classification. You're right about alternative lawmaking avenues, but given the 2a pushback on controlling "replacement parts" Americans are kind of stuck with the bed they made.

That was the case like 3 years ago. Things have advanced significantly since then.

> The only usable part a plastic 3D printer will make for you is the receiver

this hasn't been true for like 5 years now

The receiver is like the asset tag on computer servers- it's the one thing that is definitely not replaceable since it has the serial number used for entitlement.

FCUs are not tracked in US (aside from full auto trigger groups, which however are classified as "machineguns" in their own right).

Receivers are tracked.

That depends entirely on the gun. Sig "receivers" are just frames and the FCU is the controlled element. At least in the p320.

> 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?

This is a bad example. I've been notionally pro-ownership but also pro-regulation my whole life, and one of the major problems with gun legislation in the US is that it's incredibly poorly written and does not reflect the technical reality of guns.

The government allows private ownership of automatic weapons, but hasn't issued any new tax stamps for 50 years. You can convert any semiauto gun into a full-auto gun for a few cents of 3D printed parts (or a rubber band). The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.

I think yes, it is reasonable for Congresspeople to fire a gun before they legislate on it, because otherwise they are incapable of writing good laws.

Good gun regulation in the US would probably look like car insurance, where gun owners need to register and insure their weapons against the possibility of crimes being committed with them. There are so many guns compared to the amount of gun crime that it would probably not end up terribly expensive, especially if you own a gun safe.

The mistake you're making here is assuming that

> The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.

This wasn't the goal by the congresspeople, and that them having fired a gun would've changed that goal.

That was the goal. They knew they weren't going to be able to pass any kind of legislation that actually msde people safer, but they wanted to look like they were "doing something".

This is incredibly common. It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.

> It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.

I'd also add that the TSA is a good reason why we shouldn't expect talking legislators to gun ranges would make better gun laws.

The reason the TSA is what it is is because legislators fly more than most people. If you've ever been to DC you see a lot of this sort of security theater everywhere.

So much of the TSAs budget should be redirected towards what would actually make long distance travel safer, improving the ATC and Amtrak.

Thats defacto gun registration- and worse: registration with a private entity not beholden to due process. Given current realities, anybody who registers their firearm in such a manner can expect a no-knock raid because they were nearby when somebody phoned in an engine backfire as a gunshot.

So make it allowed that the insurance is tied to the gun. You buy a lifetime policy for that serial number, provide payment, and you're done. Payment can be provided anonymously at a window in cash, if that's your thing.

If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.

ATF is not allowed to digitize any of its records around gun sales or transfer of ownership.

That's not true. They have millions of digitized 4473s. They are banned by law from creating a searchable registry of gun owners but they digitize paperwork on a daily basis.

https://medium.com/statute-circuit/the-atfs-quiet-digital-tr...

You can get a stamp for full auto easily, my neighbor is an FFL and gets them frequently

You can transfer them. You can't register a new one. This is why H&K transferable sears are like $50k.

> Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?

It would be nice if they delegated to experts, instead of think tanks or populism, when it came to dealing with these. Both are examples of rampant regulatory failure.

Knowing the difference between a think tank and experts might be hard without some rudimentary knowledge to spot nonsense? I don't know, actually asking. It seems to me that the primary skill we need in our leaders is that of spotting experts talking within their field and actually listen to them while ignoring others. The primary trait, which is even more important, is character so that they act on what they here in our best interests instead of their own.

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.

Wikipedia has much better information about guns than most of the people talking about them in politics, generally speaking.

It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/a4gnr3/makes_perf...

(Sorry for the reddit link, it's a common image but that was the first url I found from a quick search that had it up front and center).

ATF rulemaking can be unintuitive and arbitrary but there really is a level below it occupied by people who have dedicated a significant chunk of their lives to trying to restrict firearm ownership, who genuinely seem to believe that Die Hard, Rambo, and Spaghetti Westerns are real life. Politicians who can't answer basic questions about their legislation, who have to be told live on air that magazines can be repacked, that just make up impossible crime statistics. Yeah it's stupid that the ATF has decided that vertical grips are a rifle feature but angled grips aren't, but it gets worse.

A bit like Joe Biden complaining that a 9mm bullet will blow the lung out of a body, and crazier things from others, yeah.

What's the difference between a "pistol brace" and a "stock"? Don't they both go into your shoulder to stabilise the weapon?

In this specific discussion familiarity does seem relevant. I don't think shooting is so relevant, but printing and assembling are.

You don't have to be a life-long user to regulate heroin, but if you start legislating second-hand heroin smoke, people might look at you sideways. You kinda need to know a little even if you've never actually ever seen heroin. If you demonstrate severe ignorance, people are going to call you on it.

Having a clue about how guns work, or the general reality of any other field one may be attempting to legislate, is absolutely crucial. With guns it just happens that actually firing them is a good way to gain (some of) that understanding.

litmus test wise, regulators of 3d printing should be able to create strong parts with a variety of 3d printing mechanisms.

they should at least be able to understand that a 3d printer is akin to a turing machine and what the real limits are - strength of the printed material vs length of the strip of memory.

Well didn't they? From the Epstein files, it looks like "all" the elite is involved....

It’s more like people who barely use computers regulating software features and development.. oh wait

I don’t own a gun, and think guns should be regulated more and better, but the heroin let alone another one are just flawed. There are no legitimate, non-life-ruining use cases for either of those analogies.

In the 1980s, my dad machined a lot of replacement parts for a gunsmith, right here in the UK. All legal, all perfectly legit. I will say it took a hell of a lot more skill than just "download file from thingiverse, press print" - but there's nothing stopping you doing it.

And no-one is (yet) suggesting banning lathes, hacksaws, or files.

It’s becoming a thing, police don’t like to report on it because they don’t want to give people ideas. They didn’t want to report on Glock switches either. I do machining as a hobby and am interested in machining guns from an academic challenge perspective, I’ve not done it because I focus on making things I can’t buy. Guns from an academic perspective are fascinating, we’ve been making them for a long time in just about every possible way, and there is an easy way to measure and communicate quality, I.e. does it shoot and how accurate is it. I think the ban is absurd, the tech to make 3D printers / CNCs is pretty generic and someone sufficiently motivated to make a gun is unlikely to have difficulty putting together the machines to do it.

Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty#Firearms_design

> one particular design, outlined in his book Expedient Homemade Firearms, is the best known. This design makes extensive use of easily procured materials such as folded sheet metal, bar stock, washers, and hex screws. It is a simple blowback-operated sub-machine gun and entirely made from craft-produced components, including the magazine and pistol grip. The major drawback of such designs is the lack of rifling in the barrel, which results in poor accuracy and limited range

This book was openly sold on Amazon 10 years ago. I still have one on my shelf.

See it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YE9J7qcj0c

Wasn't the whole point of the Sten gun that it could be made out of readily-available materials (steel plumbing pipe mostly) with simple hand tools, and really only needed two of the 50 or so components to be machined?

So, unless your garage is down to a pair of rusty pliers and a dried-out Biro then you're probably still up there.

Do potato cannons count?

The could if lawmakers wanted them to. Here in Sweden potato guns are actually illegal if the potato achieves 10+ joule.

I had friends who would scour the produce isle to find potatoes they could cut down to fit their potato gun with a rifled barrel.

This law in new york will also affect CNC machines and laser cutter AFAIK. Everything that is computer controlled that can "create" a 3d object.

Or a file. You can make a perfectly good gun with a damned file.

Or as we learned on Star Trek, some rope, bamboo, charcoal, rocks, sulfur and Gorn dung will make a one time weapon.

Or fire and a hammer

Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York

Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.

> Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns.

They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877

And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

The premise here would have to be that it was previously difficult for the majority of the population to obtain a weapon.

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"

> doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.

Well yeah, it's not exactly easy to get everyone to understand that insurance isn't magic and money out has to match money in.

According to this source, united healthcare profits were $14B in 2024. https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/unitedhealth-unh-2024-re...

So yeah, money out not matching money in is exactly the problem.

So a bit under 5% per the rest of the numbers in that link.

About half of those profits were from the Optum side of the business, not from insurance.

Money out had better not match money in or the insurance company will be in a lot of trouble.

Imagine if we removed the need for insurance to turn a profit.

Imagine if we removed the need for life to turn a caloric profit.

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.

Are you claiming that the most likely proximal cause for his murder was the legal ability to print a gun rather than any concerns or grievances the shooter may have had related to the healthcare industry or United Healthcare specifically?

Yes, I think access to firearms affects the murder rate.

That wasn't the topic though. Are you saying the United Health CEO's murder was motivated primarily by access to printing guns on a 3d printer?

Given the potential chain of custody issues, I'm not sure we can be certain a 3D printed gun was involved at all.

The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.

You can acquire guns, gun parts, and ammunition quite easily in the UK, and entirely legally.

You need to hold a suitable licence, which isn't expensive and is mostly an exercise in proving to the police that you're not a violent psychopath who's likely to run up to people in cars and shoot them in the face.

I haven't printed a full firearm but I've printed some replacement/ergonomic parts for my legally purchased firearms. And there are people printing guns - you don't hear about it because they keep their mouth shut about it.

In countries that ban guns, 3D printers don't help much because you still can't get the other parts that aren't printed and you can't get bullets. 3D printed guns are only really viable in places where guns are already common.

> because you still can't get the other parts that aren't printed

Every part except the firing pin is now printable (you can print quite strong carbon-fiber reinforced parts at home). The firing pin can be made from a nail or similar piece of metal.

> You can't get bullets

Bullets are mostly easy enough to make. One of my neighbors growing up was a competitive shooter who competed nationally and internationally. He manufactured his own ammo in his home shop, using tools any boomer dad had access to, like a lathe, presses and very accurate scales. He didn't really pay any more for ammo than we did per round. The only reason criminals don't do it is because buying factory ammo on the gray and black market is so easy.

The most difficult part to make would probably be the primers, but that still isn't difficult for any chemist.

Here's a (old) video of someone in Europe making their own ammo at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Cx4idIIe0

In my country, Guns and Bullets are heavily controlled(Even airsoft is banned here). You can not get explosive unless you prove you have legit use for it(usually for mining). And of course DIY gun or bullet is no-no and you will be jailed.

Even in police force or army, they literally count every single bullet, and for every fired bullet, it must be explained in detail.

Maybe that's why we have low gun-related crime here.

> You can not get explosive unless you prove you have legit use for it(usually for mining).

Gunpowder is fairly simple to make.

> Maybe that's why we have low gun-related crime here.

Mexico has extremely restrictive gun laws and that is not the case there. It seems to have more to do with how much crime you have than whether someone who could be charged with homicide could redundantly be charged with having a firearm.

> who this is coming from and why

I would suspect it is at least partly because the gun that killed the United Healthcare CEO was partly 3D printed.

In other words, the most famous murder/assassination in NY in modern memory.

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...

I've been saying the same about deepfake noods of hot girls.

Something something about distribution.

Does the UK ban shows like Forged in Fire that teach you how to make all sorts of specific blades?

No, and the blades created because of the methods used, would likely not be covered by the legislation anyway, theres a carve out for antiques and weapons made using traditional methods (now define traditional methods, because the law doesn't, but hammer and anvil would seem to be the most obvious traditional approach).

However, in practice the police continually take and often destroy legally owned antiques claiming they are zombie swords.

The law is written in such a way the police can take anything and you have to prove to a judge they aren't illegal.

One very large example of such police practices: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RPm4Pts23Qg

Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?

Preemptive regulation is absurd.

Quite famously, Luigi Mangione. (allegedly)

Of course, this is silliness since it is very easy to just buy a gun in the US, and it is also legal to make one in your garage.

is it because guns are easy to get without printing?

Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).

not a gunsmith, but cast iron manages to be both soft and brittle at the same time. and the barrel and bearing parts would have to be machined anyways. you have to try to harden it too. its probably easier to just machine the whole thing out of decent quality steel. just guessing.

really? they didn't have machining in the 1700s. how about a good'ol musket? or a bit more modern: a gatling gun. I always thought those were made under coarse conditions. I mean, people just need something that makes a spark against gun powder,goes boom and shoots really fast projectiles. If a shotgun is possible, then an automatic shotgun doesn't feel like it's a stretch. I would think the firing mechanisms might not be tolerant of amateur techniques, but the reloading and trigger parts at least might be. I'm also not a gunsmith, no idea what I'm talking about for the record.

They certainly didn't have mills as we know them in the 1700s, but lathes, drills, and subtractive manufacturing had been in practice for millenia. You could say they were "machined by hand". Most early firearms (barring large-bore guns like cannons) were made from forged steel or iron, which is significantly stronger than cast iron due to its lower carbon content and regular grain structure. These forged parts were then worked on by gunspiths with cutters and abrasives to produce parts in tolerance for their mechanism. Cast iron (or more typically in early warfare, bronze) was suitable for cannons and large-bore guns due to the mass of the finished gun; more metal meant that the gun could withstand more shock, but even then they could fail catastrophically due to material fatigue or failure.

Well, the kind of guns politicians are afraid people will make at home are not intended for durability. But things like street crime, school shootings,etc.. where it's just a one and done affair.

Complex manufacturing of improvised firearms has been practically made obsolete by the commodification of both steel tubing and cartridges. "Pipe guns" are incredibly easy to make, and require little more than a pipe, a cap, and a drill (which can sometimes be omitted as well). Many common cartridge diameters very closely or exactly match commercially available pipe diameters, and the hardware to make a single-shot firearm is ubiquitous in any store that sells plumbing supplies. Pipe guns are simple and cheap enough to make that some people abuse gun buy-back programs by deliberately manufacturing pipe guns for pennies and pocketing the money these programs offer [0]. These are real, functional guns, and I promise they're simpler, faster, and cheaper to manufacture than any 3d printed gun.

0: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/11/17/handing-zip-g...

they also didn't have 3d printers in the 1700s, so I figure the 3d printer doesn't add much if it requires all of these post-processing steps like molding, casting, and finishing

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…

Lower receiver being the serialized part isn’t universal. Many firearms have only a single receiver or only the upper receiver is serialized.

> Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!

People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.

Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.

If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.

We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.

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.

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.

How many crimes related to “foot claws”, “death stars” and “blow darts” were there before they were banned? The UK Offensive Weapons Act is a joke of a law that makes us look like morons afraid of cartoon turtles and farming tools.

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)

Yeah, its almost as if the knives aren't the problem. The gang memebrs will use whatever gives them an advantage, guns, knives, acid, bats, bricks. We can't ban everything, we should possibly tackle the cause instead of the symptom...

But don't worry, in the mean time they're coming for our regular knives.

The BBC has already rolled out Idris Ebla to explain that kitchen knives shouldnt have points[0]. Yes this has been picked up by politicians with the minister for policing at the time calling it an interesting idea [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j...

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/...

Sorry about the amp links

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

Maybe if the law required all knives to be pink they might be too embarrassed to murder someone. One problem then is the switch to acid attacks which are just clear liquids in containers.

It reminds me of a certain meme gun along these lines.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/comments/b4d9gy/unicorn_rifle...

(Yes, it is a real gun and it shoots real 9mm bullets.)

You could require that all acids are also dyed pink

The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.

> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.

The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

you can buy every individual component and build it yourself, it's absurd (I did some years ago)

maybe amazon/aliexpress is also too powerful for you own good then ;p

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".

As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.

To mandate tracking dots they would first have to admit they exist.

When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.

Blackmail an Executive? That's a complete overkill.

It's so much easier just to "recruit" the direct manager of the firmware engineering team. Convince them it's their patriotic duty to add "tracking dots" to the design requirements without drawing attention to where the requirement came from.

The engineers implementing it will assume the requirement came from somewhere above, or another engineering team. And if the executives ever notice, they will assume it came from somewhere below. Both will probably assume the legal department was responsible, and that there is some kind of law somewhere requiring them to implement that functionality.

The most unrealistic part here is that you're assuming they can even find their desired firmware manager on the org chart.

Moreover, most executives don't require blackmail; they tend to go along to get along.

I hear sentiment like this occasionally and I genuinely wonder if this is conspiracy theory stuff or if this sort of thing actually happened in the past.

I'm aware of the programs Snowden revealed, Tempora / XKeyscore / Longhaul / the like, plus I've heard J. Edgar Hoover did bad things and lots of CIA meddling internationally was bad. Still, these seem qualitatively different to the explicit blackmail you're referring to.

Do you (or someone else reading this) know of historical examples that demonstrate a pattern of this sort of thing? You can interpret "this sort of thing" as you wish.

That's a lot to ask for on the spot, so if not, I would be interested in what generally makes you approach the situation from this cynical angle, especially given that it's the FBI. In my experience, which is fairly limited but is as a US citizen, most of the time the US government mostly follows the law and doesn't do this sort of thing to citizens.

One of the more notable examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

>buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers *sold or delivered in New York* to include “blocking technology”.

I.e don't buy your printer in New York. Pick it up out of state. Problem solved.

Yes, this is rent seeking, and yes New York is gonna New York, but not a big deal.

I would suspect flashing your firmware to the globally standard one would become commonplace if printers sold in NY came with a nerfed version.

On principle, yes, but also for maintenance. The nerfed firmware that's only required in a few jurisdictions is almost assuredly going to fall out-of-sync with mainline features.

"The rule saying you can't print the thing that you either weren't going to print, or you weren't going to let the rule tell you not to print, wants you to run old/broken software." No matter which side of that you fall on, you're upgrading the software.

I doubt any meaningful detection would be worth implementing just for New York, so you’ll get a cut down firmware that supports 5 hard coded models. You’ll need to flash your own firmware to print anything else.

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"

I could see why "people are making guns" would be at the top of the list of politicians' worries in places where there are almost no guns, and people want to keep it that way. But in the US?

Indeed. Don't want people making guns? Ban the making of guns. Banning the production of guns using a 3D printer makes zero sense, should ban CNC machines too then.

The gun industry does not earn anything from 3D-printed guns, so those kinds of guns are "free game" for the law makers.

Exactly. In the US you don't even need a license if you want to manufacture a gun for yourself. The idea of it being made illegal is far from reality.

Even then it makes little sense... 3d printers are just tools. They can be used to print dangerous items, or parts of dangerous items in the same way a saw or hammer could be used to make something dangerous. To some degree this is just a problem with human nature – some people are going to want to harm people and will create or acquire items which do that.

Perhaps if it was literally as simple as downloading a model and pressing print, then in 20 minutes you had a fully working automatic rifle this would be an issue, but that technology simply doesn't exist today.

In reality if your goal is to acquire a weapon which can do lethal harm to someone you just wouldn't print a gun. Even if you wanted to kill multiple people in a place like the UK where guns are illegal you still wouldn't print a gun because you'd probably be better off just getting knife than printing a crappy gun and trying to source an effective propellant, etc.

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.

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

So it's okay to 3D print a gun as long as you have a serial number? That seems to reinforce that 3D printing shouldn't be banned, especially by blanket technical means.

That is the essence of the weird gun laws. Take a Glock pistol as an example. The only part that has a serial number and is legally “the gun” is the thing you hold in your hand: the frame. It’s plastic and has the trigger and some parts to hold the magazine.

The rest of the stuff? You can buy and overnight ship it to yourself legally with almost no regulation (as of 2026 CA requires more gun-like treatment for those parts).

NY and CA have the most strict gun regulations

NJ and CA. You can't make guns at all in NJ, and you need a firearm permit to buy an airgun or bb gun.

theres a procedural problem with this, and its apparently why the feds dont require serial number on a PMF until FFL transfer is about to occur

when should you be required to serialize it?

if you serialize after it is worked to the point of being a firearm, then there is a period in time, however short, when the firearm is unserialized, thus illegal, thus serializing after creation could be obscuring a crime.

vs serializing before firearmhood, and you are now requireing a "hunk of metal" to be serialized because of what it MAY become in the future.

and just when does a hunk of metal start becoming a firearm, the so called 80% threshold

Not really. You can just register prior. If hunk of metal doesn't become a gun do nothing.

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...

The author may just be showing their age a bit. That's what Ctrl+Alt+Del does on modern versions of Windows, but from Windows 95 to Windows XP (inclusive) it directly launched the Task Manager.

Ctrl+Alt+Del on an IBM PC or a compatible clone reboots the machine no questions asked. There's a dedicated reset button in case that fails.

Doing anything other than a reboot started with protected mode MS-Windows 3.1 IIRC (then marketed as "386 enhanced mode").

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?

Meta+L is the lock hotkey on all major operating systems!

???

Cmd+L is "go-to location bar" on Mac. Opt+L is ¬. Ctrl+L doesn't seem to do anything.

"Lock screen" is Cmd+Shift+Q.

Reminds me of people who think penultimate is just super-duper-ultimate.

Or “epicenter”.

All prefixes eventually become intensifiers?

"Irregardless"

The grammatically correct version is "Irredisregardless".

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.

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.

On Windows XP this depended on whether you had joined a domain. On joined systems you got the security screen (same as previous Windows NT/2000), on other systems the task manager (same as Windows 9x).

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"

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...

Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.

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?

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.

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.

Mate, the government is responding to a concern _from the populace_. Your "simple people" are begging lawmakers to restrict access to dangerous technologies in this case.

Don't conflate "populace" with "lobbying groups". The populace wants health care and this ain't it.

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Well, the NY populace voted for an openly communist guy. So, yeah, I think that in this particular case, the majority of population might indeed be at fault of specifically wanting idiotic measures like this one - and other that will surely follow.

Who, Mamdani? He's a democratic socialist, not a communist.

It's like you just confused RAM with SSD because they both involve gigabytes.

"If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.", Mamdani, 2020

"We have to ensure we are unapologetic about our socialism", Mamdani, 2021

"There are also other issues we firmly believe in [...] weather is the end goal of seizing the means of production", Mamdani, 2021

"We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.", Mamdani, 2026

It's funny. You people go up in arms calling Elon Musk a fascist because he made a suspicious gesture with his right hand. But, then you have a guy outright telling you he wants to "seize the means of production" and you make excuses on why he is not actually a communist.

None of what you said challenges the parent, you do realize that don't you? I feel like this only makes sense if you don't know what communism or socialism are.

EDIT: Nevermind I just read the part about the nazi salute lmao, lol even.

Do you have any evidence that any significant number of Americans want this restriction on 3D printers?

I think a lot of people don’t realize that in the US we have the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm. There are still requirements like it must be for personal use, cannot be transferred, must have a serial number, etc.

None of what you said is true.

> the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm

There has been a right to manufacture firearms since before the Revolutionary War, and which has remained a right continually since.

> it must be for personal use

Not necessarily; though you can't conduct business without a federal license, you can, for example, manufacture a firearm to be given as a gift.

> cannot be transferred

See above.

>must have a serial number

Not only is that not true, a federal judge struck down the prohibition on defacing serial numbers in United States v. Randy Price (2022):

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvsd.23...

This is an easy one:

bool isRestricted(uint8_t* /* data */) { return true; } // Might catch a few false positives

and

popup("This is a restricted model. If you are not in the state of New York, please flash the international firmware ([link]) to print restricted parts.");

It can also handle STL, step and all kinds of other formats.

People regularly circumvent "blocking technology" (i.e. DRM) because they want to watch a TV show on a plane with no wi-fi, or because they want to save $20 on a cartridge of printer ink. If someone wants to kill another human being and evade detection, I'm sure they'll find a way to print their part.

I built an 8'x4' CNC router table in 2004. I bought rack and pinion, steppers, drives, aluminum extrusion, and I had it built in one week. What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set? They would make it illegal to make 3D printers or CNC machinery without a license, and if you are caught it is tantamount to making guns.

It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.

Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.

> What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set?

That it's easier with this skillset to build guns and sell them to criminals when the penalty is the same.

> 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.

How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?

It depends how you define the problem. Certainly a human can look at a part and say "that's a lower reciever" but you probably can make something that functions as a firearm exclusively from inconspicuous parts. For the more limited case, an AI can definitely be trained, the broader case is likely unsolvable.

Btw, AFAIK they also want to lock down the slicer.

How the hell can you do that.

GCODE is mostly about pure maths and geometry (well, there's other stuff but in principle). They would forbid math? "Euclid is illegal."

If I remember correctly, they want the gcode to be watermarked. Or signed?

Maybe gcode watermarked and slicer signed? I can't remember. Something silly, that is for sure.

It’s not nearly that hard of a problem. There are n gun files on internet, so validate the hash of those n files (g code whatever). These people aren’t cadding their own designs.

One big part of this is that gcode isnt really a 3d model its a set of instructions on how to move the printhead around. You don't download the gcode directly, because that varies by printer. You download a model, and then a slicing program turns that into a set of printer-specific gcode. Any subtle settings changes would change the hash of this gcode.

And the printer doesn't really know what the model is. It would have to reverse the gcode instructions back into a model somehow. The printer isn't really the place to detect and prevent this sort of thing imo. Especially with how cheap some 3d printers are getting, they often don't really have much compute power in them. They just move things around as instructed by the g-code. If the g-code is malformed it can even break the printer in some instances, or at least really screw up your print.

There are even scripts that modify the gcode to do weird things the printer really isn't designed for, like print something and then have the printer move in such a way to crash into and push the printed object off the plate, and then start over and print another print. The printer will just follow these instructions blindly.

Given that quite simple G-code, say a pair of nested circles with code for tool changes/accessory activation, can make two wildly different parts depending on which machine it is run on:

- a washer if run on a small machine in metric w/ flood coolant

- a lamp base if run on a larger router in Imperial w/ a tool changer

and that deriving what will be made by a given G-code file in 3D is a problem which the industry hasn't solved in decades, the solution of which would be worthy of a Turing Award _and_ a Fields Medal, I don't see this happening.

A further question, just attempting it will require collecting a set of 3D models for making firearms --- who will persuade every firearms manufacturer to submit said parts, where/how will they be stored, and how will they be secured so that they are not used/available as a resource for making firearms?

A more reasonable bit of legislation would be that persons legally barred from owning firearms are barred from owning 3D printers and CNC equipment unless there is a mechanism to submit parts to their parole officer for approval before manufacturing, since that's the only class of folks which the 2nd Amendment doesn't apply to, and a reasonable argument is:

1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == The Right to 3D Print and Bear Arms

Guns can be made out of simple geometric shapes like tubes, blocks, and simple machines like levers and springs. There is mathematically no way to distinguish a gun part from a part used in home plumbing - in fact you can go to the plumbing section of your local hardware store and buy everything you need to build a fully functional shotgun.

The g-code is not being distributed, because it's specific to each printer, filament, etc. G-code is not the same thing as a STP or STL file.

Seems trivial to create an infinite number of inconsequentially (but hash defeating) different variants.

In 3D modeling, there are parametric files where the end user is expected to modify the input parameters to fit their needs. So for example, if you have multiple parts that need to fit together, you may need to adjust the tolerances for that fit, because the physical shape will vary depending on your printer settings and material.

Making tiny modifications isn't just a method of circumvention, it's like part of the main workflow of using a 3d model.

New York are going to be very angry when they discover that pipes and hammers exist.

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.

Since when peroxiacetone requires NAOH?

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.

The problem is, nobody is willing to use 2nd amendment rights to defend other amendments.

Right, so they can't use the blocked print as cause to get other evidence. Or if they do it is excluded.

It's not illegal to make your own firearm, you just can't sell it.

The actual wording of the law, and the way it was interpreted when I was young was that a person who does not hold an FFL may not make a firearm with the intention of selling it, but after making it, they could change their mind and then sell it.

Since, the BATF decided to interpret the prohibition as a thought-crime, enforcing a prohibition making such sales illegal, since like The Shadow, they know what lurks in the hearts of men.

The one transfer which has not yet been tested in the courts to my knowledge is an individual having made firearms, passing away, then leaving them in their will to their heirs....

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.

[flagged]

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 wasn't standing next to 25 other liberals who had armed themselves.

Ah, got it, 25 is the magic number that makes you bulletproof.

[flagged]

> drawing on a federal officer

It is my understanding [0] that multiple videos show that Petti did not draw his gun.

Do you know of evidence to the contrary?

[0] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/did-pretti-draw-wea...

> He attempted to be a hero by drawing on a federal officer.

Absolutely vile smear against a hard working VA nurse and stand up citizen.

There were zero attempts made by Alex Pretti to draw a weapon. He was being a hero by helping 2 women move away from the masked officers forcefully pushing them.

I actually appreciate it when fascists lie so brazenly - it makes it easier to ignore their nonsense, and also starkly demonstrates how little respect they have for truth.

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence.

There is video evidence and many eyewitnesses that he did no such thing. If you need to lie to justify fascism, maybe you shouldn't be supporting fascism.

He possessed a weapon on his person in a state where that in completely legal, in a country whose constitution explicitly says he's allowed to own that weapon. There was not a single reason for him to be executed by federal agents.

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.

At the moment, the most dangerous people with guns in US are the ones working for the federal government.

> Get grass roots support for it.

This must be satire. This will never, ever happen in the US. Guns are a religion here.

> Get grass roots support for it.

You know that line from the Mandalorian, "Weapons are part of my religion"?

That is true in the most literal possible sense for a large portion of Americans. And not all of them right-wing, either- if anything, the past 5 years have convinced many of my left-wing friends to get concealed weapons training and being carrying pistols.

"anyone who opposes the government must be stopped"

are you sure?

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

https://ammo.com/research/list-of-banned-guns-and-ammo-by-st...

Sawed off shotguns seems arbitrary and that was ultimately my (pre-coffee) point; government is fine with coming up with an arbitrary restriction when they want.

They could outlaw the means of production. Gen pop is not allowed to own that.

There is, in fact, a good question wrt how much of NFA is actually constitutional. A funny thing about this is that ATF has dropped cases on several occasions where the defendant tried this angle, presumably because they didn't want something contrary to their current regulations as written to be overturned in court, and because they had plenty of other charges to throw at those guys anyway.

Given that it was modeled on gun control legislation from pre-WWII Germany, it's _not_ something which they want looked at too closely.

When and where can I buy a cannon with grapeshot? They had that during the revolutionary war, and the founding fathers probably owned at least one, so I want to be able to yell "Tally Ho!" too.

Here, among other vendors:

https://southbendreplicas.com/

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."

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Cannons were regularly privately owned at the time

For sake of argument I’ll agree, but again by explicitly using arms here they where excluding them from constitutional protection not banning them.

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.

What makes you believe that grenades are banned in US? They are heavily taxed, yes - $200 per grenade - but they aren't banned on the federal level, and there are people who legally own such things.

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.

Yes, this comes up, but the Court tends to say things that didn’t exist are covered by constitutional rights. I can’t imagine think of any time they asked “could the founders have imagined this?” Television, radio, and the internet are all protected by freedom of the press without anybody ever showing that the founders could have imagined them.

From Heller v. DC:

“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

A few years after that ruling, the Massachusetts state supreme court upheld a conviction for a woman who had carried a taser for self defense. The Supreme Court accepted her challenge, allowed it to go forward without paying court costs, and unanimously overturned that ruling without asking for oral arguments ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/577/411/ ):

“The court offered three explanations to support its holding that the Second Amendment does not extend to stun guns. First, the court explained that stun guns are not protected because they ‘were not in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment.’ This is inconsistent with Heller’s clear statement that the Second Amendment ‘extends . . . to . . . arms . . . that were not in existence at the time of the founding.’

“The court next asked whether stun guns are ‘dangerous per se at common law and unusual,’ in an attempt to apply one ‘important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms.’ ... In so doing, the court concluded that stun guns are ‘unusual’ because they are ‘a thoroughly modern invention.’ By equating ‘unusual’ with ‘in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment,’ the court’s second explanation is the same as the first; it is inconsistent with Heller for the same reason.

“Finally, the court used ‘a contemporary lens’ and found ‘nothing in the record to suggest that [stun guns] are readily adaptable to use in the military.’ But Heller rejected the proposition ‘that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected.’

“For these three reasons, the explanation the Massachusetts court offered for upholding the law contradicts this Court’s precedent.”

The fact that Caetano was a unanimous and thorough ruling says a lot to me. Perhaps you’re holding out hope that Heller will be overturned soon, but the chances for that are very slim ( https://youtu.be/nFTRwD85AQ4 ).

The Girardoni is certainly and unusual example but is deadly. However more importantly it is far from the first repeating firearm. There is the Kalthoff and Cookson repeating rifles as the most prominent examples. And both Jefferson and Washington personally got offered to purchase repeating firearms per their own journals, im im sure they weren't the only founders to receive such offers for both personal and military usage.

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.

So what's next? People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks? Who's liable in this case?

> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?

The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.

It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.

There is close to zero chance the current Supreme Court would find a law that criminalizes possession of a file describing the making a gun to be constitutional.

That depends if the defendant votes Republican or Democrat, unfortunately.

I wonder if you can sell the printer shell without the main PCB and just open source the main board design. Manufacture and sale of that board as a distinct entity seems tough to stop. Especially because the board can have non-3D printer use cases which it advertises as the main ones.

Also, if I wanted to print a gun, there are thousands upon thousands of older Creality and Prusa printers that I could buy used. My CR-10 isn't connected to the internet, it's running a FOSS Marlin release.

It will be very strange and funny if there is a registry of 3D printers before there's a registry of guns, and for that matter, it will be very funny if it becomes easier to buy a gun than a 3D printer, with the reasoning being that 3D printers can print guns.

There would be a presumption of intent. Probably an "aggravated" add-on to whatever charges you might be facing.

I highly doubt we would send goon squads door to door to check your firmware. Then again, given today's situation in MN, I wouldn't rule it out either.

We need blocking technology on CNC lathes and mills too!

How's this supposed to work for all the printers running tiny AVRs?

This is a frustrating replay of the DRM (digital rights management) / copy protection debate from about 20 years ago. That time, it was about restricting fully general-purpose computers and storage devices from copying or displaying certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping media piracy. The pro-restriction side spent enormous amounts of money, engineering talent, and legal firepower, yet hackers have defeated every copy-protection system ever devised.

This time, it's about restricting fully general-purpose 3D printers (and perhaps CNC machines) from following instructions according to certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping the manufacture of firearms. I have a feeling it's going to play out in the same way, leading to an long and expensive intellectual war that accomplishes nothing.

Fighting a war against general-purpose tools is as futile as making water not wet. When will legislators learn this and give up?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

This is ridiculous. As WIRED has shown [0], the only 3D printed part of most "3D printed" guns is the frame. You can do only so much with the frame alone. All the other parts are sourced online and much easier to get, other than getting a 3D printer and finding the frame of the gun you want to print it for.

Maybe these advocating for gun control laws for 3D printers should first advocate for stricter control on selling spare repair parts for guns and the websites selling them with no sort of background check.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/luigi-mangione-ghost-gun-built-t...

It'll also just drive people to refactor designs into parts that pass individually.

This is another example of either stupid or malicious politicians thinking that it is possible to implement mandatory scanning on devices owned and operated by people and somehow get a meaningful true match rate without false positives. Of course this is not possible! But the negative consequences are immense.

It is exactly the same kind of stupid thinking driving ideas such as Chat Control in the EU. In the end, no child will be safer, but we will end up having a world where no-one has the right to control what software can run on their own hardware devices and where no-one has legal access to end-to-end encrypted communication.

We look the other way for so many actual gun tradgedies. "What more can we do?"

But when it comes to a theoretical problem we must take action even if it takes freedoms and opportunities away from normal people.

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

make sure to collect a bunch of stl, gcode, etc files that you have questions about and email them to the NY and WA legislators seeking clarification. if it’s possession and not intent, maybe they need have skin in the game to understand.

Legislators will never be prosecuted for receiving an illegal file by email

I wonder if this could fall under the 1st amendement. In any case it is stupid, won't work and has nothing to do in a budget bill. Someone's getting paid

New York should introduce a technology that can detect politicians and law makers who are not the sharpest tool in the shed, and let them go

That exists, it's a functioning education system and electorate aware of current events, past history and able to reason logically and impartially, and a viable fourth estate.

The problem is, as Rousseau warned us, elections only function for so long as the voters are able to see and identify efforts to bribe them with their own money (paraphrased).

Over here in Europe, it's pretty laborious to get a firearm legally and yet 3D prints for that are not discussed at all.

It's surprising to see discussions and bills like these, when there is the second amendment in place. What is fueling this discussion?

What do you mean? The police shut down 3d gun factories every now and then, and here's a EP briefing about it https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7758...

That seems like the way to go about it. Address when people are _selling_ guns. The fact that they were printed and not imported from Yugoslavia in 1990 doesn't really matter. Trying to stop people with 3D printers (Or metal tubes) from creating guns seems almost impossible.

? Inherit gun Request the form Fill in the form Background check Visit from plod All good Export form Customs were a pain, but carnet protected Import form Store gun at plods Fill in form Visit from plod Secure gun ok

Two different EU countries Time taken is the most 'labourious' part And grandad's funeral

I'm very confused by this. 3D printers seem to have become a critical part of many european manufacturing workflows. Is this not the case in the usa? If -say- Province Noord-Brabant were to adopt a similar law, the western IT industry would crash.

just sell almost-3d-printers.

All it is missing is a screw with a serial number on it.

"This printer is for collecting and research purposes only. Note that certain 3D-printed objects are forbidden by the law. If you notice any of these objects growing inside your 3D printer, power it off IMMEDIATELY"

We’re soon gonna realize that we will need manual kill switches for all tech in case it goes rogue or allows an AI installed somewhere else to go rogue.

only if by "soon" you mean "decades away" at minimum

Also, manufacturers that make 3d printers simply wont sell in NY. They’ve solved nothing with this.

The USA has these type of rules. Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).

I always think it's strategy to block Chinese manufacturers with super difficult to implement technology being a hard requirement.

Specially the selling face-to-face requirement here.

> Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).

The US regulations on Automatic Emergency Braking systems requirements for new cars are actually several years behind many other markets like the EU and Japan.

This isn’t really an American thing and it’s not for blocking Chinese manufacturers. Chinese automakers can make AEBs too.

The irony is it’s really easy and cheap to get a type 7 ffl, basically a background check and $150. Legally manufacture and sell all the guns you want. The reality is no one would buy your 3d printed junk anyway.

Once again another proposed law that would just make normal people's lives more difficult while doing nothing to prevent individuals who are motivated to do the illegal thing from doing it. Offline 3D printers are really not difficult to build, there are many open source plans and all of the hardware is available to order from AliExpress making it simple to do. Somewhat more technically capable people can cobble them together from alternative sources if they don't want to purchase things online.

But the bar is even lower than that since you can simply buy a gun much more easily than you could 3D print parts for one.

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.

What if i want to print a nerf gun for my kid? They have clearly not thought this through. I thik they should gather experts BEFORE signing this in to law :

Feasibility escape hatch: If the working group determines it’s “not technologically feasible,” no regulations are required… until the group decides it is feasible. This is good, but weak sauce: the working group could be stuffed with non-experts who just say what the legislators want.

I can't read this because adafruit.com uses blocking technology on the website

It's the same "blocking technology" JWZ uses on his sites.

Easily sidestepped, it's there to make a point I guess: https://www.jwz.org/blog/

No, it isn't.

Hmm, having double checked, I can read it if referred via HN, I can read it direct via my ISP, and I can read it direct via a VPN in a couple of global geolocations.

That doesn't help you directly, but perhaps that might help tracing your issue.

Unless you were running a Ceci n'est pas une pipebomb bit that flew over my addled head ...

I can't believe they haven't tried banning anyone from having a knee mill if they don't have an FFL yet (or just banned it entirely). It's not hard to convert an old inexpensive Bridgeport to CNC or just mill the parts by hand. Pandora's box is already open, and all this is is just useless flailing.

All government regulation is good regulation.

I think it's interesting to note that not only is there precedent for this type of "blocking technology that prevents the printing of certain things"[1], but it's also inconsequential and uncontroversial enough that most of the people here obviously have never even heard of it.

We lost the ability to print $50 bills with our HPs[2] and it had no noticeable negative impact on society. I'm not sure why losing the ability to print a gun with our Prusas will be any different.

[1] - https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/cant-photocopy-scan-cu...

[2] - https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-Archive-Read-Only/Won...

The printing of money has primarily lied within the purview of the government from the start. Money is one of the few modern physical item, off the top of my head, that this statement applies to. Maybe there are seals or other official marks that this also applies to, but all of these items fall into a similar category.

So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.

Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.

Images of authentic $50 bills are pretty easily detected. They are designed that way.

It's not technically possible to detect "gun geometry".

The only way to comply with this law is to ban 3d printers entirely.

Good news, as the article notes, the proposed regulation creates a working group to determine of it is feasible and won't require any further regulation if it is found nonfeasible. If you're right and this does prove to be "not technically possible", then nothing will actually change.

Hopefully this working group would do the right thing but the worldwide battle against end-to-end encryption is a pretty bad precedent. Experts who disagree with government surveillance demands seem to get discarded and replaced with yes-men. The California microstamping law isn't a good situation either.

Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban. It would be like if printer manufacturers weren't just asked to prevent the printing of US dollars, but anything that looks like money, having an ability to detect if something is money-like based on look and feel alone, without relying on an existing database or hardcoded watermarks.

Your implication makes me think that you assume that this useful-yet-not-overreaching detection tech is possible. Do you have any ideas for how this would be implemented? Because in my mind, the only way to ensure compliance would be either a manual check (uplink to the manufacturer or relevant government authority, where an employee or a model trained on known gun models tries to estimate the probability of a print being part of a gun) or a deterministic algorithm that makes blanket bans on anything remotely gun-like (pipe-like parts, parts where any mechanical action is similar to anything that could be in a gun). These scenarios seem to be both a lot more annoying and a lot more invasive. There's no negative consequences for tuning detection to always err on the side of caution and flood the user with false-positive refusals to print. Both scenarios are obviously a lot more involved and complicated than a basic algorithm checking if you're trying to print an image of a US dollar. Therefore I don't see a reason why drawing this comparison is useful. The only thing these implementations have in common is that they're detecting something.

>Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban.

If you have seen that other people have pointed it out, you have already seen my response, but I guess people keep repeating the question, so I need to repeat the answer. This regulation establishes a working group to investigate this technology. If the technical aspects are as difficult as you claim, the proposed regulation will basically be voided. Your concerns are already factored into the proposal and therefore aren't a valid argument against the proposal.

That said, the regulation also makes it sound like "implementing a check for a specific banned print" would be an acceptable outcome of this law. From page 11 of the actual proposal:

>(b) be authorized to create and maintain a library of firearms blue- print files and illegal firearm parts blueprint files, and maintain and update the library, including by adding new files that enable the three- dimensional printing of firearms or illegal firearm parts. In further- ance of this authorization, the division may designate another govern- ment agency or an academic or research institution in this state to assist with the creation and maintenance of the file library. The library shall be made available to three-dimensional printer manufactur- ers, vendors with demonstrated expertise in software development, or experts in computational design or public safety, for the development or improvement of blocking technology and firearm blueprint detection algo- rithms. The division shall establish safeguards to prevent unauthorized access to and misuse of the library and shall prohibit all persons who are granted access to the library from misusing, selling, disseminating, or otherwise publishing its contents.

Think of it like the early stages of internet copyright protections, the first step is just cross-referencing the design with a list of known banned designs. Just like an early Youtuber could have mirrored banned videos to bypass copyright detection, people will likely still be able to manipulate designs in certain ways to get past this sort of ban. That's ok. Regulation like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to still be worth doing. The goal here is to make it more difficult for some random person with no expertise to buy a 3d printer, download some files, and print a weapon.

I'm willing to admit that it's entirely possible that a full on-demand analysis of whether a shape could potentially be part of a gun might not currently be possible and it might be years before that becomes feasible, but until then, simply banning a handful of the most popular STL files would still have value.

I was bounced out of a Kinkos circa 2000 with my grandparents for attempt to counterfeit Pokémon cards on the photocopier. Mind you I didn’t seek to make illegal copies. I just wanted to photocopy and color in and draw on my own artistic creations. Fun times learning about copyright mechanisms and fraud as a kindergartner.

The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.

Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.

>Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed.

Here's a relevant article that addresses a lot of these points.[1]

[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/luigi-mangione-united-healthcare...

Counterfeiting money is bad, and should be illegal (the wisdom of forcing such software into printers notwithstanding). Manufacturing your own products is good, and shouldn't be illegal.

What about manufacturing your own counterfeit products?

But this tech isn't required by law, is it? You can legally make your own printer without a $50 bill detector.

Correct. And even if this bill passes you can build your own printer from common parts or drive across state lines to the nearest Micro Center. It’s useless posturing regulation for the sake of looking tough.

The proposed legislation is about the sale and distribution of 3d printers. You could build your own 3d printer legally without the detector software.

Uh, I'd say that something has in fact been lost in that every single printer sold watermarks every document printed regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.

There are plenty of people who change their behavior because that tracking is in place, regardless of if what they are doing (or would be doing) is in any way illegal.

Terrible example IMO.

Moreover, every person who has mostly printed in b/w on a colour device, but then been blocked by printing because the yellow cartridge has been emptied printing such watermarks is negatively affected by this.

>regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.

Maybe the way this applies to everything should be an indication that it's unrelated to the point I made about blocking the printing of certain things.

The ways that i've seen proposed for the 3d printer to determine if the thing you are printed is "gun related" was to force them to be internet connected, and to send your print files to some 3rd party (or government) server before you are allowed to print.

How is that less invasive?

The proposed legislation is suggesting nothing of the sort. If a manufacturer wants to handle this by sending everything through their own server (something some manufacturers have tried absent any regulation), that is a choice that they're making and your complaint should be with them.

Clearly, if politicians are afraid of the people, it's a sign that the people aren't happy with the work they're doing. Maybe the solution is to start delivering the results that people want.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

And anyways, you can make a zip gun out of hardware store parts on your kitchen table, no machining or 3d printing required.

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.

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.

Really garbage administration they have in NY. Hochul and a lot of her ilk have done things like block right to repair after years of activists trying to get it passed.

The way it worked was as follows:

1. Local groups push to get right to repair passed

2. Fails repeatedly for years

3. They finally get it past the houses and onto the governor's desk

4. Governor gets a visit from a 'unknown' (hint likely Apple) lobbyist, refuses to sign even though they have to

5. They wait until the very last second and then adds last minute 'amendments' neutering the bill.

6. Their sycophants then try to shut down any discussion on Reddit/other social platforms from anyone who criticizes the bill.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fair_Repair_Act

They are going to keep doing this crap, the government needs to be voted out but just like NJ, NY is captured by really corrupt 'neoliberal' Democrats so its an uphill battle to get someone better in there. The incentives are not there: In NJ and most of NY the economic base is the wealthy suburbanites who like the way things are and will fight efforts to make radical change. That results in a lot of 'think of the children' type people who would welcome any and all bans on things like 3D printing of guns.

I could understand these laws more if the majority of gun related deaths were from ghost guns. But they simply aren't.

If anything, ghost guns should be decriminalized to protect people from the rising danger of ghost-related deaths in NYC. Now that is a startup idea I can get behind.

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?

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.)

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.

This isn't the 80s anymore, desktop CNC machines have existed for decades and have gottwn incredibly 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.

https://www.makera.com/products/carvera-air?srsltid=AfmBOopy...

Desktop CNC machines are here bruh.

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.

AFAIK they claim to still be selling general purpose CNC machines that aren't marketed as being for firearms... but only take the money and ghost customers without actually delivering anything.

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

Too complicated - just strap it to a flying drone that can then slam it to the target at high speed.

Works well enough and is in wide use, many people just don't seem to have realized the implications - kinda like with machineguns and barbed wire at the start of WW1.

The first person to build ChatGPT with limbs wins.

The British army only has maybe 20,000 actual soldiers. You could manufacture enough robots to kill them all in a week. Then you’d just have a whole country.

It’ll completely change the game. There’s no point selling it to a state for their army, when you could just instantly make yourself the owner of the state.

this is so handwavy about so many disciplines of human effort?

robotics? (if you can assume AGI with a perfect world model and perfect motor skills you're insanely further than we are now, like hundreds of years in the future)

military planning? (the british isles haven't been invaded since roman times, hint its not for lack of soldiers)

logistics? (power? fuel? ammunition? boats? planes? parachutes?)

law? (where are you launching your invasion from? how are you testing the killbots without being noticed? who is letting you?)

it seems like the only way you believe this is if you've given completely up on trying to understand anything and just truly to your core think that AI = magic

> The first person to build ChatGPT with limbs wins.

Don't worry, we're safe. It's already been done and it did not win: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/14dv530/the_homele...

ROFL, this is what I surf the web for. To be fair it doesn't really have limbs

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".

I thought all printers had in place block to stop printing of money so something like that to stop printing and making of firearms etc is not unrealistic

It’s more complicated than that. A 2D rectangle with certain graphics is entirely different than a single part of a gun which may really look like anything. Would you recognize a trigger sear if I showed you one?

And if 3DP gun designers get blocked, they just have to alter the design slightly. Vs counterfeit currency which always and forever must look the same. If the 3DP database detection is loosened to catch lookalikes, then you have false positives for the guy making a desk lamp whose part just kinda sorta looks like a trigger sear.

Also, I am not aware of any open source 2D printers built from the ground up, but 3DP got started that way. So bypassing this would be insanely easy.

It’s political theater.

But not CNC machines?

Looks like them too, both subtractive and additive manufacturing. Not bending sheet metal though.

Well, at least folks will still be able to make AK-47s:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121128215957/http://www.northe...

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?

Obviously to have an unregistered gun?

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

Note that Washington's similar HB 2321 defines a "3D printer" as any additive or subtractive manufacturing machine. So these idiots want to regulate CNC machines too.

Public comments can (and should!) be submitted here: https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/2321 Keep them polite and respectful; insults and threats won't help.

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.

Oh no, now New Yokers will have to get their 3D printers the same way they currently get their guns: bring it in from another state.

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?

Is this a real issue? Guns are not hard to get in the US.

Why is it in a budget bill?

Year 2027: beep boop beep boop, scan your implanted rfid digital ID chip to authenticate:

- your social media consumption and any post you make

- your app installations

- registering a new account or keeping an already existing one

- driving your car

- 3D printing something

- watching a YouTube video

- buying anything online

- receive any gov support or healthcare

- any transaction including cash ones

And all of that is synced with your digital wallet (TM) for convenience, internet is not needed!! I am so glad we are protecting the 16yo from accessing tiktok, or something something deportations if you are the other team!!

Lol no.

Trump is gonna cancel or fuck with elections in 2026 like he has said multiple times he will, and by 2027 and 2028, he will likely install himself as 3d term president.

Its gonna be an era of economic decline and social dirtiness as shit gets worse and worse and eventually things like crime is gonna rise up again as the lower income sector transitions into the "nothing to lose" crowd.

I think this would be even harder than the penis detection in Lego Universe.

Just another example of more lid than pots.

Instead of containing the anger of the public by doing good politics and thus reduce radicalizations and peace by plenty of filled pots, its surveilance, panopticons, terror and ever more laws sas lids. If you can't atand the heat get out of the kitchen.

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.

No! Just No!

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.

Stuff like this used to make me incandescently angry but as I've gotten older I've come to understand that honestly we just can't have nice things

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.

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

Fuck all the way off.

This is batshit crazy leftist authoritarianism. And because it's so silly, it will achieve nothing but expose its peddlers as morons and give more votes to Republicans just by making them appear saner in comparison. BAD.

Seems like a boon for small batch 3d printing companies.

Gotta do something ism. Making things shit. Just do gun control, America.

"preventing firearms printing", aka "securing big companies' income from spare parts selling with 500% margin"

Yet another reason why fully open hardware and open software is so important + of course a fully open source slicing pipeline.

It might be a bit less convenient than a shiny vendor locked Bamboolab closed machine but it is perfectly doable.

A filament 3D printer is basically just a control board, firmware (like Marlin), bunch of off the shelf steppers, two thermistors, heatbed and nozzle heater. If you have modern stepper drivers you don't even need end stop switches.

Put this together and you have a machine you fully own and control and can easily repair or upgrade. Then just feed it GCODE generated by something like Prusa Slic3r from STL/obj/step files and that's it.

Avoids any shenanigans like forcing you to use only blessed consumables or trying to dictate what you can print.

> 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.

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).

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.

> Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram

The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.

Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.

Pangram has extremely high accuracy. While there's no way to prove AI use, it's a very good proxy for that metric. It's obvious to my eyes that the article is written with AI, I supplied Pangram as a citation to convince people such as yourself who didn't notice the AI usage when reading the article.

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.

My HP printer already does this. It blocks random prints on paper. I once tried to print a target practice thing for snowballs and it would always fail. There were other cases too. My very expensive printer has some other very sketchy issues with it. It's easily the least secure device I have connected to my network. This surveillance state has gone too far and I'm so sick of it.

Why have you allowed a printer access to the network? You should tell the router to drop every packet that is going outside of the lan from this mac address.

They can require whatever the want. Good luck stopping people from just building their own printers without such "blocking technology".

0. We will have to enforce blocking technology against printing printer components to bypass blocking technology

Goto 0

[dead]

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?

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).

You might want to read up on French history if you think they are not capable of bloodshed.

>. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back

The fact that ICE are still parading around on the street has put in a nail in the coffin that 2A is absolutely pointless.

If anything, USA citizens deserve to have their guns taken away forcibly just because they could use them but didn't.

The problem is that the people with guns also happen to be, by and large, the people who very much support what ICE is doing. Whereas those who oppose it have enthusiastically disarmed themselves.

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...

You know, putting people in a straightjacket with feeding tubes as soon as they are born would reduce crime by 100% basically, so... why not?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/23/ban-sales-po...

I'm also from 'across the pond' and think this is technically unworkable and is likely not going to fix any problems at all.

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.

Do you support gun ownership absent of this idea? Or is your actual concern with guns?

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.