I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.

So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?

So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.

Either way, this is bad legislation.

"state-certified algorithm" has a really nice tyrannic ring to it. I am sure once this has passed the rich people can finally sleep at night knowing they are safe from roving gangs of armed Mangiones.

In additive manufacturing it is more difficult but not impossible to print a bunch of pieces that look nothing like a gun part but and in the end be assembled into a gun.

In both the above cases there would need to be sophisticated surveillance software to even come close to detecting "gun-ness."

While I don't have a horse in the gun control race, I do have one in the open-source, running a local OS, running what software I want, and controlling what that software does races.

I have been watching footage from the Apollo programs recently, and while the types of people who made that possible are very much still around, we need to encourage that sort of thinking once again. Dangerous freedoms, radical Liberty, complete responsibility.

https://everytownresearch.org/report/printing-violence-urgen...

>Lawmakers can take aggressive action to spur change in this area and help prevent the printing of 3DPFs. The most comprehensive solutions would apply nationwide, and Congress should work immediately to pass the innovative laws described here. But even without federal action, state policymakers can take meaningful action to curtail 3DPFs.

For example, I used to cosplay for charity in the Star Wars costuming club 501'st Legion [0], where for most costumes a blaster gun of high likeness to the original is required. It has hundreds of members in California.

These days, it is very common to make cosplay accessories through 3D-printing. A ban on replica guns parts would hit the hobby hard.

[0]: https://501st.com/

Put DRM on plumbing pipes, I dare you.

It's such a waste of time and resources - you wanna handle gun violence? handle normal violence with proven mechanisms (education, social welfare, etc...)

I can only assume California has solved all its major problems if policing 3D printers is at the top of the agenda. It's like when someone complains their neighbor can afford two yachts and they can only afford one, you know they are doing pretty well if that's their major concern.

This is all at a time when the US desperately needs innovation. China basically owns us on raw manufacturing capability. 3d printers represent an excellent entry point for getting people into hobbyist manufacturing which will be where new ideas ultimately come from. This is just contributing to making is fall behind as a country.

So, the danger is in pre-emptive policing- aka capability reduction. In its extremes it results in what china does- which is producing dangerous objects on mass (every shop has a lathe that can make a gun) - while constantly looking over each other shoulders to see who might ferment revolution or amok. Same with chemistry. Same with software. The panopticon as patchwork counter measure to accumulating dangerous capabilities.

But it can not go much further. If you have a psychological normal individual that buckles under stress and hand it a photon torpedo- the spaceship goes boom. You need "unrealistic" humans, the angles of star trek to be able to handle that sort of capability. Its a whole group of problems, which started with nuclear power. Basically, the material science on humans and organizations is lousy - and the stress tests showed that we fall apart under duress.

Which is why california tries to limit it, while at the same time idealizing human nature as benevolent and at the same time driving onwards technologies, which wind up the lethal mouse-trap of capabilities with ever more potent dangers. Which as paradox as it is, is a expression of a inability to deal with reality.

> On January 13, 2014 a certain State Senator (no reason to name names) held a press conference where he held a modern rifle in his hands and stated, “This is a ghost gun. This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”

Anyone that knows even a little bit about guns knows that this is utter nonsense, and it was appropriately memed into oblivion.

Most anti-gun activists and legislators seem to have no more knowledge than this - which is to say, none.

How is this different?

Edit: I appreciate the responses! Thank you

They should simply pay people to register 3D printed guns, up to a specific amount, at which point: they should investigate them for illegally manufacturing guns.

Similarly, they should severely penalize possession of a 3D printed gun which has not been registered.

Problem solved. Good luck pretending these people are capable of regulating the compliance of 3D printing software.

What a joke.

3D printing is also on a current hype run; I think a lot of this has to do with how cheap it is to print some things. So naturally some companies with overpriced shit, get nervous. So suddenly, California AGAIN, wants to censor and restrict people here.

Now - I think this will fail, 3D printing already won (IMO). It is similar to the right to repair movement. Though at an earlier stage. I am getting tired of all those lobbyists being active in California. And this is a problem that happens a LOT in the USA. This kind of lobbyism needs to go.

It is time to look at which folks act as lobbyists here, at the least at the surface level. All their communication with other organisations or companies, must be made open, so that people can look whether they are lobbyists or not. (This will not cover all lobbyists, but it will cover about 95% of them, because most lobbyists are stupid - see how EU OLAF caught some stupid EU lobbyists here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th... - so the EU is similar to the USA here, all built by lobbyists. See also how Meta bribed people for age-sniffing and similar spying tools or Jeff Grey from honor your oath point at the problem of non-stop monitoring of everyone in cars at all times)

It makes as much sense as requiring saw manufacturers to implement protections that restrict what can be cut out with a saw.

Or pen manufacturers being required to enforce copyright.

Any form of this bill will 100% fail to attain its stated objective, while having horrendous not-quite-unintended consequences.

And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints? That's how the industry literally began.

(Not to mention: what do they think would happen to the hundreds of millions of existing "dumb" 3D printers? They won't disappear because there's a law).

Sigh.

If you pull nonsense like this in a two party system, there are enough people with blind spots that it tilts the results against you.

My favorite example of such a blind spot is a friend being flabbergasted that someone funny could be evil.

Forget about printing that copyrighted part for your no longer sold or supported gadget at home.

I guess you'll be forced to replace the whole thing.

How the printer could detect it, where the censoring circuit or program would live, how effective it would be and what it means long-term.

Guns, fireworks, explosives, sulfuric acid, all sorts of bio-hazards, ... every civilized country restricts peoples' access to these things. It is a no brainier, but Americans obsessively wrap it in ideology.

In the U.K., where I feel guns are only showpieces (do even cops have them?), stabbing is a known problem.

In India, where ammo is way more expensive than machetes and knives, people are literally murdered with them.

The only argument I can understand, when it comes to banning guns, is that it reduces the blast radius that an evil person can have.

So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?

If that's the proposal, what's my plan when coyotes and mountain lions attack my child and I on our regular walks on rural property?

My point is there's already precedent for printers cooperating with authorities so one can see this as simply an extension to 3D printer manufacturers.

I suspect it's a losing battle for the EFF and 3D printer manufacturers to resist some kind of fingerprinting or even the prohibition of things that are guns.

I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's just what I expect to happen. And if you want to argue against it, you should address the printer tracking dot issue or argue how this is different.

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