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California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

8 points by joebuckwilliams

by MisterTea

3 subcomments

This has been discussed already and we all know it is impossible to implement. It's also perplexing[1] that suddenly the government care bout ghost guns when we have tons of illegal firearms responsible for thousands of deaths every year in the USA which were legally manufactured right here in the good ol US of A.
A better question is how do we fight these stupid laws and the idiots who implement them? Voting doesn't seem to work and writing your representative also seems like it doesn't work.
[1] We know this is because of the killing of Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. Clearly the rich people are scared if this is suddenly being pushed but it puzzles me why they are now scared of ghost guns when I can get a gun off the street and buy or make a suppressor. Hell, there are suppressor adapters that let you screw a new automotive oil filter on the end which works well. To me, ghost guns are a nothingburger.

by LorenPechtel

0 subcomment

It's California. Not the first time they've gone bonkers with firearms dreams. (Microstamping--the firing pin is a wear item! Biometric--ever see a system that's fast enough authenticating the user?)
There is exactly one use case for a home 3D printed gun: get it past a metal detector. It's bulky, inaccurate, fires only once and even then with some risk to the person firing it. And I can't imagine a filter that could remotely reliably distinguish "gun" if an effort is made to disguise the parts.
The actual ghost gun issue is with CNC milling machines, not 3D printing. It used to be that while building a zip gun wasn't a big deal but building anything resembling a modern semiauto (or even full auto) firearm was in the skilled machinist realm. Now CNC machines can bring this down to merely requiring someone who knows their way around tools--which comprises an awful lot of people.
Unfortunately, the politicians routinely treat these two radically different things as if they are one.

by tangotaylor

1 subcomments

If you’re in CA, definitely leave messages for your state senator and assemblyperson. I already did and their staffers replied that they got the message.
This and AB1043/AB1856 just make me so mad. These politicians apparently think they can threaten fines upon the open source community and coerce us into implementing their poorly researched laws.
It’s like in a toxic workplace when a non-technical manager agrees to a questionable assignment on your behalf, without your consent, and tells the stakeholder oh yeah, no problem, that’ll take 2 weeks.

by mindslight

1 subcomments

Just bought a CNC mill, tehehe.
While I'm a gun owner, I'm not a gun enthusiast, so I don't really have plans to do anything firearm related. I hope these laws don't become prevalent, because a good way to get me interested in something to tell me that the tools capable of doing it are prohibited, and I'd much rather work on more constructive things.
Ultimately I think a lot of these communities (by which I mean 3d printing itself) need to run far far away from centrally hosted jank like Github et al, which is the only real nexus California has when trying to police technical speech like slicers. Just take the hit, move to self-hosted servers on onion sites, and have automation that copies out the relevant products to the centralized watering holes to attract noobs.

0 subcomment