I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”.

I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand.

I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage.

But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are paying attention. The tech capital of the world shouldn't have artificially impaired tools.

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For integrated preprint software [slicer] design, guidance for how vendors shall demonstrate that printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.

(did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)

This joke of a law isn't going to stop any 3D printed handguns from getting made, it will only add one more relatively easy step.

Then what, ban stepper motors?

Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines).

Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over).

And if all of those checked with the government before functioning.

It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce that law, and create societal conditions that don't nudge or force people into doing undesirable things.

im looking forward to the idea that the outline of Ca. may trigger false positives

What machines already have locked down (or partially locked down) slicers and communications to the boards? Have those companies made a statement?

Is there any opensource firmware which can comply?

This is a massive hit on the opensource community. As a vendor/dev of an opensource CNC control board (Smoothieboard) I will be forced to limit sales to any state with these laws (our board can easily be used to bypass these protections).

Having watched over the last 13 years how our boards have led to many other machines and innovations outside of the 3d printing community over the years (OpenPNP, Wazer, Opentrons, etc) I can only see this as stifling to development in every direction.

I wonder how companies like Machmotion and other retrofit CNC controls are viewing this as well. Since this also applies to all CNC.

I don't live in any of the states proposing these types of laws...but when it does come here I doubt it will be stopped. The simple act of making your own machine for art/design will make you a criminal.

"The more rules and regulations...the more thieves and robbers."

This is, by the way, very similar to attempts to curb down the right to repair, or more recently the age sniffing that also tries to destroy VPNs. Lobbyists are getting rich right now. It's amazing to see how corruption works in the USA here.

Where's William Osman, Adam Savage etc talking about this?

1) The right to bear arms absolutely gives you the right to make your own gun. It would be like saying the right to vote doesn't give you the right to use a pen or enter a polling place.

2) For the politicians that lack an imagination, print out the GCODE file and put it in a paperback book. Now is the government going to claim it's illegal to disseminate a book?

3) Neither does the government have a right to "search" a 3D printer without probable cause. That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

I don't think we will have much of this in Europe because guns are pretty rare here and so is ammo. We just don't really have gun problems except with organised criminals but they don't 3D print them, they just buy them.

But anyway, 3D printing isn't rocket science. It never was and it sure isn't now. Anyone can build one in their garage and many of us have in fact done so when it was a new tech. If someone wants to be printing gun parts they are going to be printing gun parts.