California’s new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report on themselves targeting general-purpose machines.
Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the “California Firearm Printing Prevention Act,” on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models… certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with “firearm blocking technology.” Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn’t on the list by March 1, 2029, it can’t be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.
Sorry, I’m just a guy from overseas trying to understand why, in a country where 1 out of 4 people possess weapons, the 3D printer is the problem. I mean, there are companies selling industrial-grade firearms—why the heck is the 3D printer the target?
Because it makes firearms available to people without having to jump through hoops the government can track, but they can make a machine that makes flexi-dragons into a boogyman, so they throw a “protect the children” in the bill and it automatically passes.
Because our government is run by old dumbasses.
Because money. Firearms are everywhere in the US because of gun lobbyists. If citizens print their own guns then money is lost.
Because between them, the legislators don’t have two brain-cells to rub together and figure out why this is an un-enforceable bunch of bullshit.
There are a few layers to it.
On the surface, the excuse they give is that printed guns don’t have serial numbers and thus can’t be tracked. They call them “ghost guns” to instill an element of horror in the messaging.
If you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see that it’s the same old tactic of manufacturing outrage and spreading fear in order to manipulate the masses. Even when people supposedly see through it, on the collective level it still works. So it seems to be an effective tool, which encourages them to keep using it.
On a deeper level than that, it’s a trojan horse. Just one more way to restrict consumers rather than holding corporations accountable. One more way to maintain their hold on people’s wallets. 3D printers give people too much autonomy, enabling them to be self-reliant. The people benefiting from the current system can’t have that, they won’t tolerate it. “No, you’ll spend $50 on that action figure, and if you need ten of them you can either cough up the dough or go to hell.” Basically.
Also not from America, but I assume this is just the same sort of thinking as trying to ban trench coats after the Columbine shooting, IE: they have to look like they’re doing something, but they can’t do the actual thing that would solve the problem because there’s too much money involved and they’re greedy cowards.
Also it’s weird that Teen Vogue was the best source that came up when I searched for that lol.
Just like all the “for the kids” bullshit excuses to enact draconian population monitoring, this system will make it harder for small manufacturing shops to compete with the mega corps.
Wow a great bill to stop people from making weapons. Y’all gonna ban pipes and steel ball bearings next?
The fuck is our country coming to man.
It is specifically trying to prevent people from making firearms that is not detectable with a metal detector. You are allowed to create your own firearm. As long as it is detectable with a metal detector.
I’m not here to argue their method of enforcement. I’m just saying what the purpose is.
Wrong, the purpose is to prevent people from not buying from a corporation - guns and otherwise. You can buy polymer guns right from the store.
I guarantee that those guns have metal powder in them to make them detectable.
Since all firearms owned by civilians must be detectable by metal detectors.
They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.
In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.
It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.
I can see you care about this topic. I’m not here to piss in your soup. I just said what the purpose is.
But in essence you are correct. The problem isn’t that you can print certain parts, it’s how easy it is to access everyone else supporting it. E.g. bullets or shells
Don’t worry, you’re not pissing in my Cheerios or anything, I just always end up in one of those “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” rants whenever they pull the “ghost gun” nonsense.
It’s like how it’s illegal in Mass to own a suppressor unless you’re a cop or military, then you can buy as many as you want. Like…it reduces recoil a little and reduces the noise from permanent hearing loss to temporary hearing damage, it’s not gonna make a gun silent. Movie magic quiet is only possible with very particular sub-sonic rounds of a specific caliber. You want silent? You put a suppressor on an air rifle. Dead silent and completely legal to put a suppressor on in all 50 states because it’s not a gun, despite being just as dangerous at close ranges.
Edit: Also, these laws are often supported by firearms manufacturers because it benefits them to prevent people from being able to go elsewhere, like making aftermarket car parts illegal or forcing people to get their service done at a car dealership.
Banning guns is so easy. But dealing with the systemic problems that lead people to guns who definitely should t have them seems impossible to grasp.
Banning anything is easy. Enforcement is hard.
When you’re next door to Arizona - regularly in the top five more prodigious gun manufacturing states - it seems absurd to worry about weapons made out of extruded plastic. Ruger & Company is going to do a better job than anything a printer can churn out.
Ban spears, knives, pipes, cars, fertilizer, aluminum, bows, blowguns, poison, fists.
Or, just run a decent society where nobody feels opressed, and has no desire to lash out.
Tax the billionaires out of their billions, or put a tight leash on everyone to allow the billionaires to become trillionaires. Which is it?
Let’s not forget how Gavin Newsom vetoed universal healthcare in California. Also, Gavin Newsom gave prepaid phones to a bunch of CEOs and told them to call him if the CEOs need anything. Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/18/newsom-ceos-burner-phones-00235044
They will need to ban breathing while poor soon the way they are going.
Can’t ban your way out of the greatest wealth inequality since the Great Depression. But they will try, won’t they?
printers can literally be built with dumb electronics, some pieces of metal and an arduino.
juat saying.
Funny enough, guns can be made from a handful of hardware store parts.
there it is. yes, and you guys have a constitutional right to bear arms, with an infinity of them already in circulation.
That didn’t work well for that doctor that was murdered by ICE.
hardware store parts didn’t work out so well for Shinzo Abe too.
Not personally. But Sanae Takaichi was Abe’s ideological successor. Now she’s right back in the PM with an enormous majority.
You can doohickey the man, but you can’t doohickey the movement.
Very frustrating to see people confuse Gun Ownership with Being Bulletproof.
As though you’re going to quick draw on the entire LASD, at which point they’ll all just tip their hats and proclaim “this person has constitutional rights, we will leave peacefully and not bother you again”.
But he didn’t draw on them, it was in it’s holster, they removed it from his holster, then murdered him
But he didn’t draw on them
Because he was rushing to help one of his neighbors recover from tear gas. Which is what an EMT is trained to do.
they removed it from his holster, then murdered him
As they were trained to do
that’s because usians have the illusion they live in a democracy and that weapons are a right instead of a duty.
the fact they can have a weapon doesn’t mean the regime will take lightly to dissidents, just that they can in fact have them for now. fascists certainly have them, that’s for sure.
and historical figures or whatever said this was gonna happen and shit.
Well the answer is banning Arduinos, obviously 🧐
Are you suggesting ghost printers? Lol
i’m suggesting regular, non-enshitified printers.
Until they make that illegal.
oh, i would bet on it.
i wanna see them try to enforce it though.
It seems like that should be invalidated as a law? Like it would be if the feds pre-empted it.
But the courts have previously ruled that you can’t illegalize dual use devices that have legitimate legal uses and possible illegal ones, as they tried to do with CD burners back in the day for the record companies, may they burn in hell.
Not sure that would apply?
If it involves firearms then the law, constitution and existing precedent mean nothing to the 9th Circuit of Appeals. When it comes to guns, no right is too important to not invalidate to prevent guns.
How does this “firearm blocking technology” even work? How does a 3d printer id whatever code the slicer sends it as a gun part?
They upload the following meme to everyone’s printer and call it a day:
From what I’ve heard, it’s like inkjet printers and a signature. Add a squiggle along the inevitable seam that is on the print. Each squiggle is different, and it may even skip every three layers or so.
firearm blocking technology.
grep -r "gun"It’s very funny that people think they need a 3D printer to make a tube, a stock, and a trigger.
If you can make a rubber band gun, you’re 70% of the way to a working firearm. And it’ll be sturdier then extruded plastic.
Is what killed Abe
Fallout plays a comedic take on it, but I can very much see a gun being made out of iron pipe and a shovel handle.
You can make a slam fire shotgun with 2 galvanized pipes and a roofing nail
Bauer-Kahan is a Democrat, if you wonder.
If the bill is passed, I’d be surprised if Newsom didn’t sign it.
What kind. Because I’m well aware of how bad democrats can be even if they aren’t as bad as the literal fascists.
At best this is a grossly uninformed position. At worst she is pushing this to add it to the pile of privacy violations or because a system like this, if it could actually work, would have an end goal to block people printing copyrighted objects.
I imagine it wouldn’t really be too difficult to design parts in a way that they would be completely inconspicuous until trimmed and assembled
or a 3D printer that doesn’t call the FBI
I bet the code is cracked within the hour of every update from now until eternity. It’s like the shit physical locks we put on everything. Nothing but a display of safety.
Even if this could actually be enforced you have the issue that if they go too far you suddenly have it blocking a cylinder because it thinks you are trying to print a gun barrel.
Not that I don’t think they would care about that, but it would certainly cause even more of a backlash.
You wouldn’t do the barrel anyway. You’d use tube stock instead
The plastic would be too fragile to handle the heat and pressure that it’d likely be worse than a barrel-less design.
I guess that’d make open-source firmware illegal.
That’s just a happy by-product for them.
If you haven’t noticed open source is under attack. Hammer has been rising for a while.
edit: meaning FOSS
Silly woman who proposed that bill, if passed the law will only create a black market for 3D printers.
And largely unenforceable. Like, it can only really block the sale of prebuilt, proprietary crap like Bamboo, but most of these things are built out of common parts that are used for a verity of applications and there are countless completely open source printers you can just built from sourced parts that this literally cannot apply to.
Even for most of the prebuilt or kits you get you put open source firmware on it. They can boot lock the board that comes with it, technically, but the board is easy enough to replace on most printers and it’s a standard micro controller and/or raspberry pi nowadays.
Half the time people who get those kits end up replacing various components to customize for their use case. I have a Sovol SV08 that I put stock Klipper on and want to do the multi-print-head mod someday. I’ve even considered replacing the main board with a more powerful one so I can run higher microsteps without overloading the processor.
This is going to make life hard for hobbyists not criminals.
Land Of The Free^TM
I could make a working metal gun in a day with hand tools and a trip to home depot. Guns aren’t magical complicated devices. It’s a handle and a tube and a pin that smacks a bullet.
This bill is the epitome of stupid and one of the reasons the left has had so many issues becoming the party leaders. Stop trying to play “big brother” and stop trying to fuck with the 2nd amendment.
What do you mean “the left”? The farther left you go, the more people see firearms as important for the people to fight oppression. Karl Marx—pretty much as far left as you can go—was very adament about wokers owning guns.
I think you are trying to refer to authoritarians.
Argue semantics about this however you like, but in the US, as far as 95% of the public is concerned, their are two parties. The left are Democrats and the right are Republicans.
Generally speaking, for at least the past 40 years the Democrats have been the ones to try taking away gun rights, while the right has prevented it or put them back. Many people who vote Republican straight up do it for the sole reason of “the Democrats want to take my guns”.
That’s the reputation the Democrats have. It’s true of them, and it’s stupid of them.
You’re getting paid for doing the work of Fox News and Republican grifters, right? The only place I’ve seen or heard about anyone wanting to take guns from anyone has been from right-wing conspiracy theorists and right-wing talking heads who use that shit to scare right-wing idiots into voting against their best interests by conflating sensible gun laws with taking all guns away. You make up stats or cherry-pick from somewhere, that’s clear.
I know of no democrat voter who doesn’t own a gun nor any that don’t want them to be available. We just don’t think our school kids should need to practice active-shooter drills or invest in bulletproof backpacks to get an education because Bill here HAS to have a weapon that can cut a deer in half from a mile away. They got dumb-fucks spouting this shit off cause the more they repeat the lie the more dumb-dumbs believe them, fight a culture war instead of a class war, and buy more guns.
Republican voters with your belief will find out how many lies they swallowed if a Civil War does break out. The left may have fewer guns but I don’t know of any gun nut with more than one life.
I’m not sure if you’re gaslighting, dumb, or just have the memory of a goldfish.
Did you not know that in 1994 Democrats passed an assault rifle ban and magazines couldn’t hold more than 10 rounds? It lasted for an entire decade. Joe Biden talked about trying to do it again, but harsher. It was also 1934 when Democrats created an incredibly high priced tax stamp requirement for automatic weapons, which kept most people from affording a purchase if they wanted one.
It doesn’t matter if you know a bunch of gun owning Democrats. So do I. That has no bearing on the fact that a bunch of Republicans vote red no matter what because “the Democrats want to take their guns”.
Shovel AK is still a thing, but this is not about guns. That is just the cloak of fear (ie - protect the children!) for legislating away your right to own things. Corpos are pissed you can make and/or repair the things they’d rather you buy again.
This is all politics is, convincing morons to vote for puppets of the ruling class.
