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?
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.
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 money. Firearms are everywhere in the US because of gun lobbyists. If citizens print their own guns then money is lost.
Because our government is run by old dumbasses.
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.
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.
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?
That, the coming war against VPN in other states and countries, … Can’t we cut through all these baby steps and get straight to a 1984’s telscreen mandatory in all rooms?
Oh come on! Think about all the domestic violence’s victims!
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.
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.
Well the answer is banning Arduinos, obviously 🧐
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
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.
You can build a weapon with common tools you find in any metal workshop.
Story time:
Right after the war my grandfather - a locksmith by profession - build a cap and ball revolver in his workshop just with the tools he had and scrap metal.
Easy solution. Sell a separate “motion platform” and an “FDM module” as distinct products that basically snap together.
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.
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.
This is going to make life hard for hobbyists not criminals.
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.
Someone more eloquent than I am needs to craft a compelling argument that this violates the 2nd amendment.
It also violates the first and fourth. And it does nothing about gun violence.
It’s also impossible to actually implement and is no more than one more privacy violation to add to the pile.
Any proper printer should work offline.
Any normal printer doesn’t have nearly enough processing power to run analysis on bgcode/instruction files (it’s nor needed for normal operation).Good luck idiot lawmakers
Knowing the internet, I also assume that a custom firmware or some other workaround would be released in about a week anyway, making the whole thing utterly pointless.
This is what I’m talking about. We are stating to get to a cojent argument that I can call my representatives with and bitch them out, politely.
Am a Californian by choice.
