This first bill allows the state of California to regulate and oversee all 3D prints in the name of public safety.
in the name of public safety
In the name of gutting small manufacturing and the ability to repair your own devices. This has never had anything to do with safety, as they can’t even do the thing the bill demands. Fucking asinine
“Uhoh, can’t 3d print a gun. Guess I’ll just go to Walmart.”
More like “Guess I’ll just print this file labeled ‘hyper realistic movie prop lazer blaster’.”
Or google zip gun. All you need to shoot 9mm is 9mm internal diameter pipe
I doubt you can do that in California
Guess I’ll go to Nevada.
This guy gets it.
No, but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts, then you can buy an AR-15 out of the trunk of the car of a dude who was selling it on Facebook.
Completely legal resale so long as you both sign off on the ownership paperwork.
but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts
Californian here. They’re not. Lol. I mean you can do a private party sale and the guy is welcome to store the rifle in his trunk on his way to the meet, but all firearm sales or transfers have to be done at an FFL (basically a registered gun store) and require a 10 day waiting period, meaning you’d meet with the person at the store, do a shit ton of paperwork, pay a fee to the FFL and the DOJ, go home without the gun. Then come back 10 days (specifically 240 hours) later to meet up again, do some more paperwork, pay the person, and you’re now the proud owner of a gun that cost you 15-25% more and infinitely longer to acquire than if you lived 200 miles to the East.
Thankfully, making guns so much more expensive and tedious to acquire than damn near everywhere else in the country has rendered it physically impossible for criminals to steal guns or otherwise obtain them illegally. Now, if someone goes on a killing spree in a shopping mall, they may face legal repressions if the paperwork doesn’t come back clean.
MA is probably not a good example, because you also have to have an LTC, and the AR has to be legally owned in state on 8/1/26, and you have to register the transaction, and probably other restrictions I don’t remember off the top of me head.
True, but it’s the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.
Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There’s still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would’ve been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.
Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they’ve improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I’m aware of is in Myanmar, where they’re using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can’t get any actual firearms. You’re much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.
But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it’s much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that’s buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they’re not being bought right in the city/state, they’re being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.
Jokes aside it’s to prevent having one that’s not registered
Not all legal firearms are registered anyway already. Not to mention it is completely legal to build your own gun in the US. So long as you aren’t building something NFA regulated (full auto, over .50 caliber, short barrel shotgun, silencer, etc.) and you are not distributing them to anyone, you are allowed to just build a gun. There are places online that sell “receiver blanks” with plans for how to finish them with very basic machining, and then you can buy all the rest of the parts off the shelf at any gun store without any registration at all because only the receivers are regulated even a little bit.
This has nothing to do with gun control. The entire concept of “ghost guns” has been a scare tactic to get enough public on-side to pass draconian surveillance and manufacturing control laws like this. The goal of this is to monitor “at-home manufacturing” (of anything, nothing to do with guns anymore than it has to do with warhammer compatible miniatures) and restrict the practice.
also the real gun companies are salivating over this, they dont want thier bottom line to be reduced if people are just making thier own.
Under the proposal, printers would have to evaluate STL files, CAD files, or other geometric code using a firearm blueprint detection algorithm and block files flagged as capable of producing a firearm or illegal firearm parts, including conversion devices.
California’s Department of Justice, or another relevant state agency, would have until January 1, 2028, to publish performance standards for detection algorithms and software control processes.
This is the problem when lawmakers write technical bills without speaking to technical people. They’re going to publish standards for evaluating if your gcode is a firearm or firearm part? THAT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
It’s not even that, building a firearm…is legal…this shit going after printers makes no sense at all, it’s fucking legal to print firearm parts.
Fun time to introduce/remind people of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
Same thing goes for laws and lawmakers. It’s almost as if selecting our “leaders” from a narrow band of society who, for the most part, don’t know shit about anything, does not lead to enlightened laws.
Lol I was just talking to my wife about that yesterday and how it’s exactly like AI.
If you read something in the newspaper about your job, you’re like “these fucking idiots got this all backwards.” If you see AI output of an attempt at your job, it’s the same thing.
But if you read an article about someone else’s job, you think “that makes sense.” Same about seeing AI trying to do someone else’s job.
In most cases, absolutely. There are a few jobs I can see an LLM performing as well or better. Though, then those people would be roaming the streets and do you really want your insurance claim denied while you’re out walking your dog or someone yelling about paradigm shifts to align synergies when you’re just having a nice day at the park?
Cosplayers are going to be pissed.
Kinda, render a few images from the gcode, use a CV algorithm to identify the object.
On device it’ll be slow or expensive.
Define gun is a lot harder then you think. For example
I know, but they want a solution implemented, that’s a solution.
Ah yes. Another passive asshole that codes this type of thing and goes home without even batting an eye because I got mine before someone else did.
Big assumptions
Its just either completly ineffective, or effectively bans 3d printing. Then you are going to run into enforcement, and legal challenges. Oh and even if all that is done guns will still be present at a ratio above 1:1 in the states.
Anyone who has a highschool level of metal shop can also make a firearm, 3d printing is not even well suited for the task. Just look at Japan, one of if not the most restricted nation for firearms, and someone shot a leader with a homemade firearm.
Your faith in this mystery algorithm is stronger than mine. Here’s a diagram of the parts in an AR-15:
So we need an algorithm that renders the gcode I’m printing, then compares it to… something?
Look, I was just saying, it could be done, train it on current real and 3d printable gun parts and there, you did your best to create algorithmic gun filtering. I wasn’t saying that it would be good or accurate.
The algos don’t need to deny any or every part of a gun, but the most critical part must not be printable and it’ll already be effective.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist for a gun, but I suspect there’s a few very important pieces that need to be printed a certain way or the firearm falls apart or is at least a lot less useful.
All that said, I’m generally against such limiting mechanism in any printer or compiler. Try close sourcing all compilers so they can’t create malware? Forget it.
3D printed gun designs these days don’t even use plastic for most of the critical parts. The goal is to print a frame, which you can then assemble into a full gun using durable off-the-shelf parts that are available from any hardware store. No need to 3D print a bolt (and deal with all of the manufacturing issues that entails) when you can just buy a bolt for 5¢ at any hardware store. Especially when that bolt will be more precise and durable than the plastic bolt you would have printed.
It’s the old carpentry idea that if you can’t get precision by hand, you can borrow it from something else. Need to cut a bunch of identical boards, with precision in 64ths of an inch? A #8-32 bolt will have 32 threads per inch. So a half turn on the bolt will advance or retract the bolt 1/64 inches, accurate down to whatever the bolt manufacturer’s clearance is. Probably a few thousands of an inch. Build a jig to hold your boards at the saw, and thread a bolt into the jig to act as the board stop. Now you can turn the bolt to adjust your clearance as needed, and you’ll be accurate down to 1/64 by only making half turns each time.
And 3D printed guns use the same concept. You don’t print a plastic barrel that will explode after two or three shots, you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe to fit into the frame. The pipe will be more durable and more precise than anything you could feasibly print. You don’t need to 3D print a firing pin that will blunt/shatter/jam after a few uses, when you can just use a steel nail that will have better durability and avoid jamming. And all of the parts you need can be bought at a hardware store without raising any suspicions. That’s part of what makes this so dumb. They’re not just requiring printers to scan for potential gun parts. They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts. And that is a much broader spectrum than simply scanning for the shapes of the parts directly.
you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe
So you’re saying the answer is to scan for voids! Thanks for your technical input
- your congressman, probably
That makes a lot of sense. If the print just holds the critical parts, forget it.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing
Unfortunately that’s the crux of the issue. The people who have written and signed this bill aren’t either - and they weren’t as big of a person as you to recognize that.
At the end of the day, 3D printing gcode is telling your printer to spit out a shape. And you simply cannot ban shapes. Am I printing a firing pin or a part for my shoe rack? There’s no way to tell. Any politician that’s telling you there is is either ignorant or lying to you.
Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and “draw” the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.
And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as “gun parts”… The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.
You’re gonna hate this, but… AI can literally do it, and for the large models it’s terrifying how accurate they are. You will argue that your little ESP32 powered reprap or klipper or whatever printer can’t handle it, to which regulators will go ok then, either the printer has to call out to a service with an http request to upload the gcode every time it wants to print anything, or your slicer has to do it (and we dont care that it’s open source, it’s illegal to operate if it doesnt make the call and you’re getting fines or jail time if you get caught).
This is what AI was built for 😟
EDIT:
In case it isn’t abundantly clear, I am not in favor of what I just described. I know that it is possible though and know how to architect exactly these mechanisms. If I can build them, so can they. (I won’t, of course, that goes against everything I stand for).
Even AI can’t do this. It is an impossibility. AI might be able to make the shape, but it will NEVER be able to interpret the intent of that shape. It will never know if a cylinder is meant for a gun or for a rolling pin. It will never know if I’m making a trigger for a gun or a replacement trigger for my hot glue gun.
Those cheap printers that don’t have onboard hardware to do this also generally don’t have any networking either. You’re lucky if you can get them to connect to a computer with USB - most of the print jobs exclusively get sent via a physical SD card.
The slicer is in a better position to do this draconian business, but they aren’t aiming this bill (from what I have found) at slicers at all (probably because they are all open source and, unless the law gets passed world-wide, they would just get forked and hosted by someone else in a place where they are still legal to be “dumb”). They are aiming at hardware. It is effectively a complete ban on cheap 3d printers, and turns the models “legal” to sell to a white-list style of control. The manufacturers that play ball get to continue business in the state, others do not.
All of this to stop a very tiny and difficult avenue for someone to get a gun, when there are much easier and more reliable options available and being used orders of magnitude more often. This has nothing to do with gun control, or guns. This is absolutely a play against 3d printing, at home manufacturing, and right to repair in general. The end goal is DMCA on 3d printing.
Theres countless gcode use in the world, much of it is offline
Doesn’t matter. Has nothing to do with online.
You can run OpenCV on an RPi, it’s just super slow, and you could probably use a cheap GPU chip to do it faster. You store the pretrained model on the device.
You may even get away with an asic designed for the model, though with that one I’m talking out my ass.
That would makes printers more expensive and my guess is that they’ll prefer to force online connectivity
100%
Yes they have no idea what they are asking. Stl is just gcode how do you look for a gun out of coordinates.
Can’t regulate the parts as they are used in many many many devices. So as far as I’m concerned this is worthless. I can build a fucking 3d printer from an old VCR and a hot glue gun.
my interest is who is PAYING to fund the bill, i wouldnt be surprised if its gun companies or palantir.
You can, but 90% 3D printer buyers can’t, and that’s a good enough amount of people to spy on.
exactly but that’s also good fuel to defeat the bill.
Proposal: All elected officials must install Corruption Blocking Software that scans all their communications, financial records and assets, and uses advanced Corruption Pattern Matching Algorithms to determine if they might be taking bribes from industry lobbyists, pumping up their own investments, or secretly serving special interest groups, or if they’re just general nutjobs.
Why stop at elected officials any company has to do this. If they can infringe our rights why not make sure everyone has their rights taken away.
Honestly though… What’s the process for a regular idiot to try and suggest or propose new bills? I think I’d like to actually propose such a bill
That’s what “representative government” is all about. I’ve never tried to do this but theoretically you could write to your representative or senator and try to impress them with your idea. You’d probably get more traction by starting local with a city or town ordinance, or by creating a campaign on social media and in person - rally an impressive number of people to stand around city hall with signs requesting/demanding this kind of action, get noticed on news media, and build it into a credible movement. In many states citizens who collect enough signatures can place proposed legislation on ballots during regular elections.
Good luck. Tough to pick a more DIY-oriented bunch of hobbyists who would rather build their own hardware and compile their own software over allowing their printer to narc on them to the government.
RepRap 2: Countersurveillance Boogaloo, launching soon.
I am feeling bad for all the people that bought Bambu.
- Buy a kit.
- Buy a mechanical kit and an electronics package.
- Build from scratch
- Buy out of state
- Buy an open source machine and flash the firmware
- Buy your fucking gun in an alley (way easier, and maybe cheaper.)
- Design and distribute stls that have parts that may be interpreted by whatever brain dead software is going to watch out for files, and print in two batches, say, something that may look like a lower, and then an upper, for a a nerf gun, for example, to glut the system.
The list goes on…
I suppose my old Prusa just jumped a bit in value.
You can use a 3d printer to build a 3d printer. When they figure that out, will they try to stop those parts from being printed too?
Who did they consult on this, and did that person or persons purposely lead them astray, or were the consultants equally ignorant?
Hell, with modern stepper motors and extruded aluminum box frame, you don’t even need a 3D printer to build a 3D printer. It would certainly make it easier, but it’s not required. You could manufacture an entire 3D printer using off-the-shelf parts and a raspberry pi (or maybe even an Arduino) to control the motors. It wouldn’t be elegant, and it would require a lot of calibration… But it would be doable if someone were so inclined.
Wait to see that they discover that you don’t need a 3d printer to build a 3d printer…
I might print some guns purely out of spite.
In Minecraft.
Given they’ve postponed the standards until 2028, I am skeptical our legislators will be able to develop a viable benchmark. And then I don’t imagine it’s possible to enforce it.
This is likely to die in court.
Jokes on you, my 3D printer is offline
Fyi, I can make a gun from schedule 40 pipe, a few rubber bands, a weldable hing, and some brazing rods.
I’m reminded of that dude who made bank at a gun buyback program. The program was offering like $250 per gun, no questions asked. One dude made a ton of (technically legal) single-shot shotguns out of a pipe, notched 2x4, spring, steel nail, and plumber’s strap. The pipe was basically strapped to the 2x4, and permanently held a single shotgun shell.
The nail acted like a firing pin and it would fire if you pulled the nail back and let it go. The barrel length was enough to be a legal shotgun. Reloading required undoing the plumber’s strap to get the spent shotgun shell out of the pipe. It wasn’t really useful as a functional weapon…. But it ticked all of the boxes that the gun buyback program needed, so they were forced to pay him for each one he turned in.
Basically this:
The dude made a jig to cut and drill the 2x4, cut all the pipes to length, and assembled them in bulk. He turned a few dollars in hardware store parts into thousands of dollars. IIRC, he assembled like 50 of them in a day and rode off into the sunset.
Wasn’t the one used against the corner Japanese PM essentially a home-made blunderbuss?
I read the article and what a load of shit. So you can’t 3D print a cosplay gun? How far will this go? Water pistols? Ray gun props? Children’s toys. Plastic guns are not illegal, just certain ones.
If I lived in California, I think I would invest in a really good 3d printer now-ish and just never update the software. Big brother is watching everything.
My favorite irony of all of this is that it’s very possible to build a 3D printer from scratch (hell that’s how the hobby got started in the first place) with open source software that never talks to the Internet. It’s more work, but not to the extent that it’d stop anybody determined.
Sure, one of the best printers is a Voron. People build those all of the time.
Why use AI generated bullshit images like this techspot…
Sad to see AI, but honestly that image made me laugh, because it seems to come straight from the mind of the author of this bill.
Hah true, it is sufficiently ridiculous and stupid.
I’m sorry you can’t print a garden hose nozzle because AI thinks it is a gun.
I’m sorry you can’t print a caulking gun because AI thinks it is a gun.
I’m sorry you can’t print a water pistol because it’s a gun.
