alt Hacker NewsCalifornia's new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report themselves
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The irony isn't lost on me that it's the USA, the country with some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns - or is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby?
If this happens I'm gonna buy one of these printers and exclusively print dicks with it.
It's legal to manufacture your own firearms. Putting limitations on 3d printers just makes people who want to this's lives harder and stifles innovation.
Do you have to prove that your 3D printer cannot print a 3D printer which can print a gun?
the goal is you cant sell a 3D printer without attestation that it is anti firearm compliant.
now they have to do 80% printers, kits composed of not a printer subunits, to be assembled on site.
then DIY sources must be dealt with:
https://pea3d.com/en/how-to-build-your-own-3d-printer/
it looks like mole whackings, all the way down.
"3D Printer" is a broad term. Would this apply to HAAS automated CNC machines? They can "3D Print" things from billet.
Guess this is as good an excuse as any.
What are the recommendations for printers now? Bucket it by price range, so $0-200, $200-400, $400-800, $800+
Any notable features which can be a big value add? Offline is obviously a requirement given how the winds are blowing.
Requiring people to drive to Nevada to buy a real 3DP?
I'm a long time shooter of all kinds of firearms (bolt actions to full-autos).
What people don't realize is that gun control works, but only when it's very controlled - i.e. full registration, deep checks, mandatory training, strict storage, no handguns, etc.
You need to do it across the whole country, as a real customs border can cut guns significantly, but in the US you can do still do a private party (person to person with no dealer) transfer in many states, making gun running pretty trivial.
None of this will happen anytime soon in the US, and the ghost guns, etc. thing will keep happening.
US requires only the serialized part of a firearm treated as guns. For the AR-15, which is like PC/AT of guns, it's a nearly cosmetic part of it, sort of a motherboard backplate. Or like, a collar for a dog rather than the heart of a dog. As such, that part reportedly can be printed and used to shoot live rounds fine. Most other guns apart for AR-15 don't even matter, like how an E-ATX motherboard with dual PowerPC hardly matter in any talks concerning a PC - if you'd be wondering what about Raspberry Pi, that would be SIG P320 or something like that.
In most place of the world, including where I am, pressure bearing parts such as the barrel, the bolt that locks onto the end of the barrel to seal it as it fires, the firing pin that ignites the cartridge, the live cartridge containing gunpowder, etc etc, rather than the part that merely carries its nameplate, are controlled. It is illegal in such places to buy or possess functionally relevant parts of a gun, at least without a license, and/or prior approvals. This is more like buying a CPU or motherboards would be controlled rather than cases and faceplates. In some places, what is considered a gun in US hardly qualify as such, even almost slipping through customs(allegedly).
You guys gotta fix that broken classification before trying to offload onus onto the global 3D printing community. Or drop it altogether.
Fascinating parallel with this thread regarding regulating AI bots:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066567
Nice sentiments, but totally impractical.
Snuck in my Bambu P1S. Won't be upgrading that firmware hahaha! I've had it for a few months now and it's a good consumer-grade easy-to-use 3d printer.
A 3D printer being able to identify what it's actually printing is much harder than it seems. Also, the majority of what gets printed are parts - how do you distinguish between a legal gun owner printing accessories and parts that go towards a ghost gun?
Also, good luck farming off the job to the DOJ right now. The ATF has already mostly shrugged at the prospect of 3D printed guns, and that was before the administration gutted it. I don't think they have any interest/ability to cooperate with tech regulation at this time.
This, like every other bill on the subject that has been attempted from around the country, is bound for a quiet death by committee.
The definition carve-out for "additive manufacturing" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. CNC mills, laser cutters, and waterjet cutters can all produce the same end result but fall outside the statutory language. So the bill doesn't regulate the capability — it regulates the specific manufacturing process. Which means it's trivially circumvented by anyone who actually wants to make something prohibited, while imposing DOJ-reporting requirements on every hobbyist, educator, and small manufacturer running a $200 Ender 3.
This is the pattern with most hardware regulation attempts: the compliance burden falls on the people already operating in the open, while the actual threat model (someone with intent) routes around it by switching tools or buying across state lines.
This is so dumb. It isn't the printers where you could solve this but the slicers and slicers are for the most part open source. Effectively this is another ban on particular numbers. The printers just execute G-code and to make a printer aware of what it is that it is printing requires a completely different level of processing than what is normally present in the printers. Besides that, you could break anything up into parts that don't necessarily look like the complete article.
I wonder how "significant technical skill" will be interpreted in practice. That phrase likely means something different to the average HN reader than to the average congressman.
This is bullshit. It's a clear power grab to re-seize democratized means of production, and added surveillance. Both suck. The proposed bill in Washington is even worse, and blanket bans nearly any kind of machining or manufacturing that doesn't use surveillance. I'm going to have to actually write letters to lawmakers now as if there wasn't enough bullshit happening already.
It's highly misleading to call a bill that was introduced a couple of days ago by one Assembly member "California's new bill". Bills aren't laws and most bills go nowhere.
I think this isn't about guns but more about seeing and controlling what people are printing. Guns is just the excuse to monitor.
"Hey I see your printing a replacement part for you washer. Well that is a patent part and you will need to pay to print that."
Who is going to tell them about lathes? They are much more practical for machining useful firearms. Good luck with all of that, I guess, California.
This is an idiotic feel-good bill being pushed by political opportunists who want to look like they're taking action against a flood of illicit plastic guns. In a sane world, it would be shut down before anyone even wasted the time to print it.
WE DO NOT LIVE IN THAT WORLD.
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I feel like the core issue here is accessibility. It’s always been possible to machine your own gun, but that required technical skill. Now the skill lies in the designing of the models, not the manufacturing, so it may be more practical to go after model distribution. But that ship might have already sailed with the advent of AI model creators.
Sometimes I wonder what Adafruit's first language is.
Of course the Bill does not require DOJ-approved 3d printers.
The irony is that these printers are all coming from China where even thinking about printing a gun is illegal. In comparison, America has a massive consumer gun production industry that wouldn’t survive if a significant share of that production wasn’t smuggled into Latin America.
> The state should prosecute people who make illegal thing, not add useless surveillance software on every tool in every classroom, library, and garage in the state.
This bill is analogous to requiring text editors to verify that a document does not contain defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, child porn, etc., before it saves the file. In first amendment terms that led to the conclusion that prior restraint on publication is incompatible with the amendment. The same doctrine should be extended to the second amendment for the same reasons. The alternative is intolerable surveillance.