- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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Even if this bill was in good faith, I wouldn’t want it: I believe that the USA is headed into a civil war, and I want the good guys to have the ability to manufacture stuff if they need to. Be it guns or tractor parts, having flexible logistics will be invaluable. Not just for military use, but also for civilians who don’t have access to official parts.
In any case, the implementation of universal healthcare and UBI would be much more helpful for quelling violence. People who can have access to mental healthcare and with enough prosperity, are much less likely to become deranged enough to murder people. Measures like this, often exist to keep the peasants from being able to rise up against their overlords.
This thing is a product of malicious greed, not for the sake of good.
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.
Private workshop are next on the chopping block, then. Totally feasible. /s
Wasn’t there a guy who built an AK-47 out of a shovel?
printers can literally be built with dumb electronics, some pieces of metal and an arduino.
juat saying.
Well the answer is banning Arduinos, obviously 🧐
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.
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
Are you suggesting ghost printers? Lol
i’m suggesting regular, non-enshitified printers.
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.
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?
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.
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?
It’s not about firearms.
It’s about controlling what you can 3D print.
When your 3D printer has to connect to a third party service to check if it’s allowed to print what you just sent it. That’s a clear vector for companies to enforce IPs.
Printing a replacement part for your appliance? Sorry, they’re blocked.
Printing parts to repair part of your vehicle or snap something back on? Sorry, that’s banned.
Printing something that resembles the intellectual property of any other company? Sorry, that’s banned.
Can’t have you cutting into the profits of corporations by self-servicing and self-repairing.
Also a mass surveillance device to produce surveillance of what people are 3D printing and report it to a central authority.
Because it makes for a good distraction from actual problems that they don’t care to solve because those problems would require them to heavily tax millionaires and billionaires.
Let’s entertain the thought. How would one identify what is a gun part being printed, and what is a tube, a mechanical latch, or whatever else. Heck, I printed a plastic replica of a movie prop once. Would that be illegal?
I mean, I’m not in the US, and I know how to drive three steppers according to a list of extremely basic instructions that never ever represent anything “final part-y” looking, but the question remains. How do we go from “lots of gcode” to “yep, that’s definitely illegal” without saying that everything is illegal?
Ever heard of the EURion constellation?
This is the same, just an additional dimension.
“Markus Kuhn, who uncovered the pattern on the 10-euro banknote in early 2002 while experimenting with a Xerox colour photocopier that refused to reproduce banknotes.[2] The pattern has never been mentioned officially; Kuhn named it the EURion constellation as it resembled the astronomical Orion constellation, and EUR is the ISO 4217 designation of the euro currency.[3]”
It would seem governments always poke into corporations for debatable “safety”. Even if they don’t say it.
You can of course build your own printer from stepper motors and belts. Good luck, see you in a year. Also 3d printing in general has improved lightyears, so it’s becoming a decent-sized corpo thing => tools becoming scrutinized by government vogons.
That’s… not applicable here. Like, at all. To reproduce a printed document, you input it. To make a 3D print, you produce tailored list of operations depending on many, many settings. Usually, the file that reach the printer have little in the way of knowing what is printed, aside from expensive reconstruction that would only give the general shape, if even that. And even if you can send actual 3D model files to a printer that would do the slicing locally, there’s no “absolutely required” fingerprint there. A tube is a tube.
And, just so you know, there’s a slew of public printers and scanners that will just plain not recognize any of this, too. There’s also some “protection” pattern in some official document; large office printers would choke on them, where a home scanner was fine. This is, at best, only enforceable in the flimsiest of ways.
Applicability is in the eye of the beholder… of bureaucracy.
It is not really enforceable what people grow in their nook with led lights, or what they produce with metal lathes and metalworking tools, or what they mix up with common chemicals, and yet!
With EURion, printers/scanners that are capable of somewhat convincing replica go into the “definitely need to do this thing” money bracket I guess.
Printer instructions are also usually quite convoluted (don’t event know if anybody really knows the actual format), but definitely it’s not the actual document being sent to a printer (except some last decade printers perhaps), just the actual dithered inkjet patterns, though I am heavily guesstimating. And yet, from inkjet patterns, the printer knows to crash, presumably, though I dont know, the knowledge of currency steganography seems spotty…
There is a semi-infinite amount of processing that can be done on the slicing machine, so detecting gun-like item is wildly possible. Making your own slicer is the same as making your own photoshop (or hacking it). I definitely don’t see 3d printers having enough horses to figure out a non-watermarked-model produced geocode to have gunlike things. But! We forget! With legislation, everything is possible. Probably will require any decent (especially things like metal) 3d printer to have an ISIC specifically programmed to rebuild a model from geocode and do analysis :D (Honestly, completely easy with current technology, MNIST 99.99% accuracy fits into 10k transistors or so)
But I guess this assumes same amount of know-how and confident skills that they had in 90s. It will probably all crash and burn and make all honest customers very unhappy.
Additional note: Since 2003, image editors such as Adobe Photoshop CS or PaintShop Pro 8 refuse to print banknotes. According to Wired.com, the banknote detection code in these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies such as Adobe as a binary module.[13]
Everybody with Photoshop / Paintshop pro literally has an unexplained (likely uninvestigated) government binary blob that might be a backdoor :D
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!
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.
But it’s not about signing the weapons but about blocking the weapon even being printed. Also, 3d printers are a lot more prone to failures and not holding the exact line.
Easy solution. Sell a separate “motion platform” and an “FDM module” as distinct products that basically snap together.
Sooooo you want to stop gun violence in the US so your first instinct is to fuck over 3D printers because gun violence is okay as long as the guns are bought from the normal vendors?
This paw isn’t about lowering gun violence, this is something pushed to protect the gun manufacturers
Jokes on them. I already block my printer from talking outside the LAN.
Printing guns wouldn’t be a problem if you just make all bullets cost $5000.
Bullets are even easier to make than firearms.
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.
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
This is stupid.
You easily tell who is 3D printing guns because they have one hand and bits of plastic barrel stuck in their faces.
“3d printing guns” isn’t about the pressure holding parts, it’s about the traceable serial number holding parts. On most firearms the “lower assembly” or “receiver” (frame, trigger group, feeding assy) is legally considered the firearm and is what bears the serial. Most of those can be printed and use off the shelf hardware to work, albeit with a much lower lifespan.
Pressure containing wear parts that are meant to be exchanged (barrel and breech bolt) typically do not carry serials and are thus not normally traceable. If you eliminate the serialized, traceable part of the firearm, then any collection of parts could be used.That said, eliminating an entire hobby and industry because gun serialization laws haven’t been updated in a hundred years is probably not the right way to do it.
