> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician

At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.

Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.

I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.

I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...

Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...

The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.

I’ll just build my own 3D printer lol. Did it college 15 years ago. I’ll do it again.

People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?

Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.

Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York

Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.

It’s becoming a thing, police don’t like to report on it because they don’t want to give people ideas. They didn’t want to report on Glock switches either. I do machining as a hobby and am interested in machining guns from an academic challenge perspective, I’ve not done it because I focus on making things I can’t buy. Guns from an academic perspective are fascinating, we’ve been making them for a long time in just about every possible way, and there is an easy way to measure and communicate quality, I.e. does it shoot and how accurate is it. I think the ban is absurd, the tech to make 3D printers / CNCs is pretty generic and someone sufficiently motivated to make a gun is unlikely to have difficulty putting together the machines to do it.

Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine.

Absolutely ridiculous.

> Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns.

They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877

The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.

And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

Actual shootings with 3D printed guns are relatively rare but it’s come up because Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one.

I haven't printed a full firearm but I've printed some replacement/ergonomic parts for my legally purchased firearms. And there are people printing guns - you don't hear about it because they keep their mouth shut about it.

> who this is coming from and why

I would suspect it is at least partly because the gun that killed the United Healthcare CEO was partly 3D printed.

Does the UK ban shows like Forged in Fire that teach you how to make all sorts of specific blades?

The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygxGrxCEOp0

[2] https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/BWA-Ammo-V...

Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?

Preemptive regulation is absurd.

> Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!

People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.

Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.

If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.

We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.

is it because guns are easy to get without printing?

Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).

Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.

This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.

My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…

Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.

Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.

i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.

> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.

The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

you can buy every individual component and build it yourself, it's absurd (I did some years ago)

Indeed. Don't want people making guns? Ban the making of guns. Banning the production of guns using a 3D printer makes zero sense, should ban CNC machines too then.

The gun industry does not earn anything from 3D-printed guns, so those kinds of guns are "free game" for the law makers.

Exactly. In the US you don't even need a license if you want to manufacture a gun for yourself. The idea of it being made illegal is far from reality.

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.

>buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers *sold or delivered in New York* to include “blocking technology”.

I.e don't buy your printer in New York. Pick it up out of state. Problem solved.

Yes, this is rent seeking, and yes New York is gonna New York, but not a big deal.

It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary

The folks at adafruit probably do know, but it does make sense if you expand the words: "Control, Alter, and Delete"

I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?

Reminds me of people who think penultimate is just super-duper-ultimate.

It has been used as an idiom to mean stopping or restarting something (the former in this case) for decades: https://wordspy.com/words/ctrl-alt-delete/

I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.

Alter the control, and delete!

In modern Windows, the three-key salute is a way to lock your session securely. Maybe that's what they mean: locking it up?

Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"

Maybe we should just install this keypad on our printers and be done with it:

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/ctrl-alt-del...

Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.

Hey, it's similar to Weird Al's song:

Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you

If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you

Perhaps they were using Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the Task Manager so that they can kill an unruly process?

This is more like installing anti-virus on your 3d printer.

It's the same as control open-apple reset.

I don't think there's a reading that suggests it's a good thing for 3D printers. The rest of the page confirms that.

Mate, the government is responding to a concern _from the populace_. Your "simple people" are begging lawmakers to restrict access to dangerous technologies in this case.

None of what you said is true.

> the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm

There has been a right to manufacture firearms since before the Revolutionary War, and which has remained a right continually since.

> it must be for personal use

Not necessarily; though you can't conduct business without a federal license, you can, for example, manufacture a firearm to be given as a gift.

> cannot be transferred

See above.

>must have a serial number

Not only is that not true, a federal judge struck down the prohibition on defacing serial numbers in United States v. Randy Price (2022):

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvsd.23...

I think it's still not a viable problem to solve.

What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?

Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.

How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?

You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.

If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.

They want to make it illegal

I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.

For example[0]:

> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.

…

> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.

0: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111

Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.

Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.

Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor

> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?

The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.

It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.

Also, if I wanted to print a gun, there are thousands upon thousands of older Creality and Prusa printers that I could buy used. My CR-10 isn't connected to the internet, it's running a FOSS Marlin release.

It will be very strange and funny if there is a registry of 3D printers before there's a registry of guns, and for that matter, it will be very funny if it becomes easier to buy a gun than a 3D printer, with the reasoning being that 3D printers can print guns.

There would be a presumption of intent. Probably an "aggravated" add-on to whatever charges you might be facing.

I highly doubt we would send goon squads door to door to check your firmware. Then again, given today's situation in MN, I wouldn't rule it out either.

It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.

Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.

> What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set?

That it's easier with this skillset to build guns and sell them to criminals when the penalty is the same.

The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.

The problem is, nobody is willing to use 2nd amendment rights to defend other amendments.

Right, so they can't use the blocked print as cause to get other evidence. Or if they do it is excluded.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What do you mean? The police shut down 3d gun factories every now and then, and here's a EP briefing about it https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7758...

I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).

If you want to be really simple you can make a slam fire shotgun with two pipes and a nail, no machining skills required

Legislators will never be prosecuted for receiving an illegal file by email

It's the same "blocking technology" JWZ uses on his sites.

Easily sidestepped, it's there to make a point I guess: https://www.jwz.org/blog/

> Similar with cars that have to have self-stopping when they almost run into another car (for example on your phone and person in front breaks).

The US regulations on Automatic Emergency Braking systems requirements for new cars are actually several years behind many other markets like the EU and Japan.

This isn’t really an American thing and it’s not for blocking Chinese manufacturers. Chinese automakers can make AEBs too.

It’s more complicated than that. A 2D rectangle with certain graphics is entirely different than a single part of a gun which may really look like anything. Would you recognize a trigger sear if I showed you one?

And if 3DP gun designers get blocked, they just have to alter the design slightly. Vs counterfeit currency which always and forever must look the same. If the 3DP database detection is loosened to catch lookalikes, then you have false positives for the guy making a desk lamp whose part just kinda sorta looks like a trigger sear.

Also, I am not aware of any open source 2D printers built from the ground up, but 3DP got started that way. So bypassing this would be insanely easy.

It’s political theater.

Images of authentic $50 bills are pretty easily detected. They are designed that way.

It's not technically possible to detect "gun geometry".

The only way to comply with this law is to ban 3d printers entirely.

Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban. It would be like if printer manufacturers weren't just asked to prevent the printing of US dollars, but anything that looks like money, having an ability to detect if something is money-like based on look and feel alone, without relying on an existing database or hardcoded watermarks.

Your implication makes me think that you assume that this useful-yet-not-overreaching detection tech is possible. Do you have any ideas for how this would be implemented? Because in my mind, the only way to ensure compliance would be either a manual check (uplink to the manufacturer or relevant government authority, where an employee or a model trained on known gun models tries to estimate the probability of a print being part of a gun) or a deterministic algorithm that makes blanket bans on anything remotely gun-like (pipe-like parts, parts where any mechanical action is similar to anything that could be in a gun). These scenarios seem to be both a lot more annoying and a lot more invasive. There's no negative consequences for tuning detection to always err on the side of caution and flood the user with false-positive refusals to print. Both scenarios are obviously a lot more involved and complicated than a basic algorithm checking if you're trying to print an image of a US dollar. Therefore I don't see a reason why drawing this comparison is useful. The only thing these implementations have in common is that they're detecting something.

The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.

Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.

I was bounced out of a Kinkos circa 2000 with my grandparents for attempt to counterfeit Pokémon cards on the photocopier. Mind you I didn’t seek to make illegal copies. I just wanted to photocopy and color in and draw on my own artistic creations. Fun times learning about copyright mechanisms and fraud as a kindergartner.