Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.
(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)
I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.
Preemptive regulation is absurd.
[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...
EDIT: I think you mean "allegedly"
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…
(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)
e.g. https://d12t4t5x3vyizu.cloudfront.net/ritchietorres.house.go...
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.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
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.
Absolutely ridiculous.
It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/a4gnr3/makes_perf...
(Sorry for the reddit link, it's a common image but that was the first url I found from a quick search that had it up front and center).
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).
Something something about distribution.
Of course, this is silliness since it is very easy to just buy a gun in the US, and it is also legal to make one in your garage.
The government allows private ownership of automatic weapons, but hasn't issued any new tax stamps for 50 years. You can convert any semiauto gun into a full-auto gun for a few cents of 3D printed parts (or a rubber band). The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.
I think yes, it is reasonable for Congresspeople to fire a gun before they legislate on it, because otherwise they are incapable of writing good laws.
Good gun regulation in the US would probably look like car insurance, where gun owners need to register and insure their weapons against the possibility of crimes being committed with them. There are so many guns compared to the amount of gun crime that it would probably not end up terribly expensive, especially if you own a gun safe.
Well yeah, it's not exactly easy to get everyone to understand that insurance isn't magic and money out has to match money in.
You don't have to be a life-long user to regulate heroin, but if you start legislating second-hand heroin smoke, people might look at you sideways. You kinda need to know a little even if you've never actually ever seen heroin. If you demonstrate severe ignorance, people are going to call you on it.
Even for those, you can get 80% finished parts for those - just drill a few holes, and file off some tidbits, and you get an almost factory-spec gun.
I'm no expert on US gun law, but afaik, some states even allow you to make your own guns without registration, as the law defines gun manufacturing as manufacturing with the intent of selling them.
So there's plenty of options, many of them better than making a gun with a printer.
But even all this is typically overkill, I dont think criminals go to these lengths to make their own guns, they just get them from somewhere.
So yeah, money out not matching money in is exactly the problem.
> The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.
This wasn't the goal by the congresspeople, and that them having fired a gun would've changed that goal.
That was the goal. They knew they weren't going to be able to pass any kind of legislation that actually msde people safer, but they wanted to look like they were "doing something".
This is incredibly common. It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.
I don’t own a gun, and think guns should be regulated more and better, but the heroin let alone another one are just flawed. There are no legitimate, non-life-ruining use cases for either of those analogies.
If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.
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
they should at least be able to understand that a 3d printer is akin to a turing machine and what the real limits are - strength of the printed material vs length of the strip of memory.
It would be nice if they delegated to experts, instead of think tanks or populism, when it came to dealing with these. Both are examples of rampant regulatory failure.
0: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/11/17/handing-zip-g...
Every part except the firing pin is now printable (you can print quite strong carbon-fiber reinforced parts at home). The firing pin can be made from a nail or similar piece of metal.
> You can't get bullets
Bullets are mostly easy enough to make. One of my neighbors growing up was a competitive shooter who competed nationally and internationally. He manufactured his own ammo in his home shop, using tools any boomer dad had access to, like a lathe, presses and very accurate scales. He didn't really pay any more for ammo than we did per round. The only reason criminals don't do it is because buying factory ammo on the gray and black market is so easy.
The most difficult part to make would probably be the primers, but that still isn't difficult for any chemist.
Here's a (old) video of someone in Europe making their own ammo at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Cx4idIIe0
I would suspect it is at least partly because the gun that killed the United Healthcare CEO was partly 3D printed.
https://medium.com/statute-circuit/the-atfs-quiet-digital-tr...
> one particular design, outlined in his book Expedient Homemade Firearms, is the best known. This design makes extensive use of easily procured materials such as folded sheet metal, bar stock, washers, and hex screws. It is a simple blowback-operated sub-machine gun and entirely made from craft-produced components, including the magazine and pistol grip. The major drawback of such designs is the lack of rifling in the barrel, which results in poor accuracy and limited range
This book was openly sold on Amazon 10 years ago. I still have one on my shelf.
Receivers are tracked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/comments/b4d9gy/unicorn_rifle...
(Yes, it is a real gun and it shoots real 9mm bullets.)
this hasn't been true for like 5 years now
Even in police force or army, they literally count every single bullet, and for every fired bullet, it must be explained in detail.
Maybe that's why we have low gun-related crime here.
Gunpowder is fairly simple to make.
> Maybe that's why we have low gun-related crime here.
Mexico has extremely restrictive gun laws and that is not the case there. It seems to have more to do with how much crime you have than whether someone who could be charged with homicide could redundantly be charged with having a firearm.
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.
And no-one is (yet) suggesting banning lathes, hacksaws, or files.
You need to hold a suitable licence, which isn't expensive and is mostly an exercise in proving to the police that you're not a violent psychopath who's likely to run up to people in cars and shoot them in the face.
So, unless your garage is down to a pair of rusty pliers and a dried-out Biro then you're probably still up there.
However, in practice the police continually take and often destroy legally owned antiques claiming they are zombie swords.
The law is written in such a way the police can take anything and you have to prove to a judge they aren't illegal.
One very large example of such police practices: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RPm4Pts23Qg
I'd also add that the TSA is a good reason why we shouldn't expect talking legislators to gun ranges would make better gun laws.
The reason the TSA is what it is is because legislators fly more than most people. If you've ever been to DC you see a lot of this sort of security theater everywhere.
So much of the TSAs budget should be redirected towards what would actually make long distance travel safer, improving the ATC and Amtrak.
But don't worry, in the mean time they're coming for our regular knives.
The BBC has already rolled out Idris Ebla to explain that kitchen knives shouldnt have points[0]. Yes this has been picked up by politicians with the minister for policing at the time calling it an interesting idea [1].
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/...
Sorry about the amp links
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.
https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...
A lot of the polymer guns (1911, AR15) need to be reinforced with metal at certain places for any kind of reliablity. A Glock doesn't need to be, because the material was invented by the designer of the gun and the gun was intended to be a polymer frame from the start.
Someone is. They recover thousands of illegal guns in Chicago alone every year.
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/report/firearms-trace-data/fire...
God forbid individuals and organizations not choose paths of action that "low level piss off" millions of people such that their chance of being at the business end of some outlier who will actually do violence upon them is non-trivial.
It's not hard to not be "the thing" in any given crazy's life they choose to go out with a bang over, especially if you're not something they deal with every day. If that means that the default amount of screwage your organization applies needs to be dialed back, or that you must clean house a little better or more often then cry me a river.
>most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is
Except it's not. The "budget" you have to wrong people and cause despair before people would be apathetic to violence done upon you is pretty directly coupled to the amount of good you do to offset your harm.
The ATF has been in court (and lost) quite a bit [1] over this.
[0] there's a nice picture and writeup here of a pistol brace being setup https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/gear-review-sig-sb15-pisto...
[1] a brief rundown of the 2023-2025 legal rulings https://www.fflguard.com/atf-pistol-brace-rule/
House Bill 2321 (HB-2321) proposes exemptions only for machines with licensed AI firmware that connects to blacklists, potentially requiring refits or licensing for machine shops.
> The "budget" you have to wrong people and cause despair before people would be apathetic to violence done upon you is pretty directly coupled to the amount of good you do to offset your harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Abraham_Linco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_John_Lennon
Agree to disagree. I'm not willing to trust the judgement of those most willing to commit gun violence as to whom deserves gun violence.
The entire concept is absurd on about 10 different levels.
In 2023, they had a 0.8% profit margin[0]. 9 billion dollars in a trillion dollar industry.
Ignoring the disingenuous framing ("taking off the top" including how much they pay their employees), how does that compare to other industries?
[0]https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2024-annual-hea...
To use your heroin example, this is akin to banning spoons or needles because they heard those are tools of the heroin addict. It shows a lack of understanding on the part of the regulator and has a far reaching effect on people legally using the items.
Highlighting that was actually part of my point. What utility does insurance add to justify its existence as a middle man? How are we better off with a middle man taking a cut vs nationalizing the industry? And that 14% is at best, given the other externalities of the existence of insurance and its perverse incentives.
You're saying "how is that worse than other industries", but I'm saying, why is there an industry there at all?
If you look at how Apple detects contraband imagery, they hash every image that gets uploaded into the photos app. Those hashes are transmitted to servers that compare them to hashes of known contraband.
A similar system could theoretically be used for STL files. So it isn't about detecting exact shapes, it's about preventing printing of STL files that are already known to be dangerous. This would make it harder to illegally manufacture parts for weapons because it would make it much harder to share designs. If you didn't have the knowledge or skill to design a reliable FCU, you would have to find a design someone with that knowledge and skill created - which the printer could theoretically detect with a cryptographic signature.
As the original author of the post pointed out though, this could and would be bypassed by actual criminals. As with most things like this, it's probably impossible to prevent entirely, only to make it more difficult.
You're spelling out a specific process in detail--which is the only reason I'm picking on details. Do you have anything documenting what you're describing?
From what I remember, Apple's system was proposed, but never shipped. They proposed hashing your photos locally and comparing them to a local database of known CSAM images. Only when there was was a match, they would transmit the photos for manual confirmation. This describes Apple's proposal [1].
I believe what did ship is an algorithm to detect novel nude imagery and gives some sort of warning for kids sending or receiving that data. None of that involves checks against Apple's server.
I do think other existing photo services will scan only photos you've uploaded to their cloud.
I'm happy to make corrections. To my knowledge, what you're describing hasn't been done so far.
[1] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...
The real problem with our system is that for anyone who is going to hit their deductible, or especially their out of pocket max, the costs no longer matter at all. Sure, that cancer drug can be $500,000. GLP1 drugs for $1,000 a month? Why not?
Of course, there's no free lunch on this. In a single payer system you get things like the UK not approving certain cancer treatments for people over a certain age, certain medications just aren't available, etc.
Otherwise you could make every plan a very high deductible plan, possible just not cover medications at all, etc. But then people will complain about people not being able to afford things, especially in the short term.
This is demonstrably untrue: https://gnet-research.org/2025/01/08/beyond-the-fgc-9-how-th...
Why would you waste everyone's time posting such nonsense? It's not that I support this legislation, but arguing against with counterfactual statements is unhelpful noise.
its a framing trap to think you have to print or cnc the whole thing in one job.
split it up into many smaller jobs, each one not looking dangerous, rezero start the next section as if its a new job, spiff it all up with a session of crank and curse finishing, and the blockade is meaningless.
People should not have to have great experience with killing machines to be able to regulate them.
US gun laws are bizarre.
But even then it's not that difficult, it's entirely possible and legal in many states to print a polymer lower for a AR15 or Glock 17. Then go buy a parts kit from PSA $450 and have fun zero background check or sales tax required as the smaller gun parts stores do not have multistate business nexuses.
It is also not difficult to 3dprint a glock switch, even though they illegal per the NFA https://3dgo.app/models/makerworld/2035005.
This is 100% virtue-signaling from politicians.
This article is a few years old, but has more of a plain-English, third party explanation: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/01/21/what-apple-surren...
Its fair not to trust Apple or any company, but Google and a lot of companies were scanning the cloud versions without the negative press Apple got. My understanding is Apple proposed scanning on-device because images were encrypted in the cloud. Uploading and have manual review process seems like a big ongoing cost.
Personally, I dont think Apple is doing anything with photos it stores in the cloud.
Like the first article says, technically they could, because they store the encryption key for user-convenience. Turning on Advanced Data Protection should take away their ability to decrypt photos. But there are a whole bunch of caveats if you're talking about all cloud their data and that has changed over the years.
I'm not saying that I'm for it, just that writing a law that bans them isn't all that hard.
Oh well.