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?
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).
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.
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.
> 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 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.
https://medium.com/statute-circuit/the-atfs-quiet-digital-tr...
Receivers are tracked.
this hasn't been true for like 5 years now
And no-one is (yet) suggesting banning lathes, hacksaws, or files.
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.
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/
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.
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...
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.