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.
Bauer-Kahan is a Democrat, if you wonder.
If the bill is passed, I’d be surprised if Newsom didn’t sign it.
This is all politics is, convincing morons to vote for puppets of the ruling class.
I imagine it wouldn’t really be too difficult to design parts in a way that they would be completely inconspicuous until trimmed and assembled
or a 3D printer that doesn’t call the FBI
Wow a great bill to stop people from making weapons. Y’all gonna ban pipes and steel ball bearings next?
The fuck is our country coming to man.
Here’s the thing. This isn’t about banning weapons. It’s about controlling access to IPs and preventing right to repair.
A forcibly Internet connected online. Only 3D printer that has to first check a public database to see if it’s allowed to print the thing you just sent is most definitely going to be used to block you from printing parts to fix your appliances or devices.
And definitely going to be used to provide copyright protection and blocking to IPS of large corporations and companies.
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.
Mental health care is a challenge even in universal health countries. MH is very time intensive.
I guess that’d make open-source firmware illegal.
That’s just a happy by-product for them.
Printing guns wouldn’t be a problem if you just make all bullets cost $5000.
Damn that guy must’ve did something! They put $50,000 worth of bullets in his ass!
Just messaged my assembly member asking to vote against it. I suggest those who live in the state to do the same thing too.
Messaging your representatives is a waste of time and only exists to make you feel good about yourself.
The only way to fix problems like this is to vote for better reps, but we’re too stupid to do that so the problem doesn’t get solved.
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.
Ok however its hard for me to believe that such measures could render effective. Regulating the tech literate people in such a way will always fail. The only effect it could have is that when its illegal to posses a unregistered/hacked you are an easier target for “law enforcement actions”
Because money. Firearms are everywhere in the US because of gun lobbyists. If citizens print their own guns then money is lost.
Because it doesn’t make money for Big War
Because between them, the legislators don’t have two brain-cells to rub together and figure out why this is an un-enforceable bunch of bullshit.
Because it makes firearms available to people without having to jump through hoops the government can track, but they can make a machine that makes flexi-dragons into a boogyman, so they throw a “protect the children” in the bill and it automatically passes.
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.
Because our government is run by old dumbasses.
The last half of the 2020’s is going to be remembered as when we lost all anonymity and privacy.
I guarantee by the end of the decade we get on-device snitches (to protect the children!) that profile and report everything you do, everything you type, everything you view.
Just leave me alone. Let me think my thoughts.
Then refuse to participate. Use open source software and any other kind of system outside their control until they throw you in jail. That’s what I’ll be doing. If enough of us do they can’t jail us all. Participation is consent.
Land Of The Free^TM
Terms and conditions apply.
If they were smarter, which they are not, they would look to place restrictions on the slicer software. I doubt the printers even have the capability to recognize what is being printed. Most of them are like move left 3 steps, extrude .1mm of filament, move right 1 step…. yada yada yada.
This is just insanely dumb. They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
Slicers are open source so anyone can and will remove surveillance malware from it.
Require printers to check digital signatures on STL files and have only approved slicers add those
So we’re back to placing restrictions on the printers…
They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
That’s not surprising, that’s just what politicians do. Especially politicians who are 65+ years old and completely out of touch with technology.
I am reminded of a senator from Alaska trying to describe the internet as a series of tubes.
I mean…replace the word “tubes” with “cables” and it’s apparent it’s not completely wrong. he’s reasonably correct on an ELI5 level I would say.
That was way more accurate and intelligent than this. Like orders of magnitude.
Sen Ted Stevens, rest in piss.
“The internet would be a series of tubes if we rolled out fiber, but as the literal chairman of the Senate committee regulating the internet I’m somehow against that.”
Frankly it seems more like a mild inconvenience then actual prevention. I don’t really care how smart a software gets, it can’t predict and prevent all possible configurations of prints that could possibly be used to create functioning guns without being so overly restrictive that even perfectly innocent prints would get flagged constantly in which case they simple won’t sell to normal users.
It would be a constant game of whack a mole with new creative designs, using multiple printers or with non-printed parts in the design. But no hardware or software that a smart enough engineer has their hands on is impervious to mods either, especially if they’re motivated like someone seeking to produce firearms would be.
It’s an overreaching law that will likely solve little to nothing, but might make 3d printers in general a bit more annoying to work with. “Sorry, you can’t make your dice tower because there’s a 16 percent change that it could be capable of firing an RPG out of the dragon’s mouth. Please make your design at least 12 percent less gun-ish and try again.”
Wow. I hadn’t even thought about some of these ways around this. Excellent points!!
This is a lost battle either way but a non-lost opportunity to acquire some power
This is why politicians should be automatically retired at 65. We shouldn’t be allowing people who grew up without seatbelts to make any decisions involving technology.
FWIW, the person that proposed this legislation is 47: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Bauer-Kahan
Maybe have an exit poll, if they deserve retirement or must do community service to clean up the damage they have done…
So in other words, what else is new?
The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.
It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.
Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
It seems they are rationally putting pressure upon those willing to own guns or 3d printers.
Like most of rifle shots fired in WWI didn’t kill anyone and were meant for suppression.
Making you afraid of everything that can be a legal trap. Thus possibly dropping the thought of even owning this or that thing.
I haven’t read the bill, but from the description I think you could actually get around this by building your own. They can’t sell a printer that doesn’t have this, and you can disable it, but it doesn’t say here that you can’t build your own that never had the software. In that case, I assume we’ll see kits that are totally not meant to be assembled into printers with all their parts you need, and then unrelated documentation online somewhere on how to assemble it.
I was just talking with a friend about the microstamping idea. I’d never heard of it before.
They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
You’re surprised that law makers are trying to regulate things they know nothing about? Oh…oh I have like 2000 years worth of news for you…
Laws are much older than 2000 years. To be more specific, at least about double that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
Not surprised. Just frustrated.
This is coordinated. Multiple states at the same time.
I don’t think it has anything to do with guns. Middle of the bell curve, most people aren’t using these for guns. They’re using these for right to repair. They’re using these for garage businesses. Shop businesses. Small businesses. (See: not corporate USA). Or for making/creatimg.
I’ve no doubt there are people sitting on some small slice of a tail on the bell curve who do print gun parts, but this is about corporate America.
It’s also a foot in the door dig on free and open source software.
It’s a way to block individual and small business from horning in on corporate America’s profit for a comparably tiny slice of their own.
Printing a knob to replace a broken on/off switch instead of buying a whole new item? Worse, selling that item or even just posting the pattern for free? We can’t have that.
Now, you’re bypassing my item’s proprietary system by printing…
Wait. I was able to sell threaded hand screw knobs for $5 each. Now you’re all just printing them? And the pattern is up there for free?
We need a law.
It is nothing less than, I say without exaggeration, a war on property rights as a whole.
Great points, I think you’re on to something.
I think the old saying “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” doesn’t apply when malice and corporate interests are in alignment. Now I’m curious to dig into who actually wrote the bill, and who are they financially supported by…
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.
On the contrary, there was a very interesting video by PSR (pardon the YouTube link) about how the civil war in Myanmar was being fought almost exclusively with 3D printed firearms. Apparently they’re reliable enough to be an actual threat.
“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.
Is printing a lower less illegal than removing the serial number? Must be, otherwise what’s the point other than cost?
Yes. In most of the US removing a serial is explicitly illegal, while manufacturing a firearm for personal use (the serialized part is legally the firearm, but most places don’t require you to serialize personally manufactured firearms) is completely legal.
I believe it’s a federal felony to remove the serial.
That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t positive and I didn’t want to provide incorrect information.
Serialized parts have their purchases recorded and restricted, other parts are (usually) unrestricted.
How would they connect a serialized part to a purchase if the serial number is completely gone? I guess 3d printing would also allow those who are unable to legally buy the parts to get them too.
They can’t definitively pin a particular purchase to a particular serial-defiled firearm, but the fact that the government knows that you purchased a firearm on such and such date is probably enough of a concern for a lot of people. It’s a lot easier to gather a stockpile of parts without drawing much attention.
If there’s a record of you purchasing X gun, and they find you have that same model with the serial filed off, 99% chance you filed the serial off your gun.
Right, which is why I was wondering if printing it w/o serial number is less illegal. Because if it’s not, either way having it found would guarantee arrest
Entirely depends on where you live. Much of the US manufacturing your own firearm is perfectly legal. Some jurisdictions require you to put your own serial number on, but from my understanding most do not.
Because to get the serialized part, you still have to be approved for the purchase through background checks, which will go live on the state police database, and then the police can check that database to see recently acquired firearms if something happens. Chances are the list of a specific type of firearm with the serial ground off is going to be pretty short.
And yes, the being able to obtain it with no background checks at all is the other big key.
Because to get the serialized part, you still have to be approved for the purchase through background checks
Unless you get it secondhand. Then you just kinda… Skip all that. Legally.
Unless I am missing something obvious, the simplest solution is to require both uppers and lowers to be stamped. As far as I can tell, this would only be a burden to manufacturers unless there are some weird interactions with the idiotic “stamped part is gun” definition of a firearm.
That doesn’t make much sense as a law against printers, since it’s far easier and just as illegal to grind off the serial numbers on a gun.
This is true and very underreported.
