Why would you buy a pipe at Home Depot? A gun barrel is not a firearm, and is not required to be registered or serialized. You can drive to Arizona or Nevada and buy an actual barrel, with rifling, manufactured to meet well-known specifications, without showing an ID. Until this year, you could have a barrel shipped to your California residence without an ID. There's no need to build the Shinzo Abe contraption.
> So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Occam's razor. This isn't a shadowy manufacturing cabal, threatened by 3D printing. Gun control lobbyists are trying to prevent the printing of handgun frames and Glock switches, because they're the easiest parts to print.
> Either way, this is bad legislation.
California legislators haven't met a bad gun law that they don't like.
> Out come the zip guns. Homemade gun. You pull the hook back, catch that bullet square, ping. Hit you in the head, man, you got serious problems.
> What I'm saying is that no one is going to build a lower in this manner for a firearm chambered in 7.62 and do anything useful/important with it. Maybe the cartridge size here is a distraction, idk, but this isn't a specification that I would consider common and/or useful for 3D printing a firearm.
The fact that no one was caught using such a weapon is irrelevant. You stated that there are people out there who would use it, so your statement that "no one" would want to is untrue.
Huh? There is no evidence that anyone is using a 3D printed 7.62 weapon system to do crimes. Of the existing evidence, criminals overwhelmingly use conventional firearms. I'm not understanding your point. The would-be and successful assassins in the news the last couple years used standard rifles, ranging from 5.56 to .03-06 in caliber. I think you are assuming that criminals are less sensitive to equipment reliability than they actually are.
Let me put it this way. If 3D printed firearms were such a game changer, they would already be using them at scale. They are not, and these laws are part of a fundamental misunderstanding about how firearms function and how 3D printing technology works.
9mm 3DP guns have hit the news cycle repeatedly, less so for higher power cartridges. IIRC, there's a .50 BMG project well underway.
Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
This legislation is insanely, horrendously bad and harmful, but "3D printed gun components are useless" isn't a solid argument against it. They're useful enough.
The real arguments, as others said, are:
1. You can achieve much more already without 3D printers
2. The legislation won't achieve its stated objective as any "blueprint detector" DRM will be trivial to circumvent on many levels (hardware, firmware, software)
3. Any semblance of that DRM being required will kill 3D printing as we know it (the text of the law is so broad that merely having a computer without the antigun spyware would be illegal if it means it can drive a 3D printer)
It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition, but it's not good enough to actually compete with them.
> Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record. Given his apparent political alignment, he presumably used 3D printed parts for trolling purposes since there was no actual need for him to do so. He could have bought any firearm from any of the places they're ordinarily sold.
Does anyone actually believe this? Is there any funds for this theory?
Seems to be too far fetched to be even worth sitting.
>Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record
That really isn't the point (he still doesn't have a criminal record, by the way).
The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
I guess the counterpoint is that it's not actually useful to criminals either, so there is no incentive for any non-fool to want laws like this and then all incentive arguments are weak because foolishness can be attributed to anyone.
One, you succeed in never being identified or apprehended. Consequently you, rather than the police, have the gun you used, and you can file off the serial number and throw it into the sea or whatever. They don't know who you are so they never come looking for the gun you no longer have and it's just one of millions that were sold to random people that year.
Two, you get caught before you do the murder. Some cop thinks you look too nervous or you get into a car accident on the way there etc. and they find the gun. Having one without a serial number at this point means you're in trouble when you otherwise wouldn't be. It's a disadvantage.
Three, they catch you in the act or figure out who you are because your face got caught on camera somewhere after you took off your mask etc. At this point it's extremely likely you're going to jail. This is even more likely if the weapon is still in your possession because then they can do forensics on it, and it not having a serial number at that point is once again even worse for you. This is apparently the one that actually happened.
Whereas the theory for it allowing you to get caught would have to be something like, they don't know who you are but they have a list of people who bought a gun (which, depending on the state, they might not even have) so they can look on it to find you. But that's like half the US population and doesn't really narrow it down at all.
There is no criminal benefit in doing it so that leaves the remaining options which are either trolling or stupidity.
The gun lobby has a long history of trying to ban low cost market entrants.
But having to bring your own bags limits how much you can buy. If someone has a plan to just use their own bags, they will likely forgo purchases at a higher rate than if the bag is not in the equation for them.
It's not obvious to me that the buying limit effect sales decrease would not outweigh the savings on physical bag purchases. Maybe I'm not following?
The short answer is that bags are a non-trivial cost for the larger chains. Now, they get to charge for them at an astounding markup and no longer have to compete with any grocery store on this point. All grocery stores are affected equally, which means it is disproportionately damaging to mom-and-pop stores and smaller chains.
Also, it’s been awhile but don’t plastic bags make it easier to carry more things at once because the handles are so thin and flexible? And I don’t remember handles ever ripping on plastic grocery bags.
If the math works out in favor of charging for bags it would imply that the margin is incredibly thin in the literal sense of the word incredible. Like the average purchase has so little profit that 10 cents per bag is meaningful? What is the average profit on a bag of items or on an average purchase? Surely more than 10 cents, no? Like I know grocery stores are notoriously low margin, but that’s among businesses it’s not almost 0 in an absolute sense.
In some jurisdictions, a grocery store isn’t allowed to give you a traditional disposable bag at any price. In others, there’s either a bag tax or a minimum price, usually five or ten cents, a store must charge per bag.
This is not true. They currently fund people and policies that are 100% anti-2A without any pushback. It's just a matter of fooling the people into accepting the anti-2A stuff you do support.
I have 0 reason to believe this.
That is some pretty wild speculation, and a terribly risky proposition for any company because they would instantly get blackballed by the 2a community.
It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music. It is a group that has decided that one issue is more important than anything else to them. And they vote. For you, if you are for them, but for your opponent, if you are not. They will primary you. They do not care if D or R is next to your name. In fact they love pro-gun D politicians, because it’s a chance to pull that party into respecting all constitutional rights.
The NRA is massively successful because of this. They do one thing, and everyone in it knows that. They don’t have to agree on anything else, because if you can’t have guns, the rest of the politics is irrelevant.
A company that made the slightest anti-2A movement would be dead by sunset the next day. No store would carry their product. No consumer in the know would buy their product.
Which is, in itself, a manipulation. They largely aren’t 13- and 14-year-old innocents; they are 17, 18, and 19-year-olds who are engaged in criminal enterprises.
The murder rate in the US is far too high, but if you have no contact with the illegal drug trade your chances of being murdered plummet.
> It isn’t. It’s a group of people, some of whom are country-music-loving Republicans who hate them black folk, but who also include a lot of them black folk, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of people who hate country music.
But... that is what most political opinions are like.
They learned discipline the hard way. They may not vote for the other guy, but they aren’t showing up for you. Very few blocs work that way, that strongly. The ACLU is a great example of a group that was captured and turned to things that really have nothing to do with the core mission of protecting civil liberties. They protect the ones that a certain class of folk deem worthy. They sometimes defend a Nazi to show that they are balanced, I guess. They promote diversity - which is a fine opinion, but isn’t the mission. The 2A groups have a laser focus. Nothing else intrudes. So hippies and rednecks and rappers can all get along because they only have to agree on one thing, and the organization does not care about anything else.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20251027/from-printers-to-pa...
California and New York have been done more for gun rights than anyone else by passing absurd laws that get struck down by the judiciary, setting precedent.
However, due to the adversarial nature of the judiciary system, opposition is required to set precedent. It'd be great if the overstepping didn't ever happen but we don't know what is overstepping until SCOTUS rules.
California and New York have played a pivotal role in defining the edges of the second amendment.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gun-safety-advocates-war...
Probably more accurate to say politicians are trying to take actions which will be seen publicly as fighting against gun crime. It seems like a stretch to say anyone earnestly believes that 3D printed guns are a real problem in the landscape of existing gun crime in America
In the FPV hobby, interest in smaller drones has increased, but I'm not really sure whether to attribute that more to regulations or just the fact that more components are available now to build smaller drones that can fly in public spaces without interfering with other people's usage, or even inside your own home. Overall it feels like the main impact of the regulations is to keep people away from the hobby entirely, since people who get into it inevitably start ignoring the more onerous rules sooner or later.
I'm expecting it to get worse, anyway. And the guys who fly DJI-style consumer drones are fucked, sub250 or not.
Like you say, you just need to build a key metal piece, and voila, the rest is buying parts that can be delivered to you, in some cases fully assembled.
You could also just buy black powder guns directly to your home (idk about in CA or NY though) which are not treated as "firearms" by the ATF.
The only people shooting 3D printed guns are enthusiasts usually, who have other guns.
There is some appeal to criminals, because the frame is the part that gets the serial number and is regulated. But if you want to attack this problem, the 3d printer is a backwards way to do it.
Separately, I am always a little confused by the idea that you cannot "trace" these firearms. Maybe people do not widely understand what's going on here, but the serial number being traced is on this lower receiver, which can be swapped out (in most but not all cases). If a firearm with a 3D printed lower is used in a crime, I have to assume - though I am not an expert - that you could still connect spent casings to that weapon in the same manner. In other words, it does not matter that the lower doesn't have a factory-installed serial number plate or a stamped serial number. My guess is that this confusion is being injected intentionally in the debate by the people who support/push these badly constructed laws.
It's presumably a misunderstanding of how investigations work. They're paperwork people so the assumption is that the serial number is of vital importance because it's what's on the paperwork, and if something could exist with no serial number then the entire system is in danger.
Meanwhile the serial number is overall not even that helpful. If you catch the suspect with the weapon in their possession then it doesn't matter that much what the serial number is, what matters is if the weapon they had matches the forensics. By contrast, if you don't recover the weapon then you don't have the serial number anyway.
The only case where a serial number would really do anything is if you recover the weapon after the perpetrator already tried to dispose of it and want to try to use the serial number to identify the original owner. But in that case the perpetrator can leave you without a serial number regardless by just filing it off. It doesn't really buy them anything for it to have never had one to begin with.
Isn't the same thing true for 3D printers? The first time someone tries to print something they frequently end up with spaghetti and less technically competent people wouldn't even be able to get the thing to attempt printing anything.
It was 13 years ago that the first major fully 3D printed firearm was released and even the ATF admitted that most of their reproduction attempts were capable of firing bullets at lethal velocities https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/feds-get-in-on-3...
I’m not an expert but even back then they could supposedly get 8-10 shots out of them.
So the claim that dozens of milled metal parts are necessary doesn’t appear to be factual
The barrel is so short and non existent that it basically does nothing except hold the (metal) cartridge in place. A liberator isn’t much different than simply holding a cartridge in a fixture and hitting it with a hammer.
In a conventional gun, the barrel serves to allow the projectile to build velocity and stabilize the trajectory by putting a spin on it. The liberator does neither, so the projectile will be moving quite slow and will be inaccurate.
And also, they do commonly explode, even on the first shot. It’s a gamble.
“Lethal velocities” doesn’t really mean much. A slingshot can propel a bullet at lethal velocities. And that would probably be a more suitable option for criminals as it would be more reliable and have more rapid fire capability.
Now it might be a viable one-shot gamble for a criminal in a place where guns are entire forbidden. But in those places, it is typically not easy to get a real .380 cartridge, so it doesn’t really change much. And in the US, there are much easier ways for criminals to get much better guns.
Legislators point towards the rise of "ghost guns" in crimes, but then you dig into that and they include every criminal who files off the serial number on a stolen gun in the stats, which is by far the more common circumstance along with being much easier, more reliable, and cheaper for a criminal than 3d printing a lower and assembling it.
there was no nelson device, he would have been better off with an empty soda bottle.
In reality, a 3D printed gun is not reliable, the filament will melt and nobody wants to have a melted gun while in the middle of a shoot out with other criminals or law enforcement.
The barrel will be metal. In designs made for the US market, it will almost certainly be an actual manufactured gun barrel, since gun parts other than the receiver are not closely tracked in the US. In designs for Western Europe, the metal parts will be either milled or things you can buy at the hardware store[1].
The barrel and chamber being made of something tougher than you can get from an FDM machine is basically a requirement for making a gun that doesn't explode in your face when you shoot.
1: Here's an image of all of the parts going into a gun designed to be made in the EU. Per the wikipedia article, the barrel rifling can be added with electrochemical machining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9#/media/File:FGC-9_Compon...
if someone wants to make a gun... they can. It's not complex to manufacturer simple firearms - we managed it as far back as the freaking 10th century.
So why freak out over this, for example, and not CNCs? Or Power tools? Or forges (CHF barrels are a thing too!)?
While poetically consistent, it enlarges the crater around these bad laws if they are passed and enforced. Basically all new manufacturing setups will need to stop and reprogram to stop and start according to fluctuating rules designed by committee, and will need to be made brittle to prevent circumvention.
It is a debacle.
Or just move to Texas. Or even Idaho or Dakotas. Which, under a certain angle, is good, it would lessen the wealth and expertise disbalance between states.
I still hope that California comes to senses before they would need to accept the moniker The Footgun State.
Still a thing in Australia.
If you've ever been a kid copying TMNT Michelangelo with home made nunchucks you've almost certainly smacked yourself in the face.
Y'know what's martially better than two sticks with a string between them? A single big stick.
But also, threshing flails were used outside of rice-growing regions.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Battage_...
Considering that they must be hundreds of times more expensive than long sticks with no hinge, I would say the reason must be that they're better at threshing.
In the end though, I'm not an expert. I'm repeating what people who seem to be experts have told me and it makes sense - but I can't judge who is an expert. (either you random hacker news commenter, or whatever other "expert"). I'll gladly stand corrected if anyone can show they really are an expert.
I mean, that's a solid reason to ban them :-)
In countries where healthcare is socialized at least. As a cost-saving measure.
They're melee equivalents of footguns.
>If you've ever been a kid copying TMNT Michelangelo with home made nunchucks you've almost certainly smacked yourself in the face.
I've seen qualified users train with metal nunchucks as a kid in the early 90s.
Even then I thought, if I had those, I'd knock my own brains out so fast ಠ , _ ಠ
>Y'know what's martially better than two sticks with a string between them? A single big stick.
Also an order of magnitude safer for the user.
That's kind of the point. Look at the way industry is regulated in any "high touch" state. Beyond the most basic of home businesses just about everything industrial is "illegal without a license".
Like I can't just park a tub grinder on my property and start taking tree waste from tree services and landscapers and selling truck loads of chips to the local pulp mill. I need to bend over and spread 'em for a state license.
They would be overjoyed for all manufacturing to be like that. They would love to ban your CNC plasma table or laser cutter and then sell you back the right to use it so long as you shell out $$$ to some compliance industry (that invariably is owned by a bunch of people well connected to the legislature, if environmental and weed are anything to go by).
I mean I’m not in favor of this 3D printing law but manufacturing guns without appropriate licenses is illegal already. They’re trying to target consumer 3D printers for the same reason your paper printer refuses to print currency. Anyone with any engineering knowledge can see why the 3D printing analogy doesn’t work because there isn’t a fixed set of models being banned.
Also because you can manufacture the exact thing with a lump that you just saw off later (or with a hole you fill with epoxy), or slightly larger / smaller / bent / etc., and it'll be functionally the same.
A functional piece of counterfeit currency needs to be identical to legal currency by the definition of currency; being indistinguishable from the real thing is the only function (otherwise, what you have is a piece of paper).
That doesn't apply to anything whose function isn't "looking exactly like this specific thing".
If the legislation aimed to by museum-grade visual replicas of certain shapes (e.g. an exact scaled down copy of Michelangelo's David), it'd be a technically challenging, but feasible problem.
But the problem they're trying to solve amounts to detecting the manufacturing of pieces with a certain function algorithmically, and forcing that spyware into every machine.
To boot, any form of algorithmic inference of the sort will require much more computing power than a 3D printer ever had.
That's ignoring the feasibility of solving the problem of "can this be a part of a gun", or even the much simpler one "is this part functionally the same as this other part" without giving a false positive on everything (as the saying goes, anything thing is a dildo if you are brave enough; guns aren't much different).
What I'm saying is that zero engineering knowledge is required to understand that requiring machines to refuse to make exact visual replicas of objects isn't the same as trying to restrict function.
I.e. that checking if two flat designs look the same is not hard, but checking if two designs will function somewhat similarly if manufactured is a God-tier problem.
_____
TL;DR: the only thing you can check by looking is looks.
And while that's all that matters for currency, it's irrelevant for guns.
Hope someone explains it to them legal folls. Ain't no engineering knowledge required for it.
which too many people are sorely lacking
> what's special about 3d printers?
They can make guns made out of plastic and metal detectors are kind of the primary way we try to find guns on people.
You are probably right about the lobbying group, I agree.
Edit: I'm not saying it makes sense, but this is the angle the congress folks are taking, sheesh.
But it was just as misinformed as it is today -- practically speaking, only metal is suitable for the high pressure components of a gun. A common 9mm cartridge produces upwards of 35,000 psi.
What are bullets and shell casings made out of again?
If you want something resembling an actual gun (more than one shot, won’t blow up in your hand, some reasonable chance of accuracy, etc), then you’re going to be using multiple metal components (including the bullets of course) all of which would show up on a metal detector.
If you have a capable VMC, you can make the die and other equipment necessary to stamp shell casings from commonly-available parts and machinery.
From there, with a modern Dillon or Hornady reloading press, you can crank out thousands of rounds per day without issue.
Primers are a legitimately difficult thing to manufacture, but (good-enough) bullets, casings, etc. are completely doable.
thats a problem that may not endure. if a firearm is reengineered to use an electrode to detonate charge rather than a chemical primer, there is no need for murcury fulminate, just a piezo electric spark generator, and a few square cm of cerebral cortex.
It is a mature technology. The main issue is cost and simplicity, since it often requires adding electronics to weapons that normally would not require them. The military uses electronically primed cartridges for things like chain guns and autocannons, since those require electronics to fire regardless of how it is primed.
yes the very nature of a chain cannon, makes electronic priming,the easier way to go.
so far we can still go to the store with 20$ and come back with a 200pk of 209s, someday that might be not so easy, and electronic is the better/only way.
when you have a chain cannon rof 100 rnds per second, it gets intense.
a spark discharge solves a lot of kinetic issues with engineering the mechanism and its timing.
For chemical primers there is a non-trivial lag between the trigger breaking and the firing pin being accelerated to sufficient velocity such that it ignites the primer. The mechanics of maximizing acceleration of the firing pin is adversarial to durability, reliability, and precision in a number of respects. In automatic weapons it is made worse because the same physics must run in reverse to support the desired rate of fire.
With electronic primers, you mostly only need to worry about switching electric power fast enough (trivial). The relatively fragile firing pin mechanics don't need to exist. But you do need electronics, which has its own issues.
but its not difficult to manufacture, if we are in the scenario of shortage or absconderance of products.
lead styphnate is common use, but not everyone is happy with lead either. i have a couple boxes of non lead primers, they smell different when they go off but i havnt encountered noticible difference compared to lead primers.
Usually non-ferrous metals like brass, lead, and copper unless you live closer to Russia, then you may end up with steel-case.
That's besides the point though, the barrel of the gun will be steel.
For some reason I hear "metal detector" and my brain goes right to magnetism.
So can many, many other things. Hell - something like this will do SO MUCH BETTER than anything I can print:
https://www.mcmaster.com/products/pipe/carbon-fiber-1~/?s=pl...
It's weird because 3d printed plastic is WAY down the list of things I'd prefer to trust handling the explosion from ammunition.
Frankly - even the hobbyist CNC I have is a MUCH better method of creating a plastic gun. FDM printing is not something I'd want to trust in this case, neither is SLA printing in most materials (some of the very high end ones like nylon in a formlabs printer... maybe?).
But my point stands - guns aren't that hard to make, and we aren't trying this legislation with any of the other myriad manufacturing methods. Hell - compare to a potato cannon... (also a plastic gun, btw...)
So what's different about 3d printers?
My hunch is this has fuck-all to do with guns, and a lot to do with something else, because 3d printers ARE different in that they let me manufacturer all sorts of other, much more complex, goods much more easily and cheaply at home.
Any real attempt would need to be at the national level, not that I would advocate for it, but it's simply a pipe dream to create a "gun free zone" in a country with 100s of millions of firearms. There are plenty of gun enthusiasts in California, they just don't flaunt it or talk about it.
I would rather go for Swiss-stye mandatory gun training, and keeping a gun in (almost) every home. But, like the Swiss, I would require not just storing the gun in a certified safe box, but also providing an ID + a proof of mental sanity, and registering the gun. That would raise a much larger wave of protest though, both from the "left" and the "right". Even though, IMHO, it's the only sane way.
Not just because of random strangers. I went through a mental health crisis, and there was a dark time where if I had had a gun I would be dead now. No amount of lockers or safe boxes or mental health tests would have saved me from that gun.
And wtf do you need a gun for anyway? I have never, not once, been in a situation where having a gun would have improved it. Why do you think giving everyone guns would be a good thing?
Yeah, it scares the crap out of me too.
I'm queer and very far to the left politically, and my neighbors all have a lot of guns and if you listen to what they say they think that queer leftists deserve to be murdered just out of principle.
I am not under any illusion that firearms make any situation with the government better; I have been assaulted by DHS (pepper spray) and in that situation I am certain that going from being "non-compliant" to "violent" would result in being murdered by the government in short, short order.
However, I am very worried about situations where my neighbors (who are all very well armed and very far to the right and very excited about 'interruptions in regular government') become violent.
There are many, many historical and current precedents for that situation.
So although the best situation would be unilateral disarmament, that isn't going to happen in the rural west of the US.
All that said, what do you think my position is? Owning "sporting rifles" and training on self-defense with my cadre of trans folks and anarchists seems to be the more realistic strategy than just hoping the US doesn't get suddenly worse, especially given the path it has been taking at the federal level.
Personally, I'd much prefer to be running around playing with my ham radios but here we are.
I don't know what I'd do in a similar situation. Again, I don't see how carrying a gun could improve the situation, except possibly that if everyone on the left was also carrying then the folks on the right might get scared and begin to think more rationally about gun control.
Statistically, though, you're safer than they are. Guns are much more likely to kill their owners than anyone else [0], so while it's obviously scary, maybe the thought that your neighbours are less likely to kill you than themselves or each other brings some comfort?
[0] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/160/10/929/140...
That article says no such thing, despite people often claiming it does.
I am about 50, and I can tell the difference between when my mental health was in a place where I might kill myself and where I am now.
That makes the math around gun ownership a lot more straight forward- hoping that the bigots will off themselves before they start lynching folks again (because it wouldn't be the first time) doesn't seem like the safer bet.
I am glad you live in a place that has never been touched by bigots excited by war- clearly there is no way that in Europe the bigots have or will ever (again?) require local resistance fighting (right?).
Second, you can just take it from the horse's mouth, since papers give you an abstract stating their findings. An even briefer snippet of what they say themselves there is:
> Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns
> in the home of dying from a homicide in the home. They were also at greater risk
> of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person
> was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in
> the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in
> the home. Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from
> suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different
> method.
The first half of that regarding homicide says nothing about being killed by your own gun, only about being a homicide victim in your own home. It _could_ and likely does include some of that, but it's not captured or quantified, all we see is total homicide numbers. Nor does it have any statistics about anyone else killed, either outside the home, or someone else killed in your home, so there's no basis for comparison there.
The second half only claims to be true for males in the first place, not everyone. It also explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't deal with the likely confounder of people who don't have a means of suicide in the home committing suicide _outside_ the home, and thus not being included in their numbers.
The sophistry about whose gun killed them is kinda moot. They don't actually track whether the gun-owners died by their own gun or not, as you say.
But it's likely, isn't it? We're talking about people who either kill themselves, or kill their family members. It's likely using the gun that's already in the house, rather than a new, different gun being brought in from outside.
And if it is a stranger coming in from outside with a different gun, then doesn't that contradict the entire point of owning a gun? That you can protect yourself and your family from strangers with guns?
What you call "sophistry" others might consider "not misrepresenting what research says to fit an agenda." There's value in using precise language to communicate what the numbers actually show.
And I don't even understand how the fact that a gun isn't a guarantee in any way contradicts that it _can_ be used in self defense.
My point is that a claymore mine _can_ be used for home security. The fact that it would destroy the house that it was securing doesn't contradict this.
One of the reasons that Switzerland, a country te size of Bay Area, with 9M current population, has not been overrun by the many wars in Europe for last 200 years is that every citizen is expected to fight back, without formally joining a military force for that. All men have to serve in the military for a couple of months to get the basic training, obtain and master a small arms weapon, and keep it where they live. (The ammo is not provided though.) Every few years the citizens should show up for several weeks of refresher training.
This is very close to the idea that an armed population is a backstop against tyranny, but much better implemented.
Per-capita firearm-related deaths in Switzerland are 7 times lower than in the US, and firearm-related homicide rate, 20 times lower. Truth be told, firearm ownership per capita is still about 4 times lower in Switzerland.
Maybe they also are doing something more right with mentally ill people, who in the US often receive little help.
The last few months have disproved this completely. Literal plain-clothes masked thugs seizing people off the streets en masse, and there have only been a handful of cases of armed civilians resisting.
And I disagree that Switzerland preserved itself during WW2 because the forces that stomped all over the professional armies of Europe are afraid of an armed civilian population. That just doesn't make sense.
Lol this is so gun-brained, even for an American.
Switzerland has not been "overrun" because they are in the freaking mountains. Gun or not, good luck invading mountain cliffs.
But it's of course not limited to small arms distributed among the population. There are many more preparations done in advance, like rocks prepared to block roads if an explosive charge is detonated. Same with various bridges and railroad choke points. There's a large network of shelters and bunkers, kept in a good shape. Etc, etc.
The point is not that a huge army (like Hitler's in 1940) would not be able to overrun Swiss resistance. The point is that the cost of such an invasion would be prohibitively high. It serves as a good deterrent.
If you break gun violence down in the US by race, you get results that are much closer to Europe.
>Nationally, the U.S. gun homicide rate (per 100,000 people) in 2020 was 26.6 for people identified as Non-Hispanic Black, compared to 2.2 for those identified as Non-Hispanic white and 4.5 for Hispanic individuals of any race.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10209993/
And indeed you can observe the gun homicide rate in Sweden has doubled since 2016 precisely because of demographic change.
Sweden:
2016: 0.301
2017: 0.398
2018: 0.423
2019: 0.438
2020: 0.463
2021:0.430
2022: 0.597
Before crystallizing strong opinions about guns I suggest you spend some time learning to wield them. It's trivial to travel to a place that embraces guns and engage in a training session. A lot of people are surprised that the reality of it is very different than they imagined. It's not like in the movies. Kind of like how driving a car is not like in the movies. I have many friends who have no interest in guns who I have introduced to shooting, and even though they have not changed their opinions they told me they enjoyed the experience. With enough familiarity guns are not feared, but respected, similar to driving a car makes first time drivers nervous. We are surrounded daily by miriad tools we take for granted daily that have awesome lethal power within them, we'd all be wise to remember.
edit: and the statistics on gun suicide contradict your point, which I missed earlier [0]
Which partly drives my curiousity around this (and I realise that my tone on the original question was harsher than I meant - this is genuine curiosity). I just cannot envisage a situation where a gun would improve matters. I've been in a few fights, have some scars. Even in those situations, having a gun would not have improved the situation, and might very well have killed me. So, yeah, I'm really curious about why you think making guns more widely available would be good?
[0] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/new-report-highlights-us-2...
A "proof of mental sanity" would be a far more concerning overreach than 3D printer bans or gun bans, especially as we see things which are mandatory in a society become something tantamount to personhood. I don't really know how one would even envision implementing such a thing.
Further, yes, you can get a license despite being "visibly insane". Some people consider it insane to believe in a deity, to not to, to smoke cigarettes, to have dyed hair, to have an electric car, to have a lime car, to own a Nissan, etc. During my test, the tester said nobody should drive if they hadn't gotten 10 hours of sleep, and I admitted I had only had six or seven. I still got my license.
Interpreted generously, maybe some small percentage of "insane people" are visibly so. Even then, looking at someone is not a proof of a lack of sanity.
Sanity isn't a thing you can test for, it's definitely not something the government should test for.
To make the implied question explicit: How do you envision positively testing for sanity? How would you feel if this test were implemented in 1940, 1900, 1860, 1820, etc? Would your feelings about that differ by the inclination of the politicians in power?
Exactly! Prohibition works really well.
Now if only we could figure out what state that coke, heroin and meth are still legal in!!
I'd say the real groups behind this are the anti-gun ideologues, the "do whatever it takes to stop my panic attacks over Bad Things maybe happening" left-wing control freaks, and the old-fashioned "big state" authoritarian crowd.
And the only reason they're paying attention to 3d printers is that some pro-gun ideologues and provocative makers have been talking up the concept of 3d printing guns.
when you manufacture a personal firearm, it is supposed to be yours, for your use. the 3d printer aspect, makes it possible for a group to print large quantities of receivers, under the radar, to be combined with "accesory parts" close to "drop-in" assembly style.
So no - not buying it. Hell, there's not even a real price difference. I can get a Nomad3 from Carbide 3D for the same approximate cost as an H2D from bambu labs.
And I can get super cheap temu versions of either for under 500.
Other states like Colorado have similar bills that define a "3d printer" as a computer aided machine that uses additive or subtractive manufacturing processes so CNC machines likely aren't safe either.
if you set up your job so that you print a block of, lets say 4 lower receivers for a stoner style firearm. and you ran a number of printers, you start an arsenal, for a fire team, not just a lonewolf, and that scares people.
Just buying a bunch of lower receivers. There are plenty available for less than $50. Hell, there are companies that sell them in 3 packs. If you are trying to build an arsenal you can just go to a gun store, there’s no limit on how many you can buy at once. If you don’t want the purchase to be background checked go to one of the many states that allow unrestricted private gun sales and go nuts.
in that threat model, appearances on camera buying anything related to a "mission" are going to be avoided.
no one, not even an FFL will see your face, if its all made from scratch.
this fear of takeover by a "hostile aliens" is quite alive, despite the promises of the GunControlAct
lots of companies got fat and happy selling you plastic crap for a fortune, now 3d printers let you make plastic crap at home for pennies.
If they must pass these laws, it must include protections for printing consumer goods parts, if they won't add that I will not vote for you.
contact your state reps and tell them that.
I agree that this legislation is not good, but you apparently aren’t aware of the large communities dedicated to 3D printing guns.
The first 3D printed gun was making headlines 13 years ago and since then it’s turned into a semi-underground fascination.
You aren’t going to be fashioning a gun out of a pipe from Home Depot more easily than the designs these groups are playing with.
Many of the subreddits, Discords, Facebook groups and other communities have started to get shut down since a 3D printed gun was used in a high profile murder recently.
There are a lot of comments in this comment section from people unaware of how big these communities are. I’m not supporting these legislative attempts to interfere with 3D printers but you really should know some of the context.
They are typically stocked with material and ready to deploy at a moment's notice. When the time comes that you need a weapon, casually walking into Home Depot won't be an option.
What they actually hate is people who buy bags of glock parts from ebay (contains everything but the frame) and then print the frame. The frame being the handle part, everything below the slide but none of the internals. That's the legal 'gun' when it comes to most glocks and clones. The new ruger rmx, a newer glock clone, is different, the firing group (trigger and all the associated bits there) is the serialized part. The frame is, of course, very easy to print.
All the regulations around firearms are super fucking stupid, the way they classify different parts and try and make them illegal. Like.. in a lot of states if you have a rifle (ar or otherwise), you are not allowed to have a vertical foregrip for stabalization. However if your foregrip is like 5 degrees off pure vertical... legal.
This 3d printer 'ban' is unenforcable, it's a fucking tool, you can build anything with tools. Sure it's easier and takes less skill to download a glock 19 frame model off the internet and hit print, but there is, apparently, a lot of work that goes into making the gun work with that frame well enough for the gun to actually cycle.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ramset-MasterShot-0-22-Caliber-P...
Even though lobbying is not _technically_ illegal, we should probably learn to treat companies that engage in it (to the detriment of society) as if it were. Avoid their products if you can, and get your friend-group to do it as well. Build off-ramps. Maintain and share lists of executives who work at these companies (to put pressure on their reputations -- after all, what is wealth worth, if ordinary people refuse to take your money, or to give you any of their attention?). The market's distinctive feature is that it makes things fungible: currency, goods, and even people. Eliminate or reduce fungibility, and you get a very different kind of dynamic, one that has the potential to reverse the trend of rising inequality (and rent-seeking behavior, and unfair one-sided arrangements, etc) over night.
In fact, the strategy of any company is to find a way to make an entire class of companies/merchants (not competitors) fungible, while making themselves non-fungible. Most moats are built out of the pieces or remnants of someone else's moat.
Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too hung over to tell.
https://matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/winner-art...
If legal arms dealers want the state to step in because of some decentralizing technology, then for the government it would be yet another cost center to combat this phenomenon. So lobbyists need to come up with a kind of reward, and design more "palatable" proposals, so that income can be derived by somehow initiating government control into the whole decentralized technology instead of just the illegitimately decentralized subsection...
Do we never patch one security hole until we patch all security holes?
(I'm not defending this particular legislation, just saying that this isn't the way to defeat it)
For example, one legislator always sponsors a bill (which goes nowhere every year) to outlaw chemtrails. This year's version[0] includes the plot from the SF novel Termination Shock[1]. The word "artillery" was not in any previous session's version, nor was sulfur.
Links:
0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb60.html
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)#
> If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm
While I totally agree with you that this is all about lies, there is still one difference in that most regular firearms are metal-based. With 3D printing one could print plastic or similar materials.
Again, I am not saying this is a reason to explain this lobbyism here, but we also need to be objective when debunking the lies of the other side. For instance, one difference is metal detection (naturally plastic-based weapons would also tend to break more easily, so this whole legislation is a total lie to begin with anyway; California is currently broken. I am surprised about that, usually you'd think other US states are more broken, but California is now in the top 3 lobbyist-controlled states - and from there the disease spreads slowly).
I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.
So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?
So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.
Either way, this is bad legislation.