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
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!)?