- My kindergartner has a 3D printer.
I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”.
I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand.
I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.
- I can see how something like this happens. We're talking about a 5 year old kid seeing something at school, and describing it to their parents. Who knows what the kid said?
Then you have situations like the young kid that did bring a gun to school and shoot a teacher, and there were tips not followed up on, and the school getting absolutely dragged through the court of public opinion because of it.
So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.
What happened to you is probably the best case scenario: kid told their parent something incorrect, that parent calls the school, the school checks in with you, you tell them they're wrong, the end. If the principal actually thought there was a problem, I doubt she would have simply called you.
- There's the case of a kid printing a non-functional toy weapon.
And then there's the case of years of consistent violent behavior, and even when the principal was advised on the day of the shooting that the kid was in possession of a firearm, she did nothing.
Hard to tell them apart.
- Panopticon in every class room ?
- >So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.
No, they don't. Because 99.999999% of the time they won't have guns and the other 00.000001% of the time well it's your ass anyway.
- That boy knows what he is doing. Kids figure this stuff out they are no dummies. You don’t like so and so? Tell teachers they printed a “gun”. Or mentioned “gun” or said a politically incorrect word. It’s a form of bullying using a system’s irrationality against others. Kind of like swatting
- Not at 5. 10, maybe.
Those are not the thoughts of a 5 year old.
- It's not that they are planning the sequence and understanding all the cogs in the machine. It's that they've seen the same situation play out 10 times already with other kids. All they need to do is copy it exactly.
- Unless someone taught that concept to the 5 year old.
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- > I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.
I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes.
Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.
- He started with tinkercad and thingiverse.
I tried basic elegoo and bambu printers.
He can’t read very well but he likes dragging shapes around on a tablet.
He would ask me to find shapes using the search engines then he mixes them together or reshapes them.
I would add them to his history.
This is why I was surprised to hear about 3D printed guns. I was quite sure there wasn’t anything like that in the history.
It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.
- >It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.
I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have.
Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded")
And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow.
The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...
- School shootings are extremely rare and so I was curious how it could be that large. The nuance is that those pages are not just listing school shootings as commonly understood/feared, but any shooting involving a school in any way.
So for instance from the 2010s [1] page you get teacher shooting principle, biology professor (female no less!) shooting other professors, guy killing himself in a university library after firing off a couple of rounds at nobody, 60+ guy shooting his 60+ year old wife in a parking lot then killing self, and so on.
I think that's a bit dodgy, because there's something like 130k+ schools of all sorts in the US [2], so you have a massive multiplier there. To put that number in contrast, there are fewer than 17k Starbucks in the US. Do the same by basically any metric, positive or negative, and you're going to similarly see a huge number of incidents.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
- Many school shootings would also be better classified as “shootings at a school”, such as targeted gang violence or arguments between individuals. This doesn’t excuse these events (kids should be safe at school) but most are not the sort of Columbine-style events evoked by the phrase. Conflating the two likely makes it harder to find a solution, as “ban guns” isn’t on the table without an amendment.
- to be fair, other countries also have listed as school shootings any event that involved shooting and a school; eg: Australia with a population ~ 15x smaller than the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_Au...
has a total of six (6) incidents this century (since 2000) .. somewhat less than a factor of 15 less than the US for that same 26 year period.
Note that three of the six incidents of the past 26 years involved guns being fired but no one being hit (no grazes, injuries, or deaths).
- I think the connotation of a school shooting is somebody going to a school and shooting numerous students in a mostly random fashion with the intention of creating terror. That's why guns are so scary in this context - it's trivial to kill a person with a gun, a knife, a car, or a brick, but it's much easier to kill 10 people with a gun than it is with the other instruments - well except perhaps a car.
But when you aren't listing just these sort school shootings, but instead listing any homicide that occurred within the vicinity of a school, why is it reasonable to exclude the various incidents of non-gun homicides at Australian [1][2] (or American for that matter) schools? It just feels like a false narrative. Because what matters if we're just speaking of safety at schools is how often people are killed within the vicinity of schools, though obviously subdata including the share of each weapon in homicides would be useful/informative.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lilie_James
[2] - https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15912963/Father-dies-...
- All the dodgy things listed in the second paragraph are solid school shootings?
- They don't pattern match with what people visualize as school shootings: kids bringing guns to school to shoot other kids.
- It is a nitpick, but majority of what you mean was (large ones) were committed by adults.
List by deaths is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
- I find it fascinating. There are the stabbings in china and car amoks, but everywhere else on the planet such behavior is only found with disenfranchised veterans after a large war has ended.
- Guns have always posed that risk to children. Despite that, the schools, at least around here, used to have shooting ranges and the kids would bring their guns to school to make use of them! Hard to believe now, and as you can image those ranges have been since decommissioned, but nobody batted an eye back in the day.
Key point here is that adults haven't always been bothered by things that look like guns. That is something that has emerged recently. What changed?
- Moreover, target shooting is the only school sport in the U.S. to have _never_ had an injury recorded as part of the sport itself --- that my local public school has a locker of rifles locked up and un-used in the basement and no longer has a marksmanship program/participates in competitions is _not_ justifiable on the basis of safety.
Further, children who have attended the NRA gun safety course have a much better record of safety and safe interactions with firearms than those who don't --- learning the rules of gun safety and the appropriate thing to do when finding a firearm which is not in the possession of a responsible adult makes for much less tragedy.
What has changed is that it used to be a part of the immigrant experience to purchase firearms and take up hunting, but the transition from rural farm life to urban city life means that an ever larger portion of the U.S. population has limited experience with/knowledge of firearms.
- If you have the resources, you could also serve her with papers. IANAL, but that arguably is libel, defamation, harassment and so incredibly insane that it deserves a severe legal smackdown.
- No, that is not even remotely close to qualifying for any of those things.
- Not sure I’d want to rope my kindergartener into something like that? I like GP’s approach
- So their child was accused of 3D printing a gun and taking it in to school, the parent confirmed online that, yes, their child did 3D print a gun and take it to school ... I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve.
It's not libel, it's a misunderstanding.
- It was a gun in the same way the word GUN on a page is a gun: only symbolically.
- US lawsuit culture is absolutely insane.
- What are your damages? What kind of remedy do you seek?
- Judge will throw it out unless you're well connected. They'll say the case has "no standing" unless you shell out massive amounts of money.
- Good for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered.
Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.
- Why do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?
- The rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience:
1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”.
2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world.
3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk.
4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil.
Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk, I say!
- This guy works in compliance!
- Because of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?
- Oh brings me to the good pre-CoC era when we did not need to have explicit rules and a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. :D You might say that it is too broad, but now with the CoC you have many more broad rules. :P
- > a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine.
Not a huge fan of overly broad CoCs, but they arose because, in fact, that simple rule did not work fine. It repeatedly did not work fine, in many groups engaged in many different endeavors. It worked not fine so badly and so frequently that people got tired of it and started writing out the explicit rules.
There's a lot of parallels between CoCs and sexual harassment rules. At first, it was a shitty free-for-all that was fun if you were part of the getting-away-with-it group but terrible for others. Then people said alright, had enough, we're going to make hard and fast rules against all this bullshit. Those first versions tended to be awful and heavy handed because they tried really hard to be comprehensive and serious about it, which is very well intended, but probably too far in the other direction. What we ended up with is probably vastly better, on average, for all involved. It's not as fun for people who enjoy treating others badly, but a whole lot nicer for everyone else.
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- Because that doesn't improve actual security. It's for dumb nuggets who can't do real defensive work. Maybe you would also qualify for that numb job.
- Fear of everything
- California voters, write to your state senator. I'm in San Francisco, and I wrote to Scott Wiener, who recently voted to pass this out of committee.
Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage.
But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are paying attention. The tech capital of the world shouldn't have artificially impaired tools.
- It doesnt matter. you know how much campaign financing is tied up with gun control groups? It sucks to lose all your campaign funding and get primaried, right? Wouldn't want that!
- When Wiener ignores these messages, will you vote against him in the next election, even if that means voting republican? Because if not, you can expect more laws like this one.
If you want different laws, you need to elect different politicians.
- He is currently in a congressional race. 1 month ago I voted against him, for Saikat Chakrabarti. In November he will face Connie Chan.
It's possible that Chan would also support this. She is not in a position to do so now, because she is not voting on state law.
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- Each congressperson's staff gathers all of the comments they get, counts them up, and reports back to the congressperson, passing along anything they think would be useful information; if you write a clear and careful letter about an obscure topic there's a decent chance the congressperson themself will see it. Congresspeople typically have local ties in their area and caring what their constituents think is their job.
It's a serious problem that there are some congresspeople who don't do any local events, send all comments straight to the trash, etc. You should vote those folks out.
In the longer term, we should push for significantly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives to 5–10x the current size and implement serious campaign finance reforms. In combination, these will help make congresspeople more responsive to constituents and less reliant on donors.
- Not an American, but I've wondered about increasing numbers myself. Certainly, giving each representative fewer citizens to represent could help.
I worry about the size of the bodies, however. Too big, and they become less wieldy. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder about other solutions. I was thinking of, for example, 10x the number, but each grouping of 10 has a representative, and they each give proxies on votes. Maybe best though of as, junior representatives. It'd allow more direct interaction, and in a sense you'd be electing regional representative staff for each congressperson.
I guess there are a lot of ways to handle this, but regardless I overall 100% agree.
- With modern electronics I really don't see why we can't have arbitrary numbers of representatives.
In fact I think my preferred system would be representatives get a number of votes equal to the people who voted for them, and anyone can assign anyone as their representative. Gate things like getting speaking time on representing more than x% of the vote, and maybe even have a minimum threshold if we're insisting votes are cast in person for cyber security reasons, but generally the bar for being able to represent people should be low and there shouldn't be winners and losers in elections but just people who represent different numbers of people.
- The modern democracy is unchanged from original Ancient Greek version to adapt to having 100,000 voters per representative from 100 when democracy was invented. It was never questioned if it supposed to work at this scale.
- They become more unwieldy, but that might be the point.
- Fuck congress. They are dead weight. Fuck the president too. Bring back anarchism.
- A 10x increase would just be chaos.
- This is correct. At this point all constituents believe something like "oh that's just a MAGAT and they don't matter" and throw it in the garbage. I personally think all congress people left or right should be thrown out if they don't personally reply. We're paying them to do this. If many people write about the same issue, they should not have to reply personally, but they should hold a press conference, recorded town hall or issue a statement.
We're losing our government and voice to radicalization.
- My letter opened with the fact that I generally favor reasonable gun laws, then elaborated how this is not that.
It's possible that nobody reads it and captures the nuance, but I did spend time to consider the framing. Nobody who actually reads it will think I am an extremist or that I haven't carefully considered the topic.
- 99% chance your letter ends up in the shredder without being read
- By the way I also know for a fact that Scott Wiener's staff reads San Francisco's subreddit. Commenting about Wiener's vote in there will reach his staff. Given the bay area presence here it's also possible somebody "who knows a guy" will even see this thread name-drop him.
- I posted it there. https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1ugs3l5/we_ca...
- If we're talking written letters, most of these offices at least have staff that read them. I've sorta lobbied before and they don't get quite as much mail as you imagine.
And they respond more often than you'd think. Your attitude is pretty prevalent so the chance to write back and change a voter's impression is hard to pass up.
- Get some sleep, your cynicism is showing.
- We'be been this way for decades, the government has been far detached from the will of any but the rich. The only thing Trump has done is demonstrate that, as a politician, you dont really have to try so hard to pretend otherwise anymore. And the people can and will do nothing but fight eachother.
- From what I know about legislators (I am a longtime SF resident but I am also a DC native and have known some congressional staff over the years), it is pretty rare that informed constituents write to them in a cogent and authentic voice about specific legislation, and they do pay attention to this.
Calls may work even more.
It won't work all the time and how much they do will depend on the issue and why they are supporting it etc. But it's worth a shot.
Remember I said: they should know you're paying attention. This can cause them to also pay attention.
- Alright, you won me over. I emailed my congressman from the EFF website with my own message. That's the best I can do right now. I just feel like politics is a losing battle. If its taken over by special interests and there doesn't seem like there is any end in sight, as it gets easier and easier for them to sway the people that are actually suppose to be working for us. What is the point? When we are combating legislation that no sane person should have to deal with there comes a time where the whole thing is unlawful and it we should stop investing our power into it.
- I emailed my representative as well!
- It is better to at least do what can be done instead of accepting a defeat without even trying.
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- I've written a state rep and had legislation come out of it. I've written a congressperson and had federal bureaucracy expedite my case out of it. People who think their government is unresponsive generally haven't actually tried asking their government for a response.
- There seems to be a propaganda thread in the culture now to get people cynical and thinking everything is rigged against you in advance, and a prerequisite to accepting this is to ignore how to the system actually works. The end result is to prevent you from getting involved. You never know if you don't try.
As an example (maybe some of the HN audience will dislike the outcome here but the point stands nonetheless), this week two sitting members of Congress were knocked out in New York, and their party told them the previous year to not bother trying.
- So what should we do, then?
- Manufacture a bunch of guns with a lathe instead lmao. Or if they try to take that away, forge weld smoothbore musket barrels the old way with bar stock spiraled around a mandrel. Just make sure you use enough 20 team mule and hear a crack every time, or it could make a mess when you proof it ;)
- Looks even more draconian than the New York law. For example, it seems to mandate proprietary, locked down slicers from the printer manufacturer.
--
For integrated preprint software [slicer] design, guidance for how vendors shall demonstrate that printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.
- Over the last few years, I’ve felt as though I’ve been living in a feverish dream all the time. Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve. And this is yet another example.
- >Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve.
Yet I bet you kept voting for the same parties that keep passing such laws.
- It's almost like American democracy has been dysfunctional and degrading further for more than half a century
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- It's six years later, and what happened during a public health emergency is still the most significant impingement upon personal liberty occupying your headspace? If you earnestly care about liberty, get off your simulated hobby horse and come back to reality. It's exactly this kind of disconnected nonsense that has encouraged the authoritarians to run wild.
- So lockdowns are still happening? If not why?
- I am curious which 3d printer manufacturers/developers are poised to take advantage of this.
What machines already have locked down (or partially locked down) slicers and communications to the boards? Have those companies made a statement?
Is there any opensource firmware which can comply?
This is a massive hit on the opensource community. As a vendor/dev of an opensource CNC control board (Smoothieboard) I will be forced to limit sales to any state with these laws (our board can easily be used to bypass these protections).
Having watched over the last 13 years how our boards have led to many other machines and innovations outside of the 3d printing community over the years (OpenPNP, Wazer, Opentrons, etc) I can only see this as stifling to development in every direction.
I wonder how companies like Machmotion and other retrofit CNC controls are viewing this as well. Since this also applies to all CNC.
I don't live in any of the states proposing these types of laws...but when it does come here I doubt it will be stopped. The simple act of making your own machine for art/design will make you a criminal.
"The more rules and regulations...the more thieves and robbers."
- We're bombing Iran to suppress technology form the 40s. We're suppressing advanced AI. We're suppressing 3d printer technology. Then there are the encryption wars. Control of advanced technology, not just weapons, is a larger and larger battle every year. When the robots get here, you'll need the governments ok to do anything at all with a robot. Mark Andreessen's comments that government regulators told him that they've suppressed whole branches of physics is ominous in that regard. Technology suppression is a whole separate narrative of history practically.
- Mark Andreessen has joined the FUD party, he's knowingly regurgitating a fake narrative.
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- Yeah, and then all those wild eyed assassins will get the reward of being sent out to the countryside to do hard labor, just like the Red Guards, who were also a bunch of radicalized blood-thirsty teenagers sent to tear down society, got after they were used to get Mao back into power. Enjoy eating stale rice and picking weeds all day while singing patriotic songs as your only form of entertainment.
- The masses have no idea who Andreessen is.
- And he wouldn't stop and reflect on why it's happening, either. That's like, weak or slow or something.
- Haven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.
- The Take Action link only took 30 seconds: https://www.eff.org/3DPrintCA
(did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)
- I share your hopeful optimism, but here's the reality of the mass-email campaigns targeting congress:
[email received 6/18/26 from the office of Steve Scalise, majority leader in the house, who is one of my representatives. I have trimmed for brevity.]
>> Due to advancements in technology, many third-party organizations use their mailing lists to send advocacy letters like this on your behalf. With the increased volume of third-party letters being sent to my office, I want to be sure that I am able to more appropriately address your thoughts and concerns.
I will be sure to consider the views you have sent me, but if you have any additional thoughts on this issue, or need other assistance with a federal agency, please contact my office directly through my website scalise.house.gov or by calling (202) 225-3015
-----------
In case it is not clear to anyone reading, this is kosher political speak for "I am ignoring automated emails. Consider this your notice."
Honestly, I am surprised it took this long, although I'm quite certain it has been going on for a lot longer and generally they simply do not provide the courtesy of telling you they are ignoring you.
- This is exactly why I had an LLM customize the letter as I said in my other comment; I've had a similar response from another of my representatives. It might not help much if they're filtering based on where the email is coming from, but on the off chance that they are filtering based on identical content, changing the content might make a difference. With LLMs, the effort needed to customize the content has gone down significantly (otherwise, I would agree with the more cynical commentators that such letters are a waste of time and energy).
- Also, if you have a couple extra minutes to spare, consider handing the letter and the name of your senator to an LLM (I used Deepseek V4 Pro) with instructions to research your representative and tailor the message to them specifically.
- thanks, done. i did handwrite a message since it seems more personal/effective to me
- Imagine if you couldn't buy a lathe unless it refused to make a baseball bat (which could be used for hitting people).
Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines).
Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over).
And if all of those checked with the government before functioning.
It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce that law, and create societal conditions that don't nudge or force people into doing undesirable things.
- In fact, right up front in TFA they point out that California already bans manufacturing firearms without a license. This 3D printer regulation is entirely duplicative and unnecessary.
- Which definitely fails Bruen.
- You can make all of those things. First you pick up two sticks and rub them together real good (maybe use the inner bark of a hickory tree or similar to make some cordage s.t. you can make a bow drill and rub them even better.. you may find cottonwood to your liking but I did it with green maple when I was 11 so if you can't lmao look inwards). Using the little coal you've created, build a fire. Now pile a bunch of wood on it and starve it for oxygen. Great, you've created charcoal. Now skin a big animal and make bellows from its hide. Now build a big fire and blast it with the bellows to make it rull friggen hot. Put some rocks in it that have iron in them. Collect the iron from the bottom of the fire (exercise left to the reader) into a stone tub. Build a few forms using wood, sand, and wax in the shapes of the various parts a lathe. Melt the iron in the stone tub and pour it into the forms. Scrape the mating surfaces of the lathe parts flat and clean with a hard stone.
They cannot take this shit away. It's futile.
- We used to ban the undesirable action! Then DEFCAD got that ban overturned, convincing the federal government that they have a First Amendment right to publish 3D-printable firearm plans. So now our choices are to allow widespread 3D printed firearms (which I and many others won't accept) or restrict the means by which they can be made. I genuinely do wish the DEFCAD folks had made different choices that would not have led us here.
- > We used to ban the undesirable action!
The undesirable action is shooting people, right? That's still banned.
It seems like you think the undesirable action is publishing plans for machines you don't want people to have.
- I want to know how on earth restricting the publication of plans could be consistent with the first amendment. That's like prohibiting the publication of books with content you disagree with.
- Do you think DEFCAD will get this overturned, too?
- Certainly not on First Amendment grounds, and in general I expect powerful AI will quite imminently make people more sympathetic to random manufacturing restrictions on potentially dangerous goods. I can imagine 2A arguments against any regulation that's specifically preventing the use of X for gun manufacturing, but my weakly held best guess is that they wouldn't be persuasive here.
- > ...our choices are to allow widespread 3D printed firearms...
Which parts of a firearm can be printed in a consumer-grade 3D printer? Be as specific as your knowledge permits.
Of those that cannot, how much money does one have to spend in order to purchase a 3D printer that is capable of printing those parts that cannot be printed by a consumer-grade printer?
Are you aware of "slam fire" firearms? If you were not, you owe it to yourself to learn how to make a functional "slam fire" shotgun. The tutorials are pretty widespread.
- I'm aware of "slam fire" firearms and know why and how it's easy to produce them. They're much less concerning to me because their rate of fire is extremely slow.
I don't know the details of what can be printed in a consumer-grade printer, not having performed firearms manufacturing myself, but I've seen things claiming to be pretty complete kits and it seems to me that most components should be possible. Barrels of any reasonable length might be hard, perhaps firing pins too. (And springs, but of course those are trivial to manufacture by hand.) If it's not actually possible to 3D print an effective gun, perhaps someone should make that argument in detail.
- You cannot fully 3d print an effective firearm on a consumer 3d printer. When people talk about 3d printing a gun they are almost always talking about 3d printing a single part—the lower receiver. Federal law considers the lower receiver to be a gun, and it is the part with a serial number.
A lower receiver is not complicated. It essentially just a quirk of the law that the ability to 3d print a lower receiver is useful to people who want to manufacture “untraceable” guns.
You could change the law so that barrels have to have serial numbers and accomplish nearly the exact same thing as completely banning 3d printers.
Also buying a kit, 3d printing a lower receiver, snd assembling an effective firearm is about as difficult as buying a kit to assemble an 3d printer and using existing open source slicers (or modifying a 3d printer to let you use an open source slicer).
And if 3d printers are as dangerous as the proponents of this legislation thinks they are, people would just hop across the border to Nevada and use a 3d printer there.
- > They're much less concerning to me because their rate of fire is extremely slow.
Not if you make a multi-barreled one and spend some time practicing. [0] Go check out some youtube videos... some of those kids are kinda nuts. But, okay, I believe you when you say that you're unconcerned about firearms with a low rate of fire.
> I don't know the details of what can be printed in a consumer-grade printer...
I expected this, yeah.
With a consumer-grade 3D printer you can't print the things you need for anything much better in the rate-of-fire department than a "slam fire" firearm. To make a semi-auto firearm, you need springs and a rod that are fairly strong and heat resistant to make the shock absorber that drives the gas-powered mechanism that ejects the empty cartridge after firing. You also need a cylinder that can contain the pressure and heat of the gases from the burning powder in the cartridge, as well as provide a straight guide for the bullet so that you hit what you're aiming at. For reliability, you'll probably want a metal firing pin. Your rate-of-fire concerns mean that you're worried about magazine-fed firearms, so you also want decent springs in the magazine to reliably feed ammunition.
Because you're concerned about firearms that aren't low rate of fire, all of these things need to reliably perform for more than a handful of firings.
> ...but I've seen things claiming to be pretty complete kits...
Looks like you never did the inventory on those kits. For any kit that is actually going to give you what you're scared of, you'll find that the parts of the firearm that actually do the hard work are not going to be 3D printed.
You've professed ignorance of what can be printed in a low-end 3D printer, but do you happen to be familiar with what can be made in a high-end 3D printer? If you are, would you care to tell me how much money you need to pay for a 3D printer that will generate reliable springs, shock-absorption assembly, and barrel that will function for more than a couple of shots?
> If it's not actually possible to 3D print an effective gun, perhaps someone should make that argument in detail.
So, there's the video at [1]. That's the guy's second attempt at a barrel for .22 caliber ammo, and it's... ineffective. I also want to call your attention to this short Popular Science news article from fourteen years ago. [2] Notice the discrepancy between what's described by the headline and the article body "3D printed assault rifle made from ABS!" and the truth exposed by the picture of the actual firearm... the important parts of the firearm are made of metal, rather than ABS.
I mention that Popsci article to demonstrate to you that the "3D printed gun" hysteria is not new, and the folks making the claims that one can just go up and get a fully-functional magazine-fed semiautomatic pistol or rifle straight (and entirely) from one's consumer-grade home printer are just lying.
[0] Anyone who has decided to use "slam fire" firearms to harm someone is clearly unconcerned with safety, so they could even make several to dangle from their belt to increase their effective rate of fire.
[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AA0R11oU90>
[2] <https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-07/working-as...>
- enforce that law
Califoria would not be a sanctuary state if they actually cared about enforcing laws.
- Why would a state enforce federal law?
- The US legal system never ceases to amaze me. Why indeed should a state enforce a law? Like, one of those anti-discrimination laws?
- Historically, the states never would have come together to create the United States if they had to give up all of their own sovereignty. The constitution is full of compromises.
- Why should it enforce a law from a separate sovereign entity, is the question. And the answer is, it shouldn’t. I don’t think states do, or should, enforce federal anti-discrimination laws. The feds do that. The states pass their own anti-discrimination laws if they want something to enforce themselves.
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- Lawsuits are part of the law, not thwarting the law. Refusing notifications and holds is inaction, the opposite of “actively.”
- pedantic. You can use lawsuits, within the law, to thwart the law. You can do it knowing you will lose, just to cause delays, like Califorinia and the 9th circuit are ACTIVELY doing to slowdown gun control cases from reaching the supreme court where they 100% will be struck down. Refusing notification is an action.
- If you see someone speeding and you don’t report it to the police, does that mean you are ACTIVELY thwarting the law?
- guess what, the state of california on the printer bed, depicted in the article, looks close to the profile of an AR15 pistol grip.
im looking forward to the idea that the outline of Ca. may trigger false positives
- It looks even closer to a California banned "large-capacity" magazine.
https://dpmsinc.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7217d38013ee...
- now that would be a curious looking AR15 with a california pistol grip, and a california magazine
- If this becomes law, it will give rise to a fun new form or protest art in this vain. What is the cutest thing you can design that nobody would consider to be related to guns, but which gets flagged? An obvious example... a llama sitting on the ground, legs hidden, and head held high in the air, chewing its cud. Llamas can be really cute! Sell them on Etsy/eBay/etc., printed by an out-of-state 3D printing service. I just used the EFF form to promise my state senator in Sacramento that I'd send her (and reporters that cover her) one of them if the bill passes.
- Conversely, add cute animal models to gun parts.
Maybe it would be possible to just embed a prompt injection into metadata or the STL mesh itself.
- Gun is stupidly to make. You just need a robust tube, a small hole in the end to trigger and you are done. Ofc it won't fire good, but still should be considered a gun
- I think what will happen is that there will be an explosion in the variety of gun designs.
People will make banana, cucumber, corn, sausage, etc shaped guns.
There will be guns with electronic triggers where the trigger could be a universal TV remote or an RC car remote.
- I had the same hunch when I saw it, which is either pure genius on the part of the author/publisher or pure lol meme magic.
- Better yet, design and popularize an AR grip that is the state of California
- It's fascinating because there are 3+ Constitutional Rights being stepped on which makes this much more nefarious than impacting some 3D printer hobbyists. If they can get their foot in the door on this issue you can kiss all of your civil liberties goodbye.
1) The right to bear arms absolutely gives you the right to make your own gun. It would be like saying the right to vote doesn't give you the right to use a pen or enter a polling place.
2) For the politicians that lack an imagination, print out the GCODE file and put it in a paperback book. Now is the government going to claim it's illegal to disseminate a book?
3) Neither does the government have a right to "search" a 3D printer without probable cause. That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
- At some point between this, age verification for the OS, and everything else, it starts to seem like a coordinated attack on computing.
- They've been at it since 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
- How is enforcement supposed to work? The firmware narcs pull your printer over and checksum your SD cards against permitted firmware? Or they scan it for illegal gun-algorithms?
- I'm surprised I haven't seen any makers on the popular YouTube channels I watch say anything about this.
Where's William Osman, Adam Savage etc talking about this?
- Like I wrote before is that it signals to the outsiders that things in CA are actually pretty well. The biggest problems are solved if the top of the agenda is to police 3D printers. That’s at least how it should be. I am being sarcastic, of course, I’ve seem the homeless in San Francisco and I am sure that’s not the only major problem.
- You've also got an infestation of billionaires in the San Francisco/ San Jose area ;-)
- Could the solution for surveilance state creep is to creat systems to subvert faster than they are subverted ?
- The racketeering statutes should be applied to the treasonous elites within business, government, and banking who conspire to use "private-public" partnerships to subvert the U.S. Constitution and our indiviudual rights. I further believe these individuals and groups need to be arrested, prosecuted, and punished to the full extent that the treason clause permits.
- If some people want to make their own gun, then some people will also make their own 3D printer.
This joke of a law isn't going to stop any 3D printed handguns from getting made, it will only add one more relatively easy step.
Then what, ban stepper motors?
- > Then what, ban stepper motors?
Don't give them ideas.
But seriously, given that the 3D printer movement started out with people building their own printers from scratch and there continues to be a healthy open-source hardware ecosystem within the community, I can't see this stopping anyone.
Unless you also make it illegal for 3D printers to print 3D printer parts...
- But how was the first 3D printer made? Are they gonna ban CNC machines next?
- These laws also apply to subtractive manufacturing methods like CNC machines. They just aren't as common in households so they don't get the headline space to grab our attention.
- Working on it
- Vorons are great! https://www.vorondesign.com
You've come a long way, RepRap.
- > One of the most dangerous aspects of the bill is that it criminalizes individual users for common practices, like creating and using alternative open source programs with their 3D printer.
This is, by the way, very similar to attempts to curb down the right to repair, or more recently the age sniffing that also tries to destroy VPNs. Lobbyists are getting rich right now. It's amazing to see how corruption works in the USA here.
- Let me get this straight. The USA has no gun control laws but legislators want to prevent people from making guns with 3D printers?
- Some states, like California, and New York (which recently passed the first 3d printer ban), have restrictive gun control. These laws are in conflict with Supreme Court rulings supporting the 2nd Amendment, but the litigation and appeal process is very slow. It is 9 years into the Duncan case in California challenging magazine capacity limits, 7 years into the Miller case challenging California's Assault rifle ban.
- The USA has plenty of gun control laws
- Unlike the downvoters, I'm genuinely curious: do you believe a narrative that the US has no gun control laws? Sometimes I wonder if that is what people outside the US think.
- I'll try to answer as accurately as I can. The narrative that I read into the media that I consume is that (1) the US has ineffective gun control laws, and (2) that there is widespread availability of a variety of guns and ammunition to anyone who wants it. I believe that gun ownership is a constitutional right in the US. I was aware that only some states are "open carry." I am not surprised to be corrected that some states have strict legislation, but I was not aware of that, and it does not seem consistent with my understanding of gun freedom in the USA.
I triangulate (1) from the ongoing mass shootings in the US and the few mass shootings that I recall from my youth: for a long time it seemed to me that the 1996 National Firearms Agreement [1] had been effective here in Australia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Agreement
- Nah you're not talking about the same thing. When you say it has gun control laws you're thinking "you have to wait 10 days to buy a pistol".
When he says it has no gun control laws he's thinking "after 10 days you can buy a pistol".
Poor choice of words on his part perhaps, but I think it was pretty obvious what he meant if you're not nitpicking.
- Right. Combination of poor choice of words, ignorance and laziness not educating myself before posting. But yes, I am Australian, came of age around the time of Port Arthur, I cross Hoddle St a number of times every week. I remember the amnesty. The contrast in gun culture does seem stark.
- It’s what approximately half of US voters think.
- I think that half thinks gun laws are for the bad guys, and they’re the good guy with the gun
- Is somebody organizing a rally to oppose this?
- I'm glad I don't live in California (or America in general) but this is such BS.
I don't think we will have much of this in Europe because guns are pretty rare here and so is ammo. We just don't really have gun problems except with organised criminals but they don't 3D print them, they just buy them.
But anyway, 3D printing isn't rocket science. It never was and it sure isn't now. Anyone can build one in their garage and many of us have in fact done so when it was a new tech. If someone wants to be printing gun parts they are going to be printing gun parts.
- It was partially completed lowers before this, and general machine tools before that.
I support gun control.
This feels like theater, not gun control.
- Oh yeah I support gun control too, obviously. But more like a total ban (I don't even support sports shooting since many of the massacres we have seen were perpetrated with guns from that community).
In America the problem is really more that people can just buy guns, not the printers.
- wow this is going to add a lot of friction to the printers they already don't make there
- I am old enough to remember when the fax machine first became ubiquitous in the 80's and read about how the Soviets were threatened by it. Unauthorized use was a crime and they stationed guards at fax machines to prevent mis-use. Perhaps I naively fell for CIA propaganda at the time but if true we can hope/estimate that California Commies will fall in less than 10 years since things are moving much faster in today's world.
- It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter.
We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].
It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfe...
- If you have a photocopier and a few currencies you can have a lot of fun with EURion:
- look up your local laws! usually you can photocopy money as long as it's shrunken / enlarged by a specific amount
- you can cover up everything but the EURion and see what it does to the rest of the copy
- you can cover up the EURion part of the bill and print out the rest
Again, particularly in the last point, be sure to look up local laws and set the printer scaling accordingly
- The Lives of Others is a seriously underrated movie. I highly suggest watching it.
- The fax thing sounds unlikely?
Perhaps the CIA wanted people to use fax for secret communications, so they could use automated means to read the text instead of having people listen to hours of phone conversations?
Consumer fax calls were cleartext were they not?
- I solved this problem by moving my U.S. home from Sunnyvale, CA to St. Charles MO.
- That’s a long way to go for 3d printing…
It probably would’ve been cheaper to just buy the gun at a store if you wanted one that bad.
- We all know Missouri really cares about the rights of the people.
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- We just reeeeeally want to believe, more than other states, that our government is The Good Guys and we can Fix The Problems if we only added more laws and more taxes. Every two years we are presented with 20 earnest-seeming ballot measures that each have roughly this message:
> "We have a major problem in California -- ____ is not as ____ as it should be. Prop 1234 authorizes the state to sell $__,000,000,000 in bonds[1] to be repaid over the next 30 years. This will completely fix the ____ problem. By the way, it looks like a lot, but it's actually a good investment that will SAVE TAXPAYERS MONEY in the future."
Then we get another almost identical one in 3 years saying that ____ is worse than ever and this new round of $__,000,000,000 will finally fix it once and for all.
Voters approve like three quarters of these, and usually don't even remember we just gave them billions of dollars to fix the same thing a few years ago. I've heard plenty of people in my social circle who basically vote by reading the supposed purpose from the title ("Anti-Homelessness", "Schools", "High-speed rail", "Animal welfare") and they vote based entirely on the assumption that this proposition is the only and best way to help the homeless, improve schools, etc. They don't even entertain the idea that the prop might be a pork-filled piece of trash written by lobbyists that might even make the problems worse while costing eleven figures and still not be paid for in 20 years.
We just trust Sacramento so blindly.
[1] That, or the other alternative funding: A tax raise "on big corporations" which will 100% definitely not affect you, dear voter.
- > plenty of people in my social circle who basically vote by reading the supposed purpose from the title
In my experience, if there's anything that shouldn't be judged by what it's called, it's typically political things, ballot props and bills especially. Sometimes I even adopt an inverse intuition, which is the proposal will have an opposite effect to its nominal one.
- Yes, that has been clear for a long time, about as long as CA has been a one-party state. The real question is why you supposedly smart Californians keep on falling for the... same... old... lie... every... damn... time. It is not as if the pie-in-the-sky people haven't promised a chicken in every pot and a cow in every shed and a car on every driveway - replace these with whatever modern equivalents you like - a thousand times before without delivering even a single chick, calf or push bike. Why do you keep on falling for the same old tired this-time-it-will-work lies? This is not limited to CA and might even become more prevalent in NY now that the DSA has seriously started to hollow out the remains of what used to be the Democratic party but it has been going on for much longer in the formerly Golden, now somehow tarnished state. Why? California Dreaming used to be a thing, not a nightmare.
- calling California a one-party-state is a bit exagerated: even the Democrats have had a governor from time to time too, in the past 100 (or the past 60, or the past 40) years
- There are states which are worse, but don't get as much press coverage. Louisiana is essentially just a a US state controlled by petrochemical companies, so portions of the state have extreme rates of cancer.
- California is just a population that tries to solve problems with maximal regulation and selective enforcement. So you get to see the effects. Here are some laws that I think the HN community would be hugely in favour of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652773
Yeah, I'd prefer to have an offline 3d printer but it seems I've made a mistake with my Bambu P1S.
- What was the mistake? Can’t P1S work offline? I thought they can print from SD card, and there’s also LAN mode?..
- Offline printing would be illegal in printers sold after the law goes into effect.
*printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.*
- Oh you’re right. I just use BambuSlicer but that’s not required. I can probably use Orca on the LAN.
- Sometimes they do good. Prop 65 cleaned up off-gassing plastic products in the entire country. Harbor Freight stores used to be mini gas chambers leeching away your health.
- Trampling on citizens rights is a luxury of the rich, but in this case it's an echo-chamber government ran by technocrats.
- As an American, I’d say it’s far from the most “retarded” state. (I do agree this law is very bad)
472 points by hn_acker 20 hours ago | 169 comments
