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.
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
> 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.
>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.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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
> 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...
[2] - https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
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).
All the dodgy things listed in the second paragraph are solid school shootings?
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?
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.
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.
Not sure I’d want to rope my kindergartener into something like that? I like GP’s approach
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't need to print anything, just visit your neighborhood hardware store
Correct! That's why I mentioned "slam fire" firearms.
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...>
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.
https://xcancel.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
Hope sanity prevails and printers stay free, don't give Europe ideas.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
We all know Missouri really cares about the rights of the people.