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This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem!

Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.

(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)

I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.

People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?

Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.

Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

I don't get it - afaik you can get every single part of a gun except for the lower receiver/pistol frame without any restriction - as those parts are legally defined as the 'gun' - the rest are just replacement parts.

Even for those, you can get 80% finished parts for those - just drill a few holes, and file off some tidbits, and you get an almost factory-spec gun.

I'm no expert on US gun law, but afaik, some states even allow you to make your own guns without registration, as the law defines gun manufacturing as manufacturing with the intent of selling them.

So there's plenty of options, many of them better than making a gun with a printer.

But even all this is typically overkill, I dont think criminals go to these lengths to make their own guns, they just get them from somewhere.

The only usable part a plastic 3D printer will make for you is the receiver, which is the whole point, to circumvent that very narrow legal classification. You're right about alternative lawmaking avenues, but given the 2a pushback on controlling "replacement parts" Americans are kind of stuck with the bed they made.

That was the case like 3 years ago. Things have advanced significantly since then.

> The only usable part a plastic 3D printer will make for you is the receiver

this hasn't been true for like 5 years now

Well over a decade actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberator_(gun) but of course just ignore the context of the parent comment about what's legally considered a firearm.

Exactly, but it's less effort to steal a gun or have someone else purchase a gun for you then to 3d print a gun.

But even then it's not that difficult, it's entirely possible and legal in many states to print a polymer lower for a AR15 or Glock 17. Then go buy a parts kit from PSA $450 and have fun zero background check or sales tax required as the smaller gun parts stores do not have multistate business nexuses.

It is also not difficult to 3dprint a glock switch, even though they illegal per the NFA https://3dgo.app/models/makerworld/2035005.

This is 100% virtue-signaling from politicians.

The receiver is like the asset tag on computer servers- it's the one thing that is definitely not replaceable since it has the serial number used for entitlement.

In the 1980s, my dad machined a lot of replacement parts for a gunsmith, right here in the UK. All legal, all perfectly legit. I will say it took a hell of a lot more skill than just "download file from thingiverse, press print" - but there's nothing stopping you doing it.

And no-one is (yet) suggesting banning lathes, hacksaws, or files.

The difference is this takes years and years of skill learning and hard graft. Downloading a gun file and pressing print requires nothing.

This is my attempt to answer your question about "what kind of algorithm can you implement to detect something dangerous". Disclaimer though, I agree that the proposed regulation is way too broad and will have unintended consequences as written.

If you look at how Apple detects contraband imagery, they hash every image that gets uploaded into the photos app. Those hashes are transmitted to servers that compare them to hashes of known contraband.

A similar system could theoretically be used for STL files. So it isn't about detecting exact shapes, it's about preventing printing of STL files that are already known to be dangerous. This would make it harder to illegally manufacture parts for weapons because it would make it much harder to share designs. If you didn't have the knowledge or skill to design a reliable FCU, you would have to find a design someone with that knowledge and skill created - which the printer could theoretically detect with a cryptographic signature.

As the original author of the post pointed out though, this could and would be bypassed by actual criminals. As with most things like this, it's probably impossible to prevent entirely, only to make it more difficult.

> If you look at how Apple detects contraband imagery, they hash every image that gets uploaded into the photos app. Those hashes are transmitted to servers that compare them to hashes of known contraband.

You're spelling out a specific process in detail--which is the only reason I'm picking on details. Do you have anything documenting what you're describing?

From what I remember, Apple's system was proposed, but never shipped. They proposed hashing your photos locally and comparing them to a local database of known CSAM images. Only when there was was a match, they would transmit the photos for manual confirmation. This describes Apple's proposal [1].

I believe what did ship is an algorithm to detect novel nude imagery and gives some sort of warning for kids sending or receiving that data. None of that involves checks against Apple's server.

I do think other existing photo services will scan only photos you've uploaded to their cloud.

I'm happy to make corrections. To my knowledge, what you're describing hasn't been done so far.

[1] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...

Aah okay - I remember it being proposed, but perhaps I wrongly assumed it had shipped. I do wonder sometimes if Apple is doing anything that we aren't privy to with photos that end up in iCloud.

This page probably has the most detail: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

This article is a few years old, but has more of a plain-English, third party explanation: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/01/21/what-apple-surren...

Its fair not to trust Apple or any company, but Google and a lot of companies were scanning the cloud versions without the negative press Apple got. My understanding is Apple proposed scanning on-device because images were encrypted in the cloud. Uploading and have manual review process seems like a big ongoing cost.

Personally, I dont think Apple is doing anything with photos it stores in the cloud.

Like the first article says, technically they could, because they store the encryption key for user-convenience. Turning on Advanced Data Protection should take away their ability to decrypt photos. But there are a whole bunch of caveats if you're talking about all cloud their data and that has changed over the years.

Ok that works for STL files, but printers don’t print STL files they print g code. G code is generated by slicers, and depending on your printer and settings the g code will be different.

Is this law obligating printer manufactures to lock down their printer to slicers that can do the STL naughty check?

what part of the dangerous part is the actually dangerous part?

its a framing trap to think you have to print or cnc the whole thing in one job.

split it up into many smaller jobs, each one not looking dangerous, rezero start the next section as if its a new job, spiff it all up with a session of crank and curse finishing, and the blockade is meaningless.

FCUs are not tracked in US (aside from full auto trigger groups, which however are classified as "machineguns" in their own right).

Receivers are tracked.

That depends entirely on the gun. Sig "receivers" are just frames and the FCU is the controlled element. At least in the p320.

> people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives

People should not have to have great experience with killing machines to be able to regulate them.

> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?

This is a bad example. I've been notionally pro-ownership but also pro-regulation my whole life, and one of the major problems with gun legislation in the US is that it's incredibly poorly written and does not reflect the technical reality of guns.

The government allows private ownership of automatic weapons, but hasn't issued any new tax stamps for 50 years. You can convert any semiauto gun into a full-auto gun for a few cents of 3D printed parts (or a rubber band). The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.

I think yes, it is reasonable for Congresspeople to fire a gun before they legislate on it, because otherwise they are incapable of writing good laws.

Good gun regulation in the US would probably look like car insurance, where gun owners need to register and insure their weapons against the possibility of crimes being committed with them. There are so many guns compared to the amount of gun crime that it would probably not end up terribly expensive, especially if you own a gun safe.

The mistake you're making here is assuming that

> The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.

This wasn't the goal by the congresspeople, and that them having fired a gun would've changed that goal.

That was the goal. They knew they weren't going to be able to pass any kind of legislation that actually msde people safer, but they wanted to look like they were "doing something".

This is incredibly common. It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.

> It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.

I'd also add that the TSA is a good reason why we shouldn't expect talking legislators to gun ranges would make better gun laws.

The reason the TSA is what it is is because legislators fly more than most people. If you've ever been to DC you see a lot of this sort of security theater everywhere.

So much of the TSAs budget should be redirected towards what would actually make long distance travel safer, improving the ATC and Amtrak.

Thats defacto gun registration- and worse: registration with a private entity not beholden to due process. Given current realities, anybody who registers their firearm in such a manner can expect a no-knock raid because they were nearby when somebody phoned in an engine backfire as a gunshot.

So make it allowed that the insurance is tied to the gun. You buy a lifetime policy for that serial number, provide payment, and you're done. Payment can be provided anonymously at a window in cash, if that's your thing.

If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.

ATF is not allowed to digitize any of its records around gun sales or transfer of ownership.

That's not true. They have millions of digitized 4473s. They are banned by law from creating a searchable registry of gun owners but they digitize paperwork on a daily basis.

https://medium.com/statute-circuit/the-atfs-quiet-digital-tr...

Thanks for the clarification. I knew there was limitation placed on them to hamstring their operations under the auspices of preserving the 2nd amendment.

You can get a stamp for full auto easily, my neighbor is an FFL and gets them frequently

You can transfer them. You can't register a new one. This is why H&K transferable sears are like $50k.

You're welcome to come up with a better litmus test, but it's beyond clear that lawmakers writing gun control regulation have less than a wikipedia level understanding of the topic. See "shoulder thing that goes up", the weird obsession with the Thompson, the entire concept of an Assault Weapon, etc.

Wikipedia has much better information about guns than most of the people talking about them in politics, generally speaking.

It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/a4gnr3/makes_perf...

(Sorry for the reddit link, it's a common image but that was the first url I found from a quick search that had it up front and center).

ATF rulemaking can be unintuitive and arbitrary but there really is a level below it occupied by people who have dedicated a significant chunk of their lives to trying to restrict firearm ownership, who genuinely seem to believe that Die Hard, Rambo, and Spaghetti Westerns are real life. Politicians who can't answer basic questions about their legislation, who have to be told live on air that magazines can be repacked, that just make up impossible crime statistics. Yeah it's stupid that the ATF has decided that vertical grips are a rifle feature but angled grips aren't, but it gets worse.

A bit like Joe Biden complaining that a 9mm bullet will blow the lung out of a body, and crazier things from others, yeah.

What's the difference between a "pistol brace" and a "stock"? Don't they both go into your shoulder to stabilise the weapon?

There's no legal definition per Congress. Generally speaking, braces are intended to stabilize a pistol against your arm [0], whereas a rifle stock is meant to stabilize against your shoulder. However, braces can technically be "misused" such that the rear of the brace fits against the shoulder, meaning it is used as a stock. Likewise, the distinction is so small something as simple as a sling attachment to the stock could make it a brace, or an articulation that could be used as a cheek rest turn a brace into a stock, converting a pistol into a rifle or vice versa. For awhile, the only way to know the difference was for the manufacturer to submit an NFA and hope.

The ATF has been in court (and lost) quite a bit [1] over this.

[0] there's a nice picture and writeup here of a pistol brace being setup https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/gear-review-sig-sb15-pisto...

[1] a brief rundown of the 2023-2025 legal rulings https://www.fflguard.com/atf-pistol-brace-rule/

A "pistol brace" is designed and "intended" to be braced against your forearm to stabilize the "pistol" in a way that allows you to shoot a particularly large and heavy "pistol" with one hand. The ATF said this was fine, although I think they really regret that now.

Stock goes against the shoulder. Brace goes against the elbowpit. If you let the brace touch your shoulder, your braced pistol suddenly becomes an unregistered SBR, and you become a felon. Oopsie!

US gun laws are bizarre.

> Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?

It would be nice if they delegated to experts, instead of think tanks or populism, when it came to dealing with these. Both are examples of rampant regulatory failure.

Knowing the difference between a think tank and experts might be hard without some rudimentary knowledge to spot nonsense? I don't know, actually asking. It seems to me that the primary skill we need in our leaders is that of spotting experts talking within their field and actually listen to them while ignoring others. The primary trait, which is even more important, is character so that they act on what they here in our best interests instead of their own.

Having first hand experience in contraband, and having the knowledge to create and pass laws are very different things. If you think that current lawmakers dont know enough about contraband to regulate effectively, what makes you think someone who knows loads about drug use and porn would be able to contruct decent watertight legislation?

At this point, I do expect that of them.

In this specific discussion familiarity does seem relevant. I don't think shooting is so relevant, but printing and assembling are.

You don't have to be a life-long user to regulate heroin, but if you start legislating second-hand heroin smoke, people might look at you sideways. You kinda need to know a little even if you've never actually ever seen heroin. If you demonstrate severe ignorance, people are going to call you on it.

I don't think its unreasonable to ask politicians to be familiar with how the machinery they are regulating functions and is used.

To use your heroin example, this is akin to banning spoons or needles because they heard those are tools of the heroin addict. It shows a lack of understanding on the part of the regulator and has a far reaching effect on people legally using the items.

Having a clue about how guns work, or the general reality of any other field one may be attempting to legislate, is absolutely crucial. With guns it just happens that actually firing them is a good way to gain (some of) that understanding.

litmus test wise, regulators of 3d printing should be able to create strong parts with a variety of 3d printing mechanisms.

they should at least be able to understand that a 3d printer is akin to a turing machine and what the real limits are - strength of the printed material vs length of the strip of memory.

It’s more like people who barely use computers regulating software features and development.. oh wait

I don’t own a gun, and think guns should be regulated more and better, but the heroin let alone another one are just flawed. There are no legitimate, non-life-ruining use cases for either of those analogies.

Well didn't they? From the Epstein files, it looks like "all" the elite is involved....

The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygxGrxCEOp0

[2] https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/BWA-Ammo-V...

I've been saying the same about deepfake noods of hot girls.

Something something about distribution.

It’s becoming a thing, police don’t like to report on it because they don’t want to give people ideas. They didn’t want to report on Glock switches either. I do machining as a hobby and am interested in machining guns from an academic challenge perspective, I’ve not done it because I focus on making things I can’t buy. Guns from an academic perspective are fascinating, we’ve been making them for a long time in just about every possible way, and there is an easy way to measure and communicate quality, I.e. does it shoot and how accurate is it. I think the ban is absurd, the tech to make 3D printers / CNCs is pretty generic and someone sufficiently motivated to make a gun is unlikely to have difficulty putting together the machines to do it.

Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty#Firearms_design

> one particular design, outlined in his book Expedient Homemade Firearms, is the best known. This design makes extensive use of easily procured materials such as folded sheet metal, bar stock, washers, and hex screws. It is a simple blowback-operated sub-machine gun and entirely made from craft-produced components, including the magazine and pistol grip. The major drawback of such designs is the lack of rifling in the barrel, which results in poor accuracy and limited range

This book was openly sold on Amazon 10 years ago. I still have one on my shelf.

See it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YE9J7qcj0c

"[The second amendment] basically says in order to keep us free we need to be able to keep and bear arms. A lot of countries though aren't necessarily that lucky and through things we won't talk about that's starting to show its ugly head".

Oh well.

Wasn't the whole point of the Sten gun that it could be made out of readily-available materials (steel plumbing pipe mostly) with simple hand tools, and really only needed two of the 50 or so components to be machined?

So, unless your garage is down to a pair of rusty pliers and a dried-out Biro then you're probably still up there.

There are some Youtube videos about homemade weapons in African countries and it seems you'd have to remove peoples hands in addition to their tools. Some of the functional guns out there are mostly hand whittled wood with a piece of pipe and some bailing wire.

Do potato cannons count?

The could if lawmakers wanted them to. Here in Sweden potato guns are actually illegal if the potato achieves 10+ joule.

That's effectively a complete ban as a thrown potato would have considerably more energy than that. A quick web search suggests professional baseball pitchers achieve ~130J, and a potato is roughly comparable to a baseball in mass.

Yep.

I'm not saying that I'm for it, just that writing a law that bans them isn't all that hard.

I had friends who would scour the produce isle to find potatoes they could cut down to fit their potato gun with a rifled barrel.

This law in new york will also affect CNC machines and laser cutter AFAIK. Everything that is computer controlled that can "create" a 3d object.

Or a file. You can make a perfectly good gun with a damned file.

Or as we learned on Star Trek, some rope, bamboo, charcoal, rocks, sulfur and Gorn dung will make a one time weapon.

They are trying to criminalize everyone who uses a normal lathe or a normal CNC without a permit

House Bill 2321 (HB-2321) proposes exemptions only for machines with licensed AI firmware that connects to blacklists, potentially requiring refits or licensing for machine shops.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228

Really looking forward to NY funding upgrades to the computers connected to CNC machines which tend to be pre-2000 vintage running software that's even older.

The entire concept is absurd on about 10 different levels.

Or fire and a hammer

> Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns.

They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877

Actual shootings with 3D printed guns are relatively rare but it’s come up because Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one.

And they're still doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.

EDIT: I think you mean "allegedly"

Right, because most people recognize that the US has become sufficiently polarized and radicalized that "If enough people are mad at you, a complete stranger might shoot you" is not a theory of change we want to encourage. Yes, even for causes we agree with, most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is, and even how civil and thoughtful you are in pursuing it.

Are you claiming that the most likely proximal cause for his murder was the legal ability to print a gun rather than any concerns or grievances the shooter may have had related to the healthcare industry or United Healthcare specifically?

Yes, I think access to firearms affects the murder rate.

That wasn't the topic though. Are you saying the United Health CEO's murder was motivated primarily by access to printing guns on a 3d printer?

I didn't say anything about motivation, I'm explaining why people didn't try addressing the assassin's complaints as a way to avoid a future repeat.

Won't someone think of the grievances that poor far-left terrorist had this vermin murdered Brian Thompson :'(

>because most people recognize that the US has become sufficiently polarized and radicalized that "If enough people are mad at you, a complete stranger might shoot you" is not a theory of change we want to encourage.

God forbid individuals and organizations not choose paths of action that "low level piss off" millions of people such that their chance of being at the business end of some outlier who will actually do violence upon them is non-trivial.

It's not hard to not be "the thing" in any given crazy's life they choose to go out with a bang over, especially if you're not something they deal with every day. If that means that the default amount of screwage your organization applies needs to be dialed back, or that you must clean house a little better or more often then cry me a river.

>most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is

Except it's not. The "budget" you have to wrong people and cause despair before people would be apathetic to violence done upon you is pretty directly coupled to the amount of good you do to offset your harm.

>It's not hard to not be "the thing" in any given crazy's life they choose to go out with a bang over

> The "budget" you have to wrong people and cause despair before people would be apathetic to violence done upon you is pretty directly coupled to the amount of good you do to offset your harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Abraham_Linco...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_John_Lennon

Agree to disagree. I'm not willing to trust the judgement of those most willing to commit gun violence as to whom deserves gun violence.

> doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.

Well yeah, it's not exactly easy to get everyone to understand that insurance isn't magic and money out has to match money in.

According to this source, united healthcare profits were $14B in 2024. https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/unitedhealth-unh-2024-re...

So yeah, money out not matching money in is exactly the problem.

So a bit under 5% per the rest of the numbers in that link.

I can't find the detailed breakdown for 2025, but in 2024, they took in $308bn in premiums and paid out $264bn in medical costs. So even ignoring all of the downstream and systemic problems caused by insurance existing as a for-profit entity, they're taking 14% off the top just to exist as a middle-man.

https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...

> they took in $308bn in premiums and paid out $264bn in medical costs ... they're taking 14% off the top just to exist as a middle-man.

In 2023, they had a 0.8% profit margin[0]. 9 billion dollars in a trillion dollar industry.

Ignoring the disingenuous framing ("taking off the top" including how much they pay their employees), how does that compare to other industries?

[0]https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2024-annual-hea...

> including how much they pay their employees

Highlighting that was actually part of my point. What utility does insurance add to justify its existence as a middle man? How are we better off with a middle man taking a cut vs nationalizing the industry? And that 14% is at best, given the other externalities of the existence of insurance and its perverse incentives.

You're saying "how is that worse than other industries", but I'm saying, why is there an industry there at all?

The government would still need employees to basically do everything that the people at insurance companies do. Theoretically it could be more efficient, realistically it would not.

The real problem with our system is that for anyone who is going to hit their deductible, or especially their out of pocket max, the costs no longer matter at all. Sure, that cancer drug can be $500,000. GLP1 drugs for $1,000 a month? Why not?

Of course, there's no free lunch on this. In a single payer system you get things like the UK not approving certain cancer treatments for people over a certain age, certain medications just aren't available, etc.

Otherwise you could make every plan a very high deductible plan, possible just not cover medications at all, etc. But then people will complain about people not being able to afford things, especially in the short term.

About half of those profits were from the Optum side of the business, not from insurance.

If you’ve had UHC you’d know very well that Optum is intimately tied to their insurance business. UHC just “administers the plan” while Optum controls plan decisions. So when there’s a problem, which there always is with every claim more complicated than a PCP visit, you get bounced between both companies for hours until you find someone willing to take responsibility for answering questions.

Money out had better not match money in or the insurance company will be in a lot of trouble.

Imagine if we removed the need for insurance to turn a profit.

Imagine if we removed the need for life to turn a caloric profit.

That case started over a year ago, I would have expected the topic to come up long ago if this was motivated by the shooting. Granted, lawmaking takes longer than public sentiment lasts, but I didn't really hear much about 3D-printed guns at the time.

NY legislators have been pushing for this in public statements over the past year.

e.g. https://d12t4t5x3vyizu.cloudfront.net/ritchietorres.house.go...

Given the potential chain of custody issues, I'm not sure we can be certain a 3D printed gun was involved at all.

>Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one

Do you have any source?

And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

The premise here would have to be that it was previously difficult for the majority of the population to obtain a weapon.

> Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!

People are printing guns. They're printing guns right here in the UK.

Then they're taking them out to the firing range, setting them up on a test stand, firing them by remote control, and filming the ensuing carnage with high frame rate cameras.

If you make a really really good 3D printed gun, it'll last at least two shots before it explodes into about a trillion razor-sharp fragments expanding rapidly outwards from where your hand used to be. The way you tell it's a really really good one is it didn't explode into a trillion fragments on the first shot.

We've seen enough Terrifying Public Information Films about the dangers of fireworks to mess with that shit.

Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York

Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.

I haven't printed a full firearm but I've printed some replacement/ergonomic parts for my legally purchased firearms. And there are people printing guns - you don't hear about it because they keep their mouth shut about it.

In countries that ban guns, 3D printers don't help much because you still can't get the other parts that aren't printed and you can't get bullets. 3D printed guns are only really viable in places where guns are already common.

> because you still can't get the other parts that aren't printed

Every part except the firing pin is now printable (you can print quite strong carbon-fiber reinforced parts at home). The firing pin can be made from a nail or similar piece of metal.

> You can't get bullets

Bullets are mostly easy enough to make. One of my neighbors growing up was a competitive shooter who competed nationally and internationally. He manufactured his own ammo in his home shop, using tools any boomer dad had access to, like a lathe, presses and very accurate scales. He didn't really pay any more for ammo than we did per round. The only reason criminals don't do it is because buying factory ammo on the gray and black market is so easy.

The most difficult part to make would probably be the primers, but that still isn't difficult for any chemist.

Here's a (old) video of someone in Europe making their own ammo at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Cx4idIIe0

In my country, Guns and Bullets are heavily controlled(Even airsoft is banned here). You can not get explosive unless you prove you have legit use for it(usually for mining). And of course DIY gun or bullet is no-no and you will be jailed.

Even in police force or army, they literally count every single bullet, and for every fired bullet, it must be explained in detail.

Maybe that's why we have low gun-related crime here.

> You can not get explosive unless you prove you have legit use for it(usually for mining).

Gunpowder is fairly simple to make.

> Maybe that's why we have low gun-related crime here.

Mexico has extremely restrictive gun laws and that is not the case there. It seems to have more to do with how much crime you have than whether someone who could be charged with homicide could redundantly be charged with having a firearm.

The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.

You can acquire guns, gun parts, and ammunition quite easily in the UK, and entirely legally.

You need to hold a suitable licence, which isn't expensive and is mostly an exercise in proving to the police that you're not a violent psychopath who's likely to run up to people in cars and shoot them in the face.

Why not? Because nobody is printing guns!

This is demonstrably untrue: https://gnet-research.org/2025/01/08/beyond-the-fgc-9-how-th...

Why would you waste everyone's time posting such nonsense? It's not that I support this legislation, but arguing against with counterfactual statements is unhelpful noise.

> who this is coming from and why

I would suspect it is at least partly because the gun that killed the United Healthcare CEO was partly 3D printed.

In other words, the most famous murder/assassination in NY in modern memory.

Well it might be the second most famous now, having been supplanted by Charlie Kirk through recency if not also notability (harder to spin the motives of the UHC CEO's killer in a way that people aren't sympathetic to).

That was in Utah.

Allegedly, given chain of custody concerns with the evidence.

Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?

Preemptive regulation is absurd.

Quite famously, Luigi Mangione. (allegedly)

Of course, this is silliness since it is very easy to just buy a gun in the US, and it is also legal to make one in your garage.

Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.

This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.

My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…

> These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.

A lot of the polymer guns (1911, AR15) need to be reinforced with metal at certain places for any kind of reliablity. A Glock doesn't need to be, because the material was invented by the designer of the gun and the gun was intended to be a polymer frame from the start.

Lower receiver being the serialized part isn’t universal. Many firearms have only a single receiver or only the upper receiver is serialized.

Does the UK ban shows like Forged in Fire that teach you how to make all sorts of specific blades?

No, and the blades created because of the methods used, would likely not be covered by the legislation anyway, theres a carve out for antiques and weapons made using traditional methods (now define traditional methods, because the law doesn't, but hammer and anvil would seem to be the most obvious traditional approach).

However, in practice the police continually take and often destroy legally owned antiques claiming they are zombie swords.

The law is written in such a way the police can take anything and you have to prove to a judge they aren't illegal.

One very large example of such police practices: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RPm4Pts23Qg

is it because guns are easy to get without printing?

Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).

not a gunsmith, but cast iron manages to be both soft and brittle at the same time. and the barrel and bearing parts would have to be machined anyways. you have to try to harden it too. its probably easier to just machine the whole thing out of decent quality steel. just guessing.

really? they didn't have machining in the 1700s. how about a good'ol musket? or a bit more modern: a gatling gun. I always thought those were made under coarse conditions. I mean, people just need something that makes a spark against gun powder,goes boom and shoots really fast projectiles. If a shotgun is possible, then an automatic shotgun doesn't feel like it's a stretch. I would think the firing mechanisms might not be tolerant of amateur techniques, but the reloading and trigger parts at least might be. I'm also not a gunsmith, no idea what I'm talking about for the record.

They certainly didn't have mills as we know them in the 1700s, but lathes, drills, and subtractive manufacturing had been in practice for millenia. You could say they were "machined by hand". Most early firearms (barring large-bore guns like cannons) were made from forged steel or iron, which is significantly stronger than cast iron due to its lower carbon content and regular grain structure. These forged parts were then worked on by gunspiths with cutters and abrasives to produce parts in tolerance for their mechanism. Cast iron (or more typically in early warfare, bronze) was suitable for cannons and large-bore guns due to the mass of the finished gun; more metal meant that the gun could withstand more shock, but even then they could fail catastrophically due to material fatigue or failure.

Well, the kind of guns politicians are afraid people will make at home are not intended for durability. But things like street crime, school shootings,etc.. where it's just a one and done affair.

Complex manufacturing of improvised firearms has been practically made obsolete by the commodification of both steel tubing and cartridges. "Pipe guns" are incredibly easy to make, and require little more than a pipe, a cap, and a drill (which can sometimes be omitted as well). Many common cartridge diameters very closely or exactly match commercially available pipe diameters, and the hardware to make a single-shot firearm is ubiquitous in any store that sells plumbing supplies. Pipe guns are simple and cheap enough to make that some people abuse gun buy-back programs by deliberately manufacturing pipe guns for pennies and pocketing the money these programs offer [0]. These are real, functional guns, and I promise they're simpler, faster, and cheaper to manufacture than any 3d printed gun.

0: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/11/17/handing-zip-g...

I assume this is mostly for a shotgun shell affair? otherwise the difference in bore, and particularly the seam that is present in almost all steel pipe (unless its drawn-over-mandrel which is a more speciality product), would make it pretty dodgy to fire a proper round

they also didn't have 3d printers in the 1700s, so I figure the 3d printer doesn't add much if it requires all of these post-processing steps like molding, casting, and finishing

Not cast iron

https://revolutionarywarjournal.com/how-colonial-gunsmiths-f...

Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.

Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.

> Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros

Someone is. They recover thousands of illegal guns in Chicago alone every year.

https://www.atf.gov/firearms/report/firearms-trace-data/fire...

i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.

It's just very easily substitutable with regular knives? Plus the Offensive Weapons Act already covers them? I would be very surprised if it has made a difference.

(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)

Yeah, its almost as if the knives aren't the problem. The gang memebrs will use whatever gives them an advantage, guns, knives, acid, bats, bricks. We can't ban everything, we should possibly tackle the cause instead of the symptom...

But don't worry, in the mean time they're coming for our regular knives.

The BBC has already rolled out Idris Ebla to explain that kitchen knives shouldnt have points[0]. Yes this has been picked up by politicians with the minister for policing at the time calling it an interesting idea [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j...

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/...

Sorry about the amp links

How many crimes related to “foot claws”, “death stars” and “blow darts” were there before they were banned? The UK Offensive Weapons Act is a joke of a law that makes us look like morons afraid of cartoon turtles and farming tools.

Would they really do less stabbing if they had to use a mundane kitchen knife instead of a 'tacticool' knife or 'ninja sword'?

Not necessarily a lot less but I’m sure removing the aesthetic/cool factor reduces how often they’re carried

Maybe if the law required all knives to be pink they might be too embarrassed to murder someone. One problem then is the switch to acid attacks which are just clear liquids in containers.

It reminds me of a certain meme gun along these lines.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ATBGE/comments/b4d9gy/unicorn_rifle...

(Yes, it is a real gun and it shoots real 9mm bullets.)

You could require that all acids are also dyed pink

My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.

This is part of the wider problem and heavily relates to the right to repair

Cory talked about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs

> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician

At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.

When I was in college I wrote a computer program (yes, involving yellow text) that couldn't be photocopied because I put the "o"s in the right place to trigger the eurion-finding algorithm. People thought it was neat.

That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.

Who issues Eurion-marked boarding passes?

That strikes me as extremely counterproductive given the actually sensitive part of a BP is an (outside of the US) unsigned, semi-publicly-documented barcode.

It would be extra counterproductive since you can print your own boarding pass.

When flying with easyJet, we can just print boarding passes using any old printer. As long as the number matches up, no security is required.

Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.

EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.

On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.

In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.

Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.

The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.

Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.

And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.

This is never going to work, or scale.

There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.

Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?

What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?

Will you ban old hardware?

What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?

These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.

> This is never going to work, or scale

Neither does DRM, really, but it certainly causes a great deal of inconvenience, and is upheld by the legal system.

But that's the point. DRM works at all (in terms of causing inconvenience, not preventing copying, for that it will never work of course) because the people producing the data have an interest in applying the DRM.

But the people producing 3D printable gun parts are _not_ interested in applying the DRM.

If you want to draw an analogy to media, this is more like if the government mandated porn detection software on your computer which would prevent porn from being able to be displayed on your screen. Or mandating HDCP between your monitor and your computer so that your computer could implement restrictions on what you could view on the monitor.

Except that computers are extremely difficult to DIY from basic components (I mean raw chips and metal). Meanwhile I can literally buy aluminium extrusions, or even bits of wood, some stepper motors, some gears, some belts, some pulleys and some stepper drivers, an STM32 devboard and get PCBWay to make me a simple PCB, or just use a prototyping board. And at the end of it, I would have a high quality (maybe a bit slow) 3D printer. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it could print gun parts because I have personally taken a trash-tier prusa i3 mk2 clone and turned it into a machine which could probably rival the mk3 at least.

How exactly are they planning on stopping me from designing a part, slicing it, and then putting it on a DIY 3D printer?

They could maybe achieve this by restricting the sale of certain components such as hot-ends, extruder gears (although you can get away with generic gears), or stepper motors and stepper motor drivers. I just don't see it happening. Maybe they could ban open source slicers and CAD programs?

But I guess I better start stocking up on high quality stepper motors and stepper motor drivers and buy a milling machine and a lathe so I can manufacture the other parts myself. You never know when the UK government will steal another wonderful authoritarian idea from another country.

As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.

> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.

Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed on the street in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less, if all those Iranians had easy access to guns, and not just the government.

Drones are not enough, you still need boots on the ground for you to claim control over a territory, and boots on the ground think twice about signing up for service if that includes facing armed mobs with guns on a daily basis.

So no, mobs with guns are not obsolete.

Mob with guns would be useless against the Iranian Guards which are pretty much elite commandos.

Goat herders with guns in Afghanistan kicked the U.S. army out of their country.

This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.

The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.

No. Pakistan supported an insurgency group for 20 years.

No insurgency like that can exist without foreign support in some form, usually from governments but it can be from resource export.

And the reality is nobody has ever defeated a foreign sponsored insurgency. Some have ended because the sponsor quit sponsoring them, but that is not the same thing as defeated.

I don't really think it's news that the Taliban are sponsored by Pakistan. We've known that longer than I've been alive.

The point is we were actually fighting Pakistan.

Nobody has ever defeated a foreign-funded insurgency, other than by the funding going away. It's no surprise we didn't accomplish what nobody else has, either.

This is akin to arguing that the USSR fought the US in Afghanistan. It's known that we armed and helped the various groups active there at the time. It's also pretty well established we had only a handful of people on the ground there at any point in time. Had the USSR actually fought the US at this point in time, the resulting combat would have been the most significant combat engagements of the 20th century.

Everyone knows Pakistan funded the insurgency. Pakistan has no interest in actually running Afghanistan. It's a buffer state for them. The US has no real interest in trying to get Pakistan to stop this. It's a failure of domestic politics that we didn't drop pack up a few weeks after it became obvious Bin Laden was not there.

Afghanistan is a landlocked country on the other side of the planet, the soldiers didn't grow up with knowledge of the terrain, they had no knowledge of the language, culture, customs or social networks, no one locally (with few exceptions) wanted them there, and crucially they only lost once they left, and when they left, there were no penalties for the people who started the war; no US politicians were in any danger whether the war was won or lost, no land was lost, and no truly important geopolitical goals failed.

On the flip side in any domestic insurrection, the soldiers know the terrain, language, customs and culture of the people, the supply lines are nothing (rather than having to airlift materiel and people thousands of miles, you drive them on regular roads), the infrastructure supports espionage, most people support the regime and will collaborate to return to stability (since they voted for it), the regime never leaves (you can leave Afghanistan, you can't leave your own country or it ceases to be a country), and if you lose, you lose territory and/or politicians run the risk of violence. The stakes are why these comparisons are never relevant.

But at the same time a domestic insurrection means your enemies have direct access to all of your most important infrastructure and logistics and supporting economy. It might be expensive to fly or float materials and people over to the middle east, but you don't gotta worry about 1000+ miles of pissed off insurgents potentially around every bend and tree or mixed into your own military or logistic personnel.

First the russians tried. They were not goat herders. They failed.

Then the americans tried. They were not goat herders. They failed.

The pattern is clear.

To be fair, those "goat herders" were previously trained and armed by the US to fight Russian forces, so it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison

But could they do the same to goat herders with bigger guns, drones, bombs, etc?

Pretty sure Iranians with 3D printed guns would not be able to kick their own army out of Iran.

What's the commando to civilian ratio in Iran?

Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.

So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed...

The Iranian guards, along with most of the armies in the second and third tier powers don't have elite anything. Please see Desert Storm, etc. Most of them ran. The ones that didn't were destroyed.

It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.

Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.

The 2A crowd has been really quiet this past year. Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public. I guess no one cares about government tyranny unless they're asked to respect someone's pronouns.

Why would the 2A people say anything? Conservatives aren’t libertarians. They think government has legitimate functions and draw a distinction between government performing those functions (which isn’t tyranny) and the government exceeding its scope (which is tyranny). Removing foreigners here illegally is a core function of the government. Social engineering is not.

> Why would the 2A people say anything

Because Trump is very anti 2A.

He’s a Clinton Democrat so that tracks.

> Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public.

If you were paying any attention at all, you'd see pretty much every 2A community, advocate and lobbying group was outraged by that statement and made statements against it.

Having said that, it is actually illegal to carry a firearm to go commit crimes like destroying government property, assaulting federal officers and obstructing them in carrying out their constitutional duties.

> illegal to carry a firearm to go commit crimes

Of which Pretti did zero of.

There is video of him kicking light the tail light of a federal law enforcement vehicle, which is definitely a crime. And that’s just what we have video of.

We have video from both sides of the door of a stack of ICE agents with AR15s breaking down a door to a daycare without a warrant.

We have video of at least three ICE agents executing people in the street with testimony that contradicts what we see with our eyes.

An illegal immigrant fled a traffic stop and went into a daycare: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/11/05/dhs-sets-record-straight...

Pursuit is an exception to the warrant requirement, according to a 1976 Supreme Court case: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/hot_pursuit

[dead]

That same video shows him spitting on an officer.

[dead]

Drones may be good against foreign adversaries, but you can't bomb your own population and cities into being productive economy. A war between two well funded and supported militaries is far different than an insurgency.

1) That's a mischaracterization of the FFL purchase process if I've ever heard one.

2) The weapons culture of the US is so obsolete that there are government officials parroting lines about it not being legal to carry a concealed weapon during a protest in Minnesota when it is, actually, very much legal. That is to say, it's not obsolete at all. Given the prior public stances of the Trump administration on firearms, this is incredibly telling, and all the more reason why you can't trust people like them.

Those drones lost some wars against guerilla militias

Well, at birth every American is issued Baby's First Glock™

Actually I tried to use it just for fun on some vouchers, but it didn't work on the copy machines I tried. They just happily photocopied the vouchers.

Tried the same, doesn't do anything on my scanner. Interestingly, there are regions of banknotes my scanner refuses to scan. But had no time to investigate further.

Some more tests on this old page: https://murdoch.is/projects/currency/ (2004)

Is this true? Couldn't I put the mark on a page of my book and photocopiers would still detect and refuse to copy that page?

Yes, absolutely. It's a pattern of five rings, well-documented although Omron appears to keep the exact details pretty tightly held.

They don't have to be exact circles, they just have to be some dots in about the right place. In the UK, the Bank of England issued notes with Elgar on them and the EURion constellation picked out in musical notes ;-)

No idea why this comment is getting downvoted so hard. This was exactly what I thought of too, and it provides a concrete answer to the question.

There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.

Suuure buddy, we just need to throw away every gun and introduce new ones with special marks telling software not copy.

Go ahead, try that

I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.

I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...

Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...

The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.

>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.

My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.

The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.

EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.

My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.

All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.

Yep. Democracy is working according to a non-minority in the country. Agree to disagree?

Sure. I'll bite.

The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.

They forgot.

They dont care.

They missed the registration deadline.

They're homeless, and no address.

They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.

They're in prison/jail.

The candidates suck, so you dont vote.

Can't afford to take time off work.

They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.

To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.

It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...

"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

> mandate required voting

I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.

A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.

It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.

They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.

> A right to vote includes the right to not vote.

Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.

Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.

Living in a civilized society with other people should have its social responsibilities, amongst others.

And you get to decide what others are forced to do, right?

Are you an anarchist by any chance? Because the logical conclusion to this argument is why anyone can "force" anyone else to do anything.

Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people.

Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes.

On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes.

Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?

> Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful?

The US tried to do this kind of "literacy test" before, remember? It's where the expression "grandfathered in" comes from: you had to do an impossible-to-pass test to gain the right to vote - except if your grandfather had the right to vote.

This was of course used to ban black people from voting without explicitly banning them for being black.

> Prisoners voting is madness

If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?

> People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes

This should obviously includes everyone working for government contractors. Which is obviously going to include everyone working for any kind of tech company with any government contract. Which, considering HN demographics, means you likely shouldn't e allowed to vote.

Heck, why not extend this even further? Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting. Everyone driving their car on government-maintained roads should be banned from voting!

There is a big problem with people voting themselves money out of the treasury. It gets worse every year.

> this kind of "literacy test"

Where did I mention a "literacy test"? I'm against such tests for exactly the same reasons I'm against prisoner voting.

> If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?

Prisons, by definition, are built on the principle that prisoners are under the full control of prison administrations. If everyone who will vote against could be imprisoned, there would be no problem allowing prisoners to vote: prisoners would still vote in the manner desired by the prison administration. That's how prisons work. And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.

> any kind of tech company with any government contract.

Obviously, this shouldn't apply to "any" government contracts. But if the majority of a contractor's income comes from government contracts, then yes, employees shouldn't vote.

> Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting.

I don't understand why you're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity. The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship through its ability to control taxes. And yet you're proposing measures that would proclaim such a dictatorship.

> And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.

Because what happens in the ballot box is private, it should be possible to let prisoners vote without interference as long as poll workers are allowed inside to do their job, but it's not just people currently in prison you have to worry about. There are places where convicted felons can lose their right to vote even after they've served their time and laws like that have already been used to suppress votes.

> The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship

Freedom means having enough rope to hang yourself with. By strictly limiting who is allowed to vote and taking that right away from millions of Americans you'd be destroying the country, not saving it.

Personally I don't find "tick atleast this one box and sign your name, otherwise you get a $20 fine" is too much to ask. If it wasn't the US I would assume most fines would still be ignored by the law anyways, but giving the US legal system another way to fuck with people is also kind of worrying when it is so bad already.

> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.

Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.

I love mail in voting, but it does run the unique risk of having verifiable votes to third parties, which means it allows pay-for-votes.

No election can mitigate this so long as your vote is provable to a third party.

There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.

An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.

The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).

Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.

The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.

If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA

In recent years, people can vote early, vote by mail, or vote on election day. Hard to see how a "holiday" for voting makes anything easier for anyone, though I could maybe support it if you eliminated all the other options.

Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state.

I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.

In the US, states elect the president, not the people individually. This is a pretty foundational element of our constitution.

Another foundational element of our constitution was denying women the right to contribute to society, and not establishing any form of succession and other blatant and stupid failures.

Maybe the framers can go fuck themselves.

Yet the framers quite literally told you to change what they made, so they agree.

Do you mean farmers?

Having a president which a minority of cast votes picked is a problem in my view.

The President is the representative of the constituent State governments of America, not the people. That is why it is the States that vote. The only part of the Federal government that is intended to proportionally represent the people, and is in practice, is the House of Representatives in Congress.

This is a good and appropriate thing. States are approximately countries. Most laws only exist at the State level e.g. most common crimes don't exist in Federal law. The overreach of the Federal government claiming broad authority over people is an unfortunate but relatively recent (20th century) phenomenon. The US does seem to be returning to States having more autonomy, which I'd say is a good thing.

> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

In Argentina, elections are held on Sundays.

> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.

> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.

I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.

> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.

Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.

> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.

The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for?

When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?

> When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

They are weighted - the House is allocated by population, and the Senate by state.

They are weighted in how they are elected. They aren’t weighted in how the members vote.

> Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for?

I prefer not to live in the Hunger Games world, personally.

Those books are a brilliant exploration of the tyranny of urban clusters.

The electoral college is an effective foil to that.

I wouldn’t call the US system ‘effective’. The US system is spiralling and it’s getting dystopian. The hunger games analogy is fitting, with The Patriot Games coming right up.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/18/politics/patriot-games-an...

> Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting?

About half of all folks in US prisons are there for non-violent crimes, and we're talking about a relatively small percentage of voters anyway. Maybe ~3 million added to the ~244 million eligible voters

For a consequence to be effective, you have to lose something. If you go to prison, the big thing you lose is freedom of movement. But other things, such as who you live with, what you eat, and the ability to vote are other things.

I don’t think we have a broad consensus that incarceration is effective.

No longer being able to vote seems like a rather petty inconvenience to heap on top

Voting is a civil right. People who are stripped of their right to vote should also pay zero taxes. You know, "no taxation without representation".

>Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.

>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.

Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)

>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.

> > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.

Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.

> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.

> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?

Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.

Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.

>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.

This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).

So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).

So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.

>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.

Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.

>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.

Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.

More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?

I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).

"less than 50%" being 49.8%. Kind of winning on a technicality there.

A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?

Voting is always a compromise. No candidate ever perfectly represents one's own views on every issue. So IMO reasons for voting "for" a candidate or "against" another don't really matter.

Which is why it isn't really fair to say "this is what people voted for." Just because people voted for a candidate doesn't mean they agree with everything that candidate does.

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> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people

Define "property owning", presumably you mean land or a home (would an apartment be enough without any real rights to the land it sits on?). This definition would end up disenfranchising most young adults and probably a majority of the members of the military (the military is relatively young, and young enlisted folks are housed in dorms, and if they move frequently often don't bother buying homes because it just doesn't make financial sense).

>Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote

I don't follow. Please explain.

>Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

Yeah, just like the good old days when we had literacy tests in this country to vote down south.

You're literally calling for a return of Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was bad because it targeted people in the basis of a characteristic that didn’t matter: skin color. That doesn’t mean that all restrictions on voting are bad. If the restriction is based on a characteristic that does matter, like intelligence, that’s completely different.

If you are a citizen, subject to the laws and the taxes, you should get a vote: no exceptions.

Why? To what end?

I am certain, because you use IQ as a metric for who you think should vote, that you are smart enough to puzzle out a steelman argument for my position.

Use that big brain of yours and try it, you might learn something about humanity (and humility)!

There’s lots of potential reasons. I’m trying to figure out which one you’re invoking?

> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children.

Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned?

It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more.

As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'.

> Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.

So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles.

It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow".

> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

Holy crap, the dog whistles.

Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor"

Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves.

And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?

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You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.

I don’t think social science is credible as a field. That doesn’t mean that every finding within it is not credible.

Sarcasm much? Ha ha, you forgot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_paper_bag_test

Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.

The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.

If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random.

If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.

If you think the people who CURRENTLY vote "Care enough to inform themselves" then you are very silly.

Stupid people already vote. Wrong people already vote. Your system has to accept that interference no matter what.

This is nulled by randomizing the candidates position on the ballots.

The point of letting people vote is to make people feel as though they're involved in the process so they're less likely to cause social unrest. If somebody is too apathetic to vote, they're also too apathetic to cause trouble and therefore it's not a real problem that they didn't vote.

That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.

Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.

I think he actually did get more than half the votes this time.

"Staying home" is not actually a vote, as much as people want it to be in their heart of hearts.

edit: sorry, I was wrong, he did not quite clear 50% -- looked it up and he got 49.8%.

The measure that interests me os the percentage of eligible voters that picked Trump - 31.6%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...

Multiple polls have found that if everyone had voted, Trump would have won by even more. https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2...

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

The average person who doesn’t vote is a low-trust individual who is skeptical about government and institutions. Those people are Trumpier than average.

I would prefer that reality to our current one.

I thought I had a decent understanding of the 2024 election; people were unhappy with the status quo, therefore mistrusting the people and institutions they believed responsible for it. Then I saw this and its supporting data in your first link:

> Voters saw Harris as more ideologically extreme than Trump

... what?

According to Gallup, the record high support for increasing immigration was about 36%. Harris presided over an administration that saw a large increase in immigration. So believe didn’t find it credible when she said she wanted to control the border. And the position of wanting to increase immigration is more ideologically extreme than Trump’s position of wanting to shut down the border to illegal immigration just as a factual matter.

The latest Harvard-Harris poll, which isn’t good for Trump, still shows people want to deport all immigrants here illegally by a 52-48 margin: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/HHP... (page 24). I don’t think even Trump intends to actually do that. He would have to dramatically escalate what he’s doing now in order to achieve that outcome.

I mean you can make up all the excuses you want for losing an election but you still lost. Doesn’t make the result illegitimate

"you" lost? Did this guy you're replying to run for office? This whole my team vs your team bullshit is really one of the big problems in our country. No independent thought. Just stick with what news says. Always vote my team. Dumb. Here's a news bulletin for you, everybody lost.

Parent posted a list of excuses for why people didn’t vote. Doesn’t change an election

I think people not being able to vote because their right to vote has been taken from them, or their vote was made pointless through gerrymandering, or because of other acts of voter suppression does change elections. The ability for it to change the outcome of a race is why voter suppression happens.

People who don't bother to vote for any reason changes elections. It also makes it very hard to make claims about what the majority of Americans want, since so many didn't make their opinions known

You can't gerrymander a presidential election. How would that work? It's not district-based.

A majority of Americans either wanted Trump or didn't care enough to vote against him.

In my experience in Texas, the right-wingers have this system set up where votes that were legally cast can be denied validity by some sort of "citizens election integrity board." I had no issue voting in Travis County but when I moved to a more conservative suburban county address I ran into this. There's a multitude of ways for anti-democratic forces in the US to deny citizens their rights. And it really hardened my opinion of these sorts of people that would do that to me and others. If they say my rights aren't valid how valid are their own, certainly nothing I should respect given their treatment of myself and others. That's why I have no tolerance for the right-wing I've seen their real face.

It is not democracy anymore. It is authoritarian regime dismantling the democracy.

67% of people didn't vote against it.

A half-empty kind of guy!

When democracy votes for something you don’t like just call it populism

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I do not think the current government in the US is fascist, but electing fascists would indeed be an exercise in democracy. The entire point of democracy is that it's the will of the people, whether right or wrong.

This is precisely why democracy was never seen as a tenable system for millennia. Thinkers of the past always assumed that the people would be incapable of picking the most skilled leaders, and would instead end up picking the most charismatic leaders. This is precisely what Plato's endlessly cited allegory of the Ship of State [1] is about.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State

Democracy is not "Whoever gets half + 1 vote is king"

Winning representatives are still supposed to represent the people who didn't vote for them in fact.

Democracy isn't about picking the "best" leader because that's not necessary. "The best" is almost never necessary, and you are much better off building a system that handles regularly not getting the best, because no system reliably picks the best, especially since "The best" is a criteria that cannot be rigorously defined.

You're imposing your own ideological conditions that literally do not exist. It's like a supporter of e.g. imperial systems saying that the emperor is supposed to represent all of society. In society's opinion? Sure, but there is no such condition in reality. Some did, some didn't.

The problem with democracy is that we don't get anywhere even remotely near the best. It tends to promote people that are highly charismatic and highly corrupt. The latter trait is not a coincidence, but a part of getting ahead in democracy. Give corporations what they want and your election coffers will be full, refuse and they'll instead fund your opponent and their media will frame you as unelectable, a threat to democracy, or whatever new FUD phrase focus tests best at the time. And that corruption tends to correlate strongly with a complete vacancy of morals or ethics - see: how our entire political class, globally, flocked to pedo island like flies to shit.

Good job no-one has elected any fascists then

They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.

Recently they banned all new DJI drones and as far as I know they were basically the only option in the consumer space? And there's nothing domestically of course :/

To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.

I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?

they also don't publish the NOTAMs ahead of time. So, they're effectively allowing ICE to retroactively make flying a drone illegal if an agent takes issue with the color of your cheesburger bun.

More likely the videos of FPV drones from Ukraine showing that an inexpensive quadcopter can be a very effective weapon of war.

And that radio jamming no longer neutralizes that threat.

That could be used to justify banning drones in general, or banning all drones which aren't radio controlled (not that those are being used domestically). And "it can be used for war" is a bit silly in a country where you can buy guns at the grocery store. Not to mention that cars can be very effective weapons as well, and those haven't been banned yet.

The far more likely explanation is that they just don't want people filming them. They can't legally stop someone with a cellphone from filming them, but that hasn't stopped them from using up-to-lethal force against observers. On the other hand, you can't exactly beat a flying drone into submission, so the obvious move is to observe using drones instead.

Luckily for ICE the FAA already has the mechanics in place to criminalize flying drones in certain places, so with their magic "no drones anywhere we operate" NOTAM they can now punish observers with a year of jail time.

I agree with your point but they definitely want to kill you for being in a car and driving near them if they get scared so IDK if we can use cars as an example of something they don't mind

It's my understanding that they are no longer the border people as Trump extended their reach to every square inch of the USA

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Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.

We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.

You need both, because there really is no such thing as kill it in it's crib. The people that want this will continue to want it forever, and will continue to propose it forever. And eventually it works.

The missing the third ingredient which is passing rollback resistant legislation in its place that protects these freedoms.

That makes efforts far more durable.

Than it’s a matter of showing up in court to defend attacks against the law(s) that protect it.

In this way, we can have durable change, but it’s a high cost road. By design I am sure.

How would this situation be any different if BBL printers were open source?

The law doesn't care about licensing, there are just 2 groups of printers - those that follow the law and implement effective blocking technology and those that don't.

If BBL sells an open source printer that allows someone to trivially bypass proposed mandatory blocking technology, they'll be fined and held liable for any crimes that result from guns printed using their 3D printers.

So BBL, as open source as they might want to be, is not allowed to sell such a product.

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Nothing is forever. This whole thing rose in the first place because a novel technology was used to make weapons.

To give another example, the whole modern anti-vaxxer movement was started by a doctor to sell bogus tests.

Just print the code to do what ever is disallowed on a t-shirt, ala DVDCSS. Is that not a legitimate way around things like this?

Prusa is still kicking... if open source hardware is your priority.

Prusa had been moving towards proprietary licensing (if they release files at all) for a while now, due to their open source design files being used to undercut the original with cheaper clones.

I seriously doubt it's the undercutting that's the problem here. When they release a new model they can't keep up with demand anyway, they max out production capacity on legitimate orders.

I think, if anything, the problem is when people buy a cheap clone and blame Prusa when it fails.

This is why we can't have nice things

I’m new to 3d printing. I saw bambu pushed a firmware update that bricked offline mode, so didn’t really consider them when shopping around.

I’m really liking my (better specs for less money) elegoo centauri. I compiled the slicer from source because there weren’t Linux binaries.

All problems solved. It even happily prints exotic stuff like TPU, which I guess bambu has been cracking down on for unclear reasons.

Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing, but I’ve had zero issues downloading files (even from bambu-centric websites) and running them through the slicer.

I can’t imagine wanting to use their cloud whatever thing, or it providing any value beyond the open source stacks.

Bambu is leagues better than other printers. Also its super convienant to queue up a job from your phone and then watch it live video feed.

My Bambu printer is working great in LAN mode on a vlan with no internet access. Never even complains about it. I'm not concerned.

You can still make an open source printer with some extrusion and stepper motors, same as always.

We still have open source hardware in Voron. High performance and almost infinitely moddable. Pair it with the open source Klipper firmware and open source slicer OrcaSlicer and you're there.

This bill would effectively make prusa illegal, which is my main issue with it. I refuse to buy anything else if it is not open in the same way.

3D printer hardware is pretty simple. All the magic happens in software, and there's plenty of open-source options.

Sovol open source hardware and software.

All the open source designs from 10 years ago still work, not like they went away.

AnyCubic AMS is great

I had the Kobra S1 with the ACE Pro and I couldn't get rid of the thing fast enough, probably the worst electronic device I have ever owned in my entire life. In 8 months with it I completed one multi-colour print, and that was only with ~30 filament changes - to be fair to Anycubic, their support has been excellent and they kept shipping me more and more parts to replace, none of which would solve the fundamental issue of the ACE being generally unfit for the job. In the end if was just a fancy £300 filament dryer, and I decided that you know what, even my Ender 5 was giving me fewer issues than this whole thing. I got an H2D with 2 AMSes and yes, they cost a fortune but they just work. I finished a 9 colour print with 800 filament changes the other day and it just worked fine, not a single problem.

I will always admit that maybe I was just unlucky with my S1 but both the printer and the ACE was horrendous experiences and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone based on my problems with them.

I have a friend that runs a small print farm and he had similar issues, but I didn't know if it was a one off. Thanks for sharing.

None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.

Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).

Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.

But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.

Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)

If your goal is to buy the cheapest machine you can find in the world, chances are good everything you buy is going to come from China. That Prusa Mk3 you bought ages ago can be upgraded to the latest model, which means you have the option of turning that device into a lifetime machine, something ONLY Prusa offers.

Yes, the initial purchase price is higher, the lifetime price might not be.

Last time I looked, the MK3->MK4 upgrade kit is basically the same price as a complete MK4 kit (very little can be reused. New electronics, motors, extruder)

The upgrade kits are definitely a good thing, going from MK3 to MK3S to MK3.5S was a worthwhile upgrade path and has prolonged the useful life of the printer. But they have their limits.

(And with 3D printing going more mainstream, there's a large segment of the market that has no interest in building printers from kits or stripping down printer to install upgrades - even though some of us find that quite enjoyable)

Prusa used to be king.

Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.

I'm a hobbyist and price, in the end, sold me on Bambu Labs.

(And I stayed once I saw the quality. Likely Prusa can match or exceed it, but not with what I was willing to lose from my wallet.)

Not criticizing your decision, but I went the opposite way, deciding that I was ok spending a certain extra amount initially in order to encourage a non-Chinese manufacturer. But I understand not everyone has this luxury.

I bought the Core One kit to understand better how the machine works, which reduced the price delta somewhat.

It remains to be seen over the long term which way is actually better financially, as Prusas have historically had long lives, while there is only limited data on the Bambu Lab side yet.

So far, I am quite happy with my decision. But competition is on. I am excited about the upcoming INDX system for the Core One: if it delivers on its promise, it will be fantastic!

In hindsight, I would have been happy to spend more if I knew the quality of what I was purchasing would be high.

My Ender that I had purchased years earlier sat in the closet gathering dust because of how much of a pain it was trying to dial in the bed to level, etc. I took a second chance at 3D printing on the Bambu, but might not have if it were costly.

If someone now tells me a Prusa (or whatever) is as good as and simple as the Bambu, I would not hesitate to spend even double.

This _cannot_ be true

I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.

To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.

I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.

But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.

Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.

I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.

You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.

In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.

That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.

With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.

They must be able to control their printers from their phone.

The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "

Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".

>>You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.

Why can't you be both. I loved my time with my Ender 5 Pro, I had it for 3 years and I will always freely admit that 90% of the fun was with the tinkering to make the machine work correctly. But you know, you get bored of it. I got an H2D just before christmas and it's incredible to have a machine that "just works". I can print things for myself and others and not worry whether it's going to work or not - it just will.

Same as I used to tinker with my cars when I was younger, now I want an appliance car - I want to get in, press start and drive across europe not worrying whether I'll have to fix it on the roadside or not. I would say it's just getting older, but I Don't think it is - I think everyone goes through stages of developing things they enjoy about their hobbies.

> The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

I have a 10 year old kit-built prusa I3 sitting next to me. Its brother is in the basement next to a kossel. It's been years since they have seen action, there is a litany of small bits of work they need.

I unboxed an A1 Mini and it's been like an epiphany. I've been printing almost nonstop. It's so much FUN. I just send from my phone and it just works. Everything has been nearly flawless until last night where half a batch of mini utility knife frames started to spaghetti, probably my fault for not fully cleaning the build plate in a bit.

Beats the hell out of glue stick or blue tape, fussing with slicer params, babysitting the first layers, etc etc. Fuck that, gimme the cheat.

There are plenty of us “old” type of users who made and designed our own printers and parts and spent hours on calibration, who no longer want to unnecessarily waste time doing so.

I might be a software engineering but I’m not going to waste time writing a bootloader for my next PC when it is a solved problem.

Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.

But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.

Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.

I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.

But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.

My first printer was a delta in 2015. I spent more time calibrating it than I did printing, and it was never very good. I then got an Anet A8 in 2017, but it was too flimsy. Cheap, tho!

Around 2021 I spent quite a lot upgrading and dialing in an Ender 3 V2 so it was repeatable, whisper-quiet, and dead reliable.

That's it. This doesn't end with me buying a Bambu. It's still all of those things. I'm very happy with my printing appliance, and also that its only data connection is via microSD sneakernet.

I built my Prusa from a kit and was interested in the internals, but I was always annoyed I spent more time working on the printer sometimes than learning CAD.

And the Prusa is a real workhorse. I’ve only had a couple problems in almost a decade.

A lot of the hobby is people printing out useless things. But the it doesn’t even work for people who are interested in learning CAD. There’s no surprised everyone is turning to Bambu. So will I when my Prusa breaks or there’s a sale too hard to pass up.

IP/BigCo lawyers are probably the main lobbyists behind this article in the bill so I would think soonish

I wonder if you could circumvent this by adding a thin appendage to whatever it was you're printing and then just snip it off post-print.

probably about 6 months after people start screaming about the issue

It’ll happen the day this bill is passed.

If they cared even a little bit about gun violence, they’d focus on mental health and other preventive measures.

If they just wanted to provide the illusion that they cared about gun violence, they’d go after high-volume manufacturers first.

This reminds me of Trump’s Venezuela coup. I’m offended they aren’t even bothering to properly lie about their motives.

I’ll just build my own 3D printer lol. Did it college 15 years ago. I’ll do it again.

"And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?"

You see how it's impossible to regulate technology? I don't want my tax dollars funding impossible missions.

> And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?

Yep, that's exactly what the fed undercover will say.

And sure, they can't catch everyone, but they don't have to. They just need to catch and visibly prosecute enough people to create a chilling effect. It's about making it harder, not making it impossible.

Whether the cost/benefit here justifies those gains is a different question.

The RIAA tried that. It did not go well for them, and piracy has never been more prevalent or easy.

Are you sure about that? All the normies use streaming services for music and movies. Techies around here tend to too. The normies don't know about and can't work torrents. They can't even work their own file system. The techies decry it as "inconvenient".

I just don't believe I have the right to consume the creative output of others for free if they've put a price on it.

The obvious next move is to ban all sales of 3D printer parts. You got a license for that extruded aluminum profile?

I would unironically love to see the diy 3d printer scene come back.

It never went away. The Voron continues to be a popular DIY 3D printer, tho many people choose to buy ready-made printers.

DIY used to just be “the way”. Today “the way” is Bambu. But the scene has also grown a lot, so I could see the market size of DIY staying the same or growing, even if its lost a lot of market share.

It's just the difference between having 3d printers as a hobby vs 3d printing as a hobby.

THis is a case of me not knowing and assuming, ha. I remember the peak days of the RepRap scene so I just assumed as that slowed down, the entire thing was dead

I was attending Bay Area Reprap Club meetings in 2010! Got my first printer (Ultimaker V1) in 2011. My how things have changed. We just got a second Bambu H2D Pro at work. Incredible machine.

Open Source and DIY 3d printer scene is very active.

I’ve unclogged enough nozzles in my lifetime thanks

You can do that if it is still legal.

The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.

> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.

The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

you can buy every individual component and build it yourself, it's absurd (I did some years ago)

maybe amazon/aliexpress is also too powerful for you own good then ;p

OI WHERE IS YOUR GPU LOISENCE!?!?

The most insane thing about this is that it is not illegal to manufacture firearms in the United States. Providing that you do not sell or distribute the firearm, it is entirely legal to manufacture a firearm in the USA for personal use only. Laws vary state by state, of course, and it may be different in the state of New York, but assuming that this federal law has not been overridden by some state law in New York, then this proposed regulation is 100% nonsensical.

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

So it's okay to 3D print a gun as long as you have a serial number? That seems to reinforce that 3D printing shouldn't be banned, especially by blanket technical means.

That is the essence of the weird gun laws. Take a Glock pistol as an example. The only part that has a serial number and is legally “the gun” is the thing you hold in your hand: the frame. It’s plastic and has the trigger and some parts to hold the magazine.

The rest of the stuff? You can buy and overnight ship it to yourself legally with almost no regulation (as of 2026 CA requires more gun-like treatment for those parts).

I just grabbed my glock to check. The frame, slide and barrel are all have serial markings and it's about 15 years old at this point.

Yes but nobody is forcing you to keep the parts that have markings. Those are wholly interchangeable without any paperwork required. It’s pretty weird imo

NY and CA have the most strict gun regulations

NJ and CA. You can't make guns at all in NJ, and you need a firearm permit to buy an airgun or bb gun.

Combined they are home to 1 in 6 Americans so it's important info that applies to a lot of us.

theres a procedural problem with this, and its apparently why the feds dont require serial number on a PMF until FFL transfer is about to occur

when should you be required to serialize it?

if you serialize after it is worked to the point of being a firearm, then there is a period in time, however short, when the firearm is unserialized, thus illegal, thus serializing after creation could be obscuring a crime.

vs serializing before firearmhood, and you are now requireing a "hunk of metal" to be serialized because of what it MAY become in the future.

and just when does a hunk of metal start becoming a firearm, the so called 80% threshold

Not really. You can just register prior. If hunk of metal doesn't become a gun do nothing.

you have made it quite clear that you have no understanding of the issues.

This will cause 3D printer usability to go down massively. A bit like the multicolored tracking dots - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots that causes the driver to tell you "you can't print black and white as you're out of yellow".

As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.

To mandate tracking dots they would first have to admit they exist.

When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.

Blackmail an Executive? That's a complete overkill.

It's so much easier just to "recruit" the direct manager of the firmware engineering team. Convince them it's their patriotic duty to add "tracking dots" to the design requirements without drawing attention to where the requirement came from.

The engineers implementing it will assume the requirement came from somewhere above, or another engineering team. And if the executives ever notice, they will assume it came from somewhere below. Both will probably assume the legal department was responsible, and that there is some kind of law somewhere requiring them to implement that functionality.

The most unrealistic part here is that you're assuming they can even find their desired firmware manager on the org chart.

Moreover, most executives don't require blackmail; they tend to go along to get along.

Yea, just include "All printers bought by US government must have Tracking Dots" and Executives will move that feature to top of backlog without any other concerns.

Big company executives are easiest to control; they want money and all of it. US Government luckily has plenty of it to throw around.

I hear sentiment like this occasionally and I genuinely wonder if this is conspiracy theory stuff or if this sort of thing actually happened in the past.

I'm aware of the programs Snowden revealed, Tempora / XKeyscore / Longhaul / the like, plus I've heard J. Edgar Hoover did bad things and lots of CIA meddling internationally was bad. Still, these seem qualitatively different to the explicit blackmail you're referring to.

Do you (or someone else reading this) know of historical examples that demonstrate a pattern of this sort of thing? You can interpret "this sort of thing" as you wish.

That's a lot to ask for on the spot, so if not, I would be interested in what generally makes you approach the situation from this cynical angle, especially given that it's the FBI. In my experience, which is fairly limited but is as a US citizen, most of the time the US government mostly follows the law and doesn't do this sort of thing to citizens.

One of the more notable examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Living through all of the events of 2020 in Minneapolis of all places led me to the conclusion that when push comes to shove there is no law, only hard power and the will to use it.

If you want examples of events that could be reasonably interpreted as “this sort of thing”, the son of the guy who tried to assassinate Trump the second time was mysteriously arrested for possession of CSAM a week after his dad was arrested. I’m inclined to believe that the base rate of people being into that stuff is reasonably low so whenever I hear about someone being charged with it in relation to a completely unrelated major news story it gets my spidey sense tingling.

That could also be related to his family being under more scrutiny by authorities

You're right that absent some colossal screwup you could never prove one way or another that it was legit vs planted, but stuff like that changes my priors on what I believe can happen. The fact that it is completely deniable also increases the incentive for the government to do it, and they no doubt have the capability. Capability and motive combined leads me to believe that it likely does happen.

Oh definitely. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, just that this time I don't think that's the case here

It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary

"The government has been notified that you are attempting to 3D print a copyrighted Door Wedge™ without a license. Local law enforcement has been notified, please prepare to be arrested."

or worse...

"You are trying to print a design that is 87% similar to Egg Cup™. Acquire a limited run license for $3000 for ten runs which expires in six months? Y/N"

>buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers *sold or delivered in New York* to include “blocking technology”.

I.e don't buy your printer in New York. Pick it up out of state. Problem solved.

Yes, this is rent seeking, and yes New York is gonna New York, but not a big deal.

I would suspect flashing your firmware to the globally standard one would become commonplace if printers sold in NY came with a nerfed version.

On principle, yes, but also for maintenance. The nerfed firmware that's only required in a few jurisdictions is almost assuredly going to fall out-of-sync with mainline features.

"The rule saying you can't print the thing that you either weren't going to print, or you weren't going to let the rule tell you not to print, wants you to run old/broken software." No matter which side of that you fall on, you're upgrading the software.

I doubt any meaningful detection would be worth implementing just for New York, so you’ll get a cut down firmware that supports 5 hard coded models. You’ll need to flash your own firmware to print anything else.

No, it's not solved.

Goalpost will move to "save gcode on government-approved secured storage", licensing and registering each 3d printer, then confiscating the ones that are not whitelisted, etc etc.

This is the same story where every time you hear about some democratic run city/state implementing policy, everyone makes it out to be a step in the goal to get to 1984 Oceania.

This legislation is basically like a gold star on some politicians report card about preventing gun deaths. The impacted groups are allways gonna be niche, but it looks good to the overall public.

With these little steps that affect niche groups, we got to 2026, with total surveillance and very little freedoms.

> blog.adafruit.com Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information

if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error

(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.

the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.

the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss

the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?

if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.

we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.

Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser).

I get:

blog.adafruit.com Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch the content? I bet my LLM coukd get it anyway as I'm using basic local scraping with firecrawl for backup. So my LLM if it fails to retrieve using my basic local crawl4ai will use my paid firecrawl api and those guys can scrape EVERYTHING.

I do not understand why do you (as a site owner) care? Are these bots generating so much traffic? Can you set it up to serve text only version to them then?

this isn’t an adafruit-specific stance, it’s a web-wide problem. automated scraping and bot traffic is enough to take independent sites offline, and cloudflare is a tool we use to keep the site available at all. we publish full-text rss with no blockers here: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss . if cloudflare trips on your browser and you want an article, email me and i’ll send it in whatever format you want, we're always working to make it easier, it's hard, would rather have help than snarks and dunks.

It is fine, I have used a browser I keep for such occasions.

My critique is less about this site and more about the state of Web in general.

Thank you for providing the rss feed.

My office uses ZScalar and lots of sites automatically block that because the company running the product make the product seem like an "open anonymous proxy".

Forget it. Every thread has these who people complain when some website doesn't open in Lynx or Amaya with Javascript disabled. Ignore them.

Didn't know there were proponents of Cloudflare's enshittification and centralization of the Internet.

Is the scraping protection the only thing relying on cloudflare? If it is then there are solutions like anubis that work pretty well

AI scrapers can beat Anubis now if I recall.

So, is cloudflare just becoming proof of bloat?

What's your email address?

Just get the damn RSS

When companies that earn their money by selling things deliberately make their website hard to access (especially for scrapers -- of any sort), then they're making a choice to abandon their customers.

It seems ruthlessly disappointing to consider, but maybe Adafruit isn't cut out for this whole Internet thing.

Can you elaborate on the logic that makes preventing scrapers (note, you didn't mention actually hindering accessibility technologies) customer antagonistic?

When a product doesn't show up at all using the [potential] customer's chosen tools (whether a search engine like Google, or an LLM like ChatGPT), then that product is invisible.

An invisible product is one that may as well not exist. When a person can't find it, then they also can't purchase it.

(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.

the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss

the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?

if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.

we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.

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Oh look - HN fortune cookies

Yeah you can't predict anything with 100% certainty either

By repeating propaganda at you though desperate financiers can hack your brains innate prediction loop to convince you you're knocking on the door of infamy.

Look, I get you. You're trying to fill the hole created when father never came back with cigarettes. Mom always blamed you for his leaving. But little Warboy screaming "Witness me make line go up !" everyone else is a self selecting meat suit too working unintentionally (simply distracted by their own lives needs they never encounter your pitch) and in some instances intentionally (fomenting economic and political instability) against you to support themselves.

[dead]

[dead]

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Webdev new hotness monkey poo flinging software development is not these people's schtick. Hardware is.

God forbid whatever library they use to make their website "easy" and detract less labor from their endeavors not have default settings in perfect accordance with their politics.

I bet they don't compile their OS from source either.

The "new hotness" in webdev is what causes these errors. Plain old HTML pretty much never has these issues. Clearly they are into the new hotness in webdev.

Exactly. Unless they want to make a project out of their website they're at the mercy of the packages and frameworks they depend upon, who are run by people who generally like webdev stuff and have no qualms about the new hotness.

Did you consider clicking the "Click here for more information" to learn what the reason was?

If you're using a browser more than a year old it's also much more likely you're vulnerable to zero-day exploits. Browser tech is a lot different than it was 10 years ago.

That error message almost always means someone is using an extremely obscure browser that doesn't pass Cloudflare's not-a-bot-check.

Either the browser has Javascript disabled (Tor), or its Javascript engine is very outdated/broken (a couple of old Firefox forks) or doesn't support Javascript at all.

It doesn't necessarily mean the browser is vulnerable to anything, just that it's not a browser normal websites would expect to encounter so the bot check fails.

I don't think they know what Ctrl+Alt+Delete means.

They want to restart it? They want to go to the screen where you can switch users or sign out?

Do they think it's just a fancier way of saying delete?

The folks at adafruit probably do know, but it does make sense if you expand the words: "Control, Alter, and Delete"

That's more charitable. Alt is still short for Alternate though, not Alter.

I thought "Alt" in the title is meant in the sense of "stop", as in "halt", but on second thoughts maybe that only works in French (where h is always silent)?

It's clearly meant to be part of the Ctrl-Alt-Del key sequence that interrupts Windows computers to bring up the task manager.

But doesn't Ctrl+Alt+Del bring up the screen to switch users or sign out? "Task Manager" is one item in the list of options you get, but it's not the main one or anything, in fact it's the last:

https://www.lifewire.com/thmb/hzx6btMYEqZJfSAL3WVxXuW3-jw=/1...

The author may just be showing their age a bit. That's what Ctrl+Alt+Del does on modern versions of Windows, but from Windows 95 to Windows XP (inclusive) it directly launched the Task Manager.

Ctrl+Alt+Del on an IBM PC or a compatible clone reboots the machine no questions asked. There's a dedicated reset button in case that fails.

Doing anything other than a reboot started with protected mode MS-Windows 3.1 IIRC (then marketed as "386 enhanced mode").

Yeah; in Windows 3.1, Ctrl+Alt+Del took you to a blue screen that allowed you to kill an unresponsive task (but didn't display a list of tasks; the Task List was launched with Ctrl+Esc), or told you there was no such task to kill if there wasn't.

Before Windows 3.1 it just rebooted the machine as you described.

Launching Task Manager was the 95 to XP behaviour, but NT behaved differently -- even Windows NT 4.0 (developed alongside Windows 95) took you to the security screen with Ctrl+Alt+Del (something that would later be ported to Vista), where launching Task Manager was one of its options. These OSes weren't used residentially though, until Windows 2000 attempted to merge their lineages and Windows XP finally cemented the deal.

Would have made more sense to say Ctrl+Shift+Esc since that just directly brings up the task manager. All in all I would say it is a slightly weird title, but I assume enough people get what they want to say with it.

Yes, but I thought they were making a colourful pune or play on words.

I mean, technically it’s short for alter on the way to being short for alternate

That's bullshit (IMO) and the post author (Phillip Torrone - I believe that's one of the owners of Adafruit) is obviously ignorant in this regard.

That said, what he's actually talking about in the post makes a lot of sense. That is the important part.

I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?

Meta+L is the lock hotkey on all major operating systems!

???

Cmd+L is "go-to location bar" on Mac. Opt+L is ¬. Ctrl+L doesn't seem to do anything.

"Lock screen" is Cmd+Shift+Q.

Reminds me of people who think penultimate is just super-duper-ultimate.

Or “epicenter”.

All prefixes eventually become intensifiers?

"Irregardless"

The grammatically correct version is "Irredisregardless".

It has been used as an idiom to mean stopping or restarting something (the former in this case) for decades: https://wordspy.com/words/ctrl-alt-delete/

I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.

It means restart. It has never meant stop. Even the link you provide says:

> n. A metaphoric mechanism with which one can reset, restart, or rethink something.

That's what's confusing. The headline makes no sense because it's not about restarting.

The first example:

>It's time to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete on the computerized Bowl Championship Series. Or should we now call it the Bowl Split-Championship Series?

Alter the control, and delete!

In modern Windows, the three-key salute is a way to lock your session securely. Maybe that's what they mean: locking it up?

It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.

This is what Shift+Ctrl+Esc does.

I'm behind the times! That's what it used to be until Windows XP, the last Windows version I used on a daily basis was Windows 2000 up to 2005.

On Windows XP this depended on whether you had joined a domain. On joined systems you got the security screen (same as previous Windows NT/2000), on other systems the task manager (same as Windows 9x).

I don't think there's a reading that suggests it's a good thing for 3D printers. The rest of the page confirms that.

Maybe we should just install this keypad on our printers and be done with it:

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/ctrl-alt-del...

Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.

Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"

Hey, it's similar to Weird Al's song:

Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you

If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you

Perhaps they were using Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the Task Manager so that they can kill an unruly process?

This is more like installing anti-virus on your 3d printer.

I don’t want an antivirus on my (hypothetical because I don’t have one) 3D printer. I want it to dumbly print whatever it is I send to it.

I want all my tools to dumbly operate on whatever I'm working on. Imagine if lathes were required to try to guess whether you're reboring a rifle barrel and stopped themselves from running. Or if a bandsaw had to detect whether what you are cutting was gun shaped. Totally ridiculous. [EDIT: Looks like these examples were already brought up in the article, since they're obvious]

But you’re OK with a screwdriver that could be used to assemble a gun without even checking what it’s torquing? /s

It's the same as control open-apple reset.

Hmmm... this is literally the intro of the narrative arc in the game that I'm making. Governments confiscating 3D Printers, powerful GPUs, robotic parts to prevent "simple people" the access to "dangerous technologies". For their own good of course.

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Just to be clear, I don't think this is useful or good legislation. While the idea that the state is a shady body that's out to fleece an honest and unsuspecting peoples is a great story beat, I just don't think it's particularly accurate to reality and we shouldn't pretend that it is just because it sounds good in a HN comment.

Don't conflate "populace" with "lobbying groups". The populace wants health care and this ain't it.

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Uh, Marx is the one who said "Under no pretext..." but who's keeping score at this point.

Yes, I get that you're trying to express a deeply RWNJ partisan view but as a proud LWNJ I must express that the real world is much more complicated than "commies are nuts yo". Perhaps the issue is rampant authoritarianism?

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Who, Mamdani? He's a democratic socialist, not a communist.

It's like you just confused RAM with SSD because they both involve gigabytes.

"If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.", Mamdani, 2020

"We have to ensure we are unapologetic about our socialism", Mamdani, 2021

"There are also other issues we firmly believe in [...] weather is the end goal of seizing the means of production", Mamdani, 2021

"We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.", Mamdani, 2026

It's funny. You people go up in arms calling Elon Musk a fascist because he made a suspicious gesture with his right hand. But, then you have a guy outright telling you he wants to "seize the means of production" and you make excuses on why he is not actually a communist.

> Anna Grzymala-Busse, a Stanford University international studies professor, said that seizing the means of production is a socialist and communist goal. "The difference is that with communism, there is also one ruling party that brooks no opposition and no pluralist civil society," she said.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jul/03/seizing-means...

Collectivism and some amount of state controlled means of production are typical of many leftist systems. America already does this in many places: military, power, education, civil works. Communism stands out among other -isms on the left in that it is single-party and incompatible with democracy.

> suspicious gesture with his right hand

It was a Nazi salute. Don't believe me? Go to a crowded street corner and do the "suspicious gesture," and gauge the reaction.

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He doesn't have a point, because he doesn't know how socialism and communism are alike, and how they differ. He's arguing against what he imagined I wrote.

Again, you're just demonstrating that you don't know the definitions, relationships, and differences between, communism and socialism.

Not that anyone defending Musk's nazi salute should be trusted on anything whatsoever.

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Do you have any evidence that any significant number of Americans want this restriction on 3D printers?

I think the representatives pushing for this legislation is evidence that a significant portion of their polled constituents want restrictions on printed ghost guns. Is that more or less believable than a manufacturing lobby pushing legislators in NY state for printer DRM?

>I think the representatives pushing for this legislation is evidence

Why is that considered evidence? There are many cases of elected representatives doing things that do not align with the wishes of their constituents. There are also many cases of regulators regulating things that their constituents don't care about at all, but help a politician's career by building their reputation as one of "getting things done".

Actual evidence would be polling, citizen organizations, donations etc. None of which seem to exist for this issue.

When you vote for people who have a regulatory mentality, you tend to get a government that responds to any problem with regulation.

I could see why "people are making guns" would be at the top of the list of politicians' worries in places where there are almost no guns, and people want to keep it that way. But in the US?

Indeed. Don't want people making guns? Ban the making of guns. Banning the production of guns using a 3D printer makes zero sense, should ban CNC machines too then.

Subtractive mfg is included in the scope of the Washington bill...

Just ban guns, simple! /s

Exactly. In the US you don't even need a license if you want to manufacture a gun for yourself. The idea of it being made illegal is far from reality.

Even then it makes little sense... 3d printers are just tools. They can be used to print dangerous items, or parts of dangerous items in the same way a saw or hammer could be used to make something dangerous. To some degree this is just a problem with human nature – some people are going to want to harm people and will create or acquire items which do that.

Perhaps if it was literally as simple as downloading a model and pressing print, then in 20 minutes you had a fully working automatic rifle this would be an issue, but that technology simply doesn't exist today.

In reality if your goal is to acquire a weapon which can do lethal harm to someone you just wouldn't print a gun. Even if you wanted to kill multiple people in a place like the UK where guns are illegal you still wouldn't print a gun because you'd probably be better off just getting knife than printing a crappy gun and trying to source an effective propellant, etc.

The gun industry does not earn anything from 3D-printed guns, so those kinds of guns are "free game" for the law makers.

> The gun industry does not earn anything from 3D-printed guns, so those kinds of guns are reducing the profit

ftfy

I saw a shirt one time that said something like "in just one generation user manuals went from showing you how to tune your carburetor to warning you not to drink the battery acid"

Stupidity or nefariousness? Probably both. I don't feel like I can fix either.

> in just one generation user manuals went from showing you how to tune your carburetor to warning you not to drink the battery acid

The truth is just that we don't have actual user manuals anymore. Either the things that went into the manual are now built into software, or they expect you to look it up on the internet. So the only things that remain are legal disclaimers and very basic instructions, like how to turn on the thing so that the software can tell you what to do next.

So they don't tell you how to tune your carburetor because you don't need to do that anymore, it is all injection and the ECU software does the tuning, but the lawyers insist that it should be mentioned to not drink the battery acid should an idiot decide to try it and sue the company.

Manuals still exist, but they are relegated to:

1. Quick setup guides. 2. Warranty information. 3. Warnings of not trying to fix yourself.

Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?

I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.

I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.

You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.

Since when peroxiacetone requires NAOH?

The other kind of drain opener.

> The obvious problem: you cannot reliably detect firearms from geometry alone.

The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.

I think it's still not a viable problem to solve.

What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?

Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.

How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?

That's broadly how it works today, yes: The printer itself has no concept of what it is printing. It's just running some heaters and spinning some motors in response to gcode.

Since such a printer is incapable of determining whether or not this gcode represents a legislatively-restricted item and then blocking its production, then that machine becomes illegal to sell in New York. Easy-peasy. It just takes a quick vote or two and the stroke of a pen, and it is done.

You're probably thinking something like "But that doesn't work at all," and I agree. But sometimes legislators just don't care that they've thrown out the baby along with the bathwater.

It depends how you define the problem. Certainly a human can look at a part and say "that's a lower reciever" but you probably can make something that functions as a firearm exclusively from inconspicuous parts. For the more limited case, an AI can definitely be trained, the broader case is likely unsolvable.

Btw, AFAIK they also want to lock down the slicer.

How the hell can you do that.

GCODE is mostly about pure maths and geometry (well, there's other stuff but in principle). They would forbid math? "Euclid is illegal."

If I remember correctly, they want the gcode to be watermarked. Or signed?

Maybe gcode watermarked and slicer signed? I can't remember. Something silly, that is for sure.

It’s not nearly that hard of a problem. There are n gun files on internet, so validate the hash of those n files (g code whatever). These people aren’t cadding their own designs.

One big part of this is that gcode isnt really a 3d model its a set of instructions on how to move the printhead around. You don't download the gcode directly, because that varies by printer. You download a model, and then a slicing program turns that into a set of printer-specific gcode. Any subtle settings changes would change the hash of this gcode.

And the printer doesn't really know what the model is. It would have to reverse the gcode instructions back into a model somehow. The printer isn't really the place to detect and prevent this sort of thing imo. Especially with how cheap some 3d printers are getting, they often don't really have much compute power in them. They just move things around as instructed by the g-code. If the g-code is malformed it can even break the printer in some instances, or at least really screw up your print.

There are even scripts that modify the gcode to do weird things the printer really isn't designed for, like print something and then have the printer move in such a way to crash into and push the printed object off the plate, and then start over and print another print. The printer will just follow these instructions blindly.

Given that quite simple G-code, say a pair of nested circles with code for tool changes/accessory activation, can make two wildly different parts depending on which machine it is run on:

- a washer if run on a small machine in metric w/ flood coolant

- a lamp base if run on a larger router in Imperial w/ a tool changer

and that deriving what will be made by a given G-code file in 3D is a problem which the industry hasn't solved in decades, the solution of which would be worthy of a Turing Award _and_ a Fields Medal, I don't see this happening.

A further question, just attempting it will require collecting a set of 3D models for making firearms --- who will persuade every firearms manufacturer to submit said parts, where/how will they be stored, and how will they be secured so that they are not used/available as a resource for making firearms?

A more reasonable bit of legislation would be that persons legally barred from owning firearms are barred from owning 3D printers and CNC equipment unless there is a mechanism to submit parts to their parole officer for approval before manufacturing, since that's the only class of folks which the 2nd Amendment doesn't apply to, and a reasonable argument is:

1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == The Right to 3D Print and Bear Arms

Guns can be made out of simple geometric shapes like tubes, blocks, and simple machines like levers and springs. There is mathematically no way to distinguish a gun part from a part used in home plumbing - in fact you can go to the plumbing section of your local hardware store and buy everything you need to build a fully functional shotgun.

The g-code is not being distributed, because it's specific to each printer, filament, etc. G-code is not the same thing as a STP or STL file.

In 3D modeling, there are parametric files where the end user is expected to modify the input parameters to fit their needs. So for example, if you have multiple parts that need to fit together, you may need to adjust the tolerances for that fit, because the physical shape will vary depending on your printer settings and material.

Making tiny modifications isn't just a method of circumvention, it's like part of the main workflow of using a 3d model.

Seems trivial to create an infinite number of inconsequentially (but hash defeating) different variants.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that in the US we have the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm. There are still requirements like it must be for personal use, cannot be transferred, must have a serial number, etc.

None of what you said is true.

> the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which gives you the right to manufacture a fire arm

There has been a right to manufacture firearms since before the Revolutionary War, and which has remained a right continually since.

> it must be for personal use

Not necessarily; though you can't conduct business without a federal license, you can, for example, manufacture a firearm to be given as a gift.

> cannot be transferred

See above.

>must have a serial number

Not only is that not true, a federal judge struck down the prohibition on defacing serial numbers in United States v. Randy Price (2022):

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvsd.23...

4th Amendment, unreasonable search. And of course the 2nd, but the former is more worrying. Also if printing is speech, then you can add the 1st to the list as well.

The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.

Eyes on the prize, friend, and don't capitulate prematurely.

The problem is, nobody is willing to use 2nd amendment rights to defend other amendments.

Right, so they can't use the blocked print as cause to get other evidence. Or if they do it is excluded.

People regularly circumvent "blocking technology" (i.e. DRM) because they want to watch a TV show on a plane with no wi-fi, or because they want to save $20 on a cartridge of printer ink. If someone wants to kill another human being and evade detection, I'm sure they'll find a way to print their part.

I would say it's not a crime to circumvent DRM or whatever, but then I remember the DMCA exists

It's not illegal to make your own firearm, you just can't sell it.

Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.

Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.

Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor

In Washington state I believe you need to serialize each firearm as well.

If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.

True, a terrible patchwork of different state laws makes it very easy to unknowingly violate a law.

They want to make it illegal

Maybe they should look more at how other countries quite successfully banned fire arms. Hint: it wasn't by banning printers.

They could attempt it, but the Second Amendment is quite clear that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to ban firearms and ammunition.

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There would have to be a very long period of peace, first. Periods of government instability, as we have now, actually cause American citizens to want to reaffirm their rights, not relinquish them. And, the 2nd amendment represents something symbolically beyond its function: a unified collective will against tyranny, corruption, and evil.

What a dystopia. If anything the situation in Minnesota should teach liberal Americans that they all need to arm themselves massively.

Yes, and remind me what happened to the liberal American that armed himself in Minnesota?

He wasn't standing next to 25 other liberals who had armed themselves.

Ah, got it, 25 is the magic number that makes you bulletproof.

it is a number larger than the trigger happy opposition.

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> drawing on a federal officer

It is my understanding [0] that multiple videos show that Petti did not draw his gun.

Do you know of evidence to the contrary?

[0] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/did-pretti-draw-wea...

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence.

There is video evidence and many eyewitnesses that he did no such thing. If you need to lie to justify fascism, maybe you shouldn't be supporting fascism.

He possessed a weapon on his person in a state where that in completely legal, in a country whose constitution explicitly says he's allowed to own that weapon. There was not a single reason for him to be executed by federal agents.

He possessed his firearm while obstructing federal agents, while wrestling with federal agents on the ground.

He can legally attend a protest with his firearm, but once he engages in other crimes he is also carrying his firearm illegally.

He was not executed.

> He attempted to be a hero by drawing on a federal officer.

Absolutely vile smear against a hard working VA nurse and stand up citizen.

There were zero attempts made by Alex Pretti to draw a weapon. He was being a hero by helping 2 women move away from the masked officers forcefully pushing them.

I actually appreciate it when fascists lie so brazenly - it makes it easier to ignore their nonsense, and also starkly demonstrates how little respect they have for truth.

> Get grass roots support for it.

This must be satire. This will never, ever happen in the US. Guns are a religion here.

At the moment, the most dangerous people with guns in US are the ones working for the federal government.

"anyone who opposes the government must be stopped"

are you sure?

> Get grass roots support for it.

You know that line from the Mandalorian, "Weapons are part of my religion"?

That is true in the most literal possible sense for a large portion of Americans. And not all of them right-wing, either- if anything, the past 5 years have convinced many of my left-wing friends to get concealed weapons training and being carrying pistols.

SCOTUS has ruled before that 2A does not afford freedom to own any kind of weapon. There are limits on explosives for example.

They tend to lean on whether it is reasonable that the Founders might have had access to such a weapon with their technology. Machine gun is just a rifle with automatic rechamber. Not an unreasonable upgrade for 1700s technology. Maybe, I dunno; political people don't have to actually care about the details.

There are limits. And if cases like this made it there they might rule that no Founder was smelting the materials. That they would have had to collaborate, in some "market dictates options" ruling to limit hermits going in a rampage. Also everyone a weapons assembly line in their home is anti-corporate capitalism.

"George Washington understood the value of civic life and sound economics! He would not have tolerated such insular selfishness! He did not make his own weapons! He engaged in trade!"

Not saying it's realistic but politics is not never controlled by people living in reality. Making shit up seems as reasonable as anything.

>SCOTUS has ruled before that 2A does not afford freedom to own any kind of weapon. There are limits on explosives for example.

This is largely machine guns and explosives. Pistols, rifles, etc are ordinary weapons in common use*

*NYC authorities may not agree

https://ammo.com/research/list-of-banned-guns-and-ammo-by-st...

Sawed off shotguns seems arbitrary and that was ultimately my (pre-coffee) point; government is fine with coming up with an arbitrary restriction when they want.

They could outlaw the means of production. Gen pop is not allowed to own that.

There is, in fact, a good question wrt how much of NFA is actually constitutional. A funny thing about this is that ATF has dropped cases on several occasions where the defendant tried this angle, presumably because they didn't want something contrary to their current regulations as written to be overturned in court, and because they had plenty of other charges to throw at those guys anyway.

Given that it was modeled on gun control legislation from pre-WWII Germany, it's _not_ something which they want looked at too closely.

This absurd belief that "If the jews had guns they wouldn't have been genocided" is just that: Absurd and utterly unsupported by history.

Not only did jews have guns, but Polish jews had an entire military and state and that did not protect them.

Because guns do not protect you, other people willing to die for you protect you.

The only weapon class I know of that's outright illegal to own is anti-aircraft missiles. That carries life imprisonment just for possession, with no violent intent. Because the government never wants to give up its air supremacy. This is why whenever you hear of feds concocting an international weapons conspiracy they always have to add anti-air bazookas to the charges because it's the only thing that actually can unequivocally be proven as illegal to own[0].

Basically everything else can be owned with an NFA tax stamp. Nuclear weapons my understanding is the difficulty is more with laws on handling the material than specifically owning one as a weapon, so I'm unsure those are even outright illegal either.

Explosives are actually one of the ones with looser restrictions. Even felons can own and re-instate their explosives rights, because bafflingly when congress de-funded the firearms rights restoration process for felons they forgot to do the one for explosives. Felons can also own and manufacture explosive black powder without scrutiny or paperwork, even ones intended to go in a black powder gun.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68365597

Here the law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g it says "shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment not less than 25 years or to imprisonment for life." Even conspiring to acquire them is as illegal as possession!

Fully automatic assault rifles, anti-aircraft guns (that still operate), anti-aircraft missiles (that still operate), land mines over a certain size, or any Comp B. Those are on the naughty list.

There’s a whole community of folks building semi-automatic auto-return triggers that are “technically” semi automatic, but with just a gentle squeeze, fire off another. If you maintain that grip, the return mechanism engages, returning the trigger to firing position, where your pressure causes it to fire again… it’s called a Forced Reset Trigger.

Sawed off shotguns, sawed off barrels in general.

My point overall was government is fine with arbitrary exceptions that would get Stan's dad going all "Oh I'm sorry, I thought this was America."

When and where can I buy a cannon with grapeshot? They had that during the revolutionary war, and the founding fathers probably owned at least one, so I want to be able to yell "Tally Ho!" too.

Here, among other vendors:

https://southbendreplicas.com/

Forearms yes, percussion caps no.

A large fraction of the harm from firearms comes from their ability to fire rapidly which didn’t exist when the constitution was written. As such it was making a very different balance of risk between the general public and individuals.

1. The second amendment wasn't written because the authors thought guns were inert. It was written precisely because they could impart deadly force.

2. As someone else pointed out, early repeating rifles did exist then.

3. If the meaning of the constitution is only to be evaluated against the technology available at the time -- what does that say about the validity of the 1st or 4th amendments with modern technology?

Air guns existed sure. There’s a reason those aren’t used by the military today, they just aren’t that dangerous.

They're deadly and rapid fire.

But again, in historical context, the point of the 2A was to permit people to own the most deadly weapons of war that existed at that time.

> They’re deadly and rapid fire

So are a pile of stones, it’s the degree of risk to the public that matters not some arbitrary classification.

Ignoring differences is degree here isn’t enough to win the argument.

That is an argument that people make today.

Where was that part of the decision making process in 1789?

Firearms (ops Arms) was used rather than weapons suggesting some level of consideration here. They had cannons and warships back then. That bit about a well regulated militia suggests limits on what exactly was permissible.

But obviously we don’t have direct knowledge of every conversation.

The point about cannons and warships actually makes it very clear about what the authors' intent was re: balance of risk; at the time, private ownership of artillery was completely legal and unregulated. Private citizens owned warships with dozens of live cannons that could bombard coastal cities, and didn't even need to file paperwork to do so! A warship can cause quite a bit more mayhem than a glock.

Legal yes, protected by the constitution without constraint no.

Both the use of Arms being man portable weapons and militia makes a very clear distinction.

> Firearms was used rather than weapons

Where? The constitution says neither. It says "Arms"

Regardless, the constitution specifically makes reference to the private ownership of cannons and warships.

> To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque

Arms at the time meant man portable weapons as distinct from cannons or trebuchet etc.

Just posted about firearms so many times used the wrong word here.

Cannons were regularly privately owned at the time

For sake of argument I’ll agree, but again by explicitly using arms here they where excluding them from constitutional protection not banning them.

The Girardoni repeating air rifle predates the ratification of the constitution by ~11 years and was taken on the Lewis and Clark expedition ~13 years later. Really the whole discussion around 2A is usually nonsense because it ignores the context that the entire Bill of Rights had a completely different meaning prior to the 14th amendment leading to incorporation over the last century (and other expansions of federal power via commerce clause); that is, the Bill of Rights originally did not apply to the states.

Very obviously individuals were expected to be part of the militia, which was the military at the time (c.f. the Militia Acts 2 years after ratification requiring individual gun ownership and very clearly laying out that all able-bodied white male citizens aged 18-45 were part of the militia), but also states could regulate weapons if they wanted.

> Girardoni repeating air rifle

Not a firearm.

I didn’t say we could ban compressed air powered guns, I specifically said percussion caps. The Girardoni was way less dangerous than a modern handgun.

Sure, but compressed air guns are deadly (you can find videos of people using them on deer on youtube, or if you want something less graphic, you can find ballistic gel test videos), and a repeating rifle did exist at the time and was used a couple years later by an official American expedition commissioned by Jefferson. So fast-firing weapons were not some alien technology. The wider context also makes it clear that 2A was supposed to give individuals the right to own whatever weapons the military uses because at the time, there was no standing military. Individuals were summoned and expected to bring their own weapons, hence the law requiring them to own them.

In the 230 intervening years, we've vastly increased the scope of the federal government and developed a formal military, so one might argue we ought to amend the constitution to change exactly what's allowed under 2A (e.g. it should be straightforward to have a nuclear weapons ban added with unanimous agreement), but as it stands, 2A (+14A) clearly gives individuals the right to own the arms necessary to run a functioning ("well-regulated") militia, which in 2026 means at least semi-automatic firearms.

> So fast-firing weapons were not some alien technology.

Thrown stones are a fast firing deadly weapon. They, compressed air guns, and ball musket etc aren’t used by modern military forces in combat because they are less dangerous.

A rule that allows compressed air weapons yet bans percussion caps is quite reasonable and could pass constitutional scrutiny.

It might be quite reasonable, but it would also quite clearly require an amendment to do in the US, which is what you originally replied to.

Grenades a clear requirement for a modern infantry are also banned, thus eliminating any argument that a modern standards of military efficiency apply.

Banding heavy machine guns yet another invention after the constitution was written didn’t, so there’s clear present this wouldn’t either.

What makes you believe that grenades are banned in US? They are heavily taxed, yes - $200 per grenade - but they aren't banned on the federal level, and there are people who legally own such things.

“Possessing a live grenade is illegal.” https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...

Obviously there’s a bunch of exceptions, including as you point out the federal option of going through a background check and paying 200$/grenade. But that’s only at the federal level it doesn’t necessarily meet state requirements.

The rules on those background checks are as capricious as banning people who were dishonorably discharged from the military.

They are not "exceptions". It's exactly as I wrote: possessing a live grenade is legal, subject only to paying the $200 tax and doing the associated paperwork for the feds. The illegal part is not paying the tax.

State laws are another matter entirely, but even many states with stringent gun laws don't ban DDs specifically (probably because many lawmakers are not aware that such things are legal).

As for the background checks, I own over a dozen NFA-regulated items including a destructive device (a 40mm grenade launcher), and I can't say that the rules aren't really any more onerous than they are for regular firearms. This particular bit about "banning people who were dishonorably discharged from the military" applies equally to any firearm transfer under federal jurisdiction, for example (e.g. buying across state lines, or within states that mandate a federal check for anything). As I recall, the only thing that stood out in NFA forms compared to the regular stuff was the need to submit fingerprints. That aside, it was smooth sailing even back when I wasn't a citizen. So really the only barrier is affordability, and AFAIK this is exactly how the NFA was intended to work back when it was designed ($200 was about 4x the price of a full auto gun like Thompson back then, so it basically made them outlandishly expensive, only available to the rich).

> firearm transfer under federal jurisdiction

A far looser restriction.

> doing the associated paperwork for the feds.

That implies that it’s guaranteed you will pass, which is false.

That said, the ability for some states to totally ban ownership outside of military or police rests on them not receiving constitutional protection.

> That implies that it’s guaranteed you will pass, which is false.

It is not a "may issue" situation. You're guaranteed to pass so long as you are not in any specifically defined disqualifying categories, which are the same as for regular firearms.

Anecdotally I can tell you that I've had more (false positive) rejections on my 4473 than I did on my NFA applications.

Except "it was made after the constitution was written" is a standard you've made up -- there is existing case law from SCOTUS that 2A protects guns "in common use"

Actually things that are new after the constitution was written is regularly brought up before the court it’s a very common argument. The thing was written a long time ago, everyone involved in the process acknowledges that fact. The degree to which papers applies to electronic data should be familiar to you.

Supreme court rulings are arbitrary as they regularly reverse or update standards, sometimes multiple times.

Yes, if your argument is found to be right in the future, then it will be right. Currently it is not, and it is unlikely to be any different until the composition of the court changes. Until then, the only other path to change it is an amendment.

I agree it’s the composition of the Supreme Court that’s at issue not the constitution.

Saying what arguments are right doesn’t make sense in these contexts only what is the current precedent.

Yes, this comes up, but the Court tends to say things that didn’t exist are covered by constitutional rights. I can’t imagine think of any time they asked “could the founders have imagined this?” Television, radio, and the internet are all protected by freedom of the press without anybody ever showing that the founders could have imagined them.

From Heller v. DC:

“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

A few years after that ruling, the Massachusetts state supreme court upheld a conviction for a woman who had carried a taser for self defense. The Supreme Court accepted her challenge, allowed it to go forward without paying court costs, and unanimously overturned that ruling without asking for oral arguments ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/577/411/ ):

“The court offered three explanations to support its holding that the Second Amendment does not extend to stun guns. First, the court explained that stun guns are not protected because they ‘were not in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment.’ This is inconsistent with Heller’s clear statement that the Second Amendment ‘extends . . . to . . . arms . . . that were not in existence at the time of the founding.’

“The court next asked whether stun guns are ‘dangerous per se at common law and unusual,’ in an attempt to apply one ‘important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms.’ ... In so doing, the court concluded that stun guns are ‘unusual’ because they are ‘a thoroughly modern invention.’ By equating ‘unusual’ with ‘in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment,’ the court’s second explanation is the same as the first; it is inconsistent with Heller for the same reason.

“Finally, the court used ‘a contemporary lens’ and found ‘nothing in the record to suggest that [stun guns] are readily adaptable to use in the military.’ But Heller rejected the proposition ‘that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected.’

“For these three reasons, the explanation the Massachusetts court offered for upholding the law contradicts this Court’s precedent.”

The fact that Caetano was a unanimous and thorough ruling says a lot to me. Perhaps you’re holding out hope that Heller will be overturned soon, but the chances for that are very slim ( https://youtu.be/nFTRwD85AQ4 ).

> the Court tends to say things that didn’t exist are covered by constitutional rights.

Sure but drivers licenses exist when no similar requirements existed for horse drawn buggies because the clear increase in relative danger to the public. When comparing newspapers with radio, the limited spectrum on radio was accepted as justification for more restricted speech etc.

Really citing when the court ruled one way vs another is less important than recognizing which kinds of arguments tend to resonate with the court as in the end specific cases are arbitrary decisions influenced by the specifics of the case.

> drivers licenses exist when no similar requirements existed for horse drawn buggies

They absolutely did.

https://www.tmlw.co.il/db/content/75d5befd0cba51b0639bbf1086...

Note the “one horse and one seat” bit.

That’s closer to a vehicle registration than a license for the driver.

That example also expires in 1880, but there’s various regulations around carriages going back to England in the 1600’s. They were more about congestion and taxes rather than the capabilities of the drivers the way a drivers license tests vision, knowledge of road rules, and practical skills is focused on just how amazingly dangerous cars are.

Critically, you can legally own a street legal car without a license and a license without a car.

The Girardoni is certainly and unusual example but is deadly. However more importantly it is far from the first repeating firearm. There is the Kalthoff and Cookson repeating rifles as the most prominent examples. And both Jefferson and Washington personally got offered to purchase repeating firearms per their own journals, im im sure they weren't the only founders to receive such offers for both personal and military usage.

Again way less dangerous than a modern firearm.

“Repeating” here ignores the actual rate of fire of a Kalthoff or the even worse Cookson design. Especially when you consider how slow reloading is vs modern firearms.

How many lives would have been saved at the Las Vegas massacre if Paddock has been limited to these designs? I’d say 30 is a safe bet but that’s probably a low estimate.

The balance of power being considered then was between the state and the people. Fear over a standing army was real.

Crime exited when the constitution was written, suggesting the framers were only concerned with interactions at the state level is to insult their intelligence. Not to mention specific text like people’s rights to a jury trial etc.

Principally concerned between the state and the people, not only. The context was the nature of England at the time. It was viewed as an oppressive force.

The right to a jury trial is another example of favoring the individual instead of say, the Star Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber

I don’t think we even disagree per se, but it’s hard to argue the constitution wasn’t written primarily with the thought of what England and how it exercised authority in mind. Individual roadmen and ruffians, let’s say, existed but weren’t existential threats to shape the tone of the new nation’s foundation, were they?

Lawlessness is a complete breakdown of state power and just as threatening to a new country as foreign powers.

The degree of importance they place on individual factors here is obviously debatable, but they just had two governments fail. England and the articles of confederation didn’t work so there was a larger emphasis on practicality over idealism.

It's not about banning, it's about taxing. Distilling liquor without paying taxes is illegal.

Their proposal is about getting lines like this ratified:

"No person, firm or corporation shall sell or deliver any three-dimensional printer in the state of New York unless such printer is equipped with blocking technology," https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S9005

They don't like firearms in the hands of the public.

The goal is to be an indirect ban that's hard to challenge. California has had significant success with strategies such as requiring "microstamping technology" (but it could be anything - it's just a limiting mechanism) in conjunction with an approved handgun roster to limit handgun sales in the state. This is almost certain to be a similar strategy.

> Distilling liquor without paying taxes is illegal.

One can always expect the "don't thread on me" country to have some of the craziest, most intrusive rules at the most random places.

This is handled without banning glass containers.

Nobody banned anything here either.

What's "blocking technology", then? I'm repeating an argument from the article, which itself is an argument older than the microprocessor:

> But the answer to misuse isn’t surveillance built into the tool itself. We don’t require table saws to scan wood for weapon shapes. We don’t require lathes to phone home before turning metal. We prosecute people who make illegal things, not people who own tools.

I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.

For example[0]:

> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.

…

> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.

0: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111

The actual wording of the law, and the way it was interpreted when I was young was that a person who does not hold an FFL may not make a firearm with the intention of selling it, but after making it, they could change their mind and then sell it.

Since, the BATF decided to interpret the prohibition as a thought-crime, enforcing a prohibition making such sales illegal, since like The Shadow, they know what lurks in the hearts of men.

The one transfer which has not yet been tested in the courts to my knowledge is an individual having made firearms, passing away, then leaving them in their will to their heirs....

The much much much more concerning part of this bill in my opinion is the part that applies this expectation to CNC machining equipment. This means that there will be some ugly consequences to running real industry out of New York state. Probably heavy import and cross shipping delays (lots of German machining equipment passes through the port at NY/NJ, so could theoretically be subject to this, even if eventual delivery is to Texas, for instance). The reasoning behind things like the old "receiver is the only part of the gun to be serialized and tracked" and "80% AR Lower Receiver" were to prevent impact to non-gun industries. Block of steel with random holes is not a gun is an important concept. My only conclusions are: 1) very glad I don't live in New York, 2) buy my used VMC sooner rather than later to avoid this stupidity. Much like continuing to drive my 2010 Miata a lot longer since it doesn't have all this terrible new technology that prevents maintenance (VIN locked modules, no home programming software to replace things, etc etc).

YUP

For every constraint I see them creating in the law, I can instantly create a simple workaround, and also see multiple ways it will impair or destroy the ability to create 100% legitimate parts/components/products.

This is an unfortunate example of a too-common political solution:

A new industry arises that unintentionally creates a new capability that some can use to create problems.

So, "let's just create a mandate on the industry that will destroy it or contort it beyond recognition, and provide no funding to support this new requirement!".

I fully understand and fundamentally support the need for government to regulate markets, pollution, product & food safety, and much more, but this simplistic approach is a net negative for society and the economy.

They need to focus on the actual act of "3D printing firearms" not on the precursors.

I built an 8'x4' CNC router table in 2004. I bought rack and pinion, steppers, drives, aluminum extrusion, and I had it built in one week. What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set? They would make it illegal to make 3D printers or CNC machinery without a license, and if you are caught it is tantamount to making guns.

2004! You were way ahead of most of us on that game.

Custom CNC stuff is tremendously rewarding and fun to work with. I haven't built a 4x8 table (yet), but I've made some smaller stuff. I credit the introduction of these machines into my life with bringing me out of the deepest and longest-lasting period of mental unwellness I've ever experienced, and it'll be a real shame if this kind of hobby becomes hobbled by legislation.

But anyway, to address your question: Unless the fine state of New York decides to close their borders, nothing stops a person from building their own dangerously-unregulated 3D printing machine.

Just as nothing stops a person from taking a drive over the Hudson and buying one already-assembled from the Microcenter in Patterson, NJ. New Jersey isn't beholden to the laws of New York, and they won't care at all where the buyer is from.

It's the same thing folks in Ohio do to buy cheap weed: We drive up to Monroe, Michigan, where there's a veritable cornucopia of places dedicated to selling that devil's lettuce. It's against Ohio law to bring it back into Ohio (as of 2026), but there's a constant churn anyway. In the parking lots, Ohio license plates often outnumber the Michigan plates. Michigan doesn't care about this; they're not responsible for the problems that Ohio creates for itself.

Michigan border towns are insane for that reason. People come from as far as 6 states over for the cheap prices. On the other side of the state from Monroe lies New Buffalo. 33 dispos on a small stretch of road in a small lake town. All to bring in.. wait for it… $1.4mil in tax revenue ie basically a rounding error for even a small municipality…

https://www.wndu.com/2026/01/28/new-buffalo-residents-voice-...

There's other benefits, I think, that extend beyond direct taxation. For instance:

I don't even partake, myself, but I went to Monroe recently for a run with some family members. And we got hungry.

We stopped at 24-hour Coney Island-like place that has American food, Greek food, and anything that can be made with eggs on a grill, and sat down for a proper dinner. It was actually a very lovely experience: The service was excellent, and the food exceeded expectation.

It was neither expensive nor cheap as restaurant prices go these days, but whatever money we spent on it was left there in Monroe instead of taken back to Ohio.

And that matters, for Monroe. :)

It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.

Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.

> What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set?

That it's easier with this skillset to build guns and sell them to criminals when the penalty is the same.

Except selling the printers as plain printers without any restrictive AI firmware or other has a thorny abstraction layer in between that and convicting someone of actually making firearms and selling direct. The printers are universal machines within the parameters of additive processes. Silly proposal this "blocking technology" written by people with no analytical thinking skills.

As you might expect on a tech website, folks in the comments have immediately jumped to workarounds for this. Before we do that, spare a thought for whether our government should be allowed to conceive of something like this in the first place.

ideally, it should be political suicide to attempt to push something like this.

realistically, if it fails now due to public outrage, they will try to sneak it again in the future.

Weird how this is happening simultaneously in many states. Washington is considering a vague 3d printer and CNC law to address ghost guns. Gun crimes are mostly committed with regular pistols but that isn’t stopping politicians from passing all sorts of restrictions under the guise of keeping people safe. Meanwhile these states have serious budget problems that go unaddressed …

It is not weird in the slightest. These things are coordinated at the state level all the time.

This is probably one of those good tests of "is your 'conspiracy theory' meter properly calibrated", because if it's going off right now and you are in disbelief, you've got it calibrated incorrectly. This is so completely routine that there's an entire branch of law codified in this way called the "Uniform Commercial Code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code and see the organization running this' home page at https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc .

And that's just a particular set of laws with an organization dedicated to harmonizing all the various states laws for their particular use cases. It's not the one and only gateway to such laws, it's just an example of a cross-state law coordination so established that it has an entire organization dedicated to it. Plenty of other stuff is coordinated at the state level across multiple states all the time.

So what's next? People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks? Who's liable in this case?

> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?

The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.

It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.

There is close to zero chance the current Supreme Court would find a law that criminalizes possession of a file describing the making a gun to be constitutional.

That depends if the defendant votes Republican or Democrat, unfortunately.

I wonder if you can sell the printer shell without the main PCB and just open source the main board design. Manufacture and sale of that board as a distinct entity seems tough to stop. Especially because the board can have non-3D printer use cases which it advertises as the main ones.

Also, if I wanted to print a gun, there are thousands upon thousands of older Creality and Prusa printers that I could buy used. My CR-10 isn't connected to the internet, it's running a FOSS Marlin release.

It will be very strange and funny if there is a registry of 3D printers before there's a registry of guns, and for that matter, it will be very funny if it becomes easier to buy a gun than a 3D printer, with the reasoning being that 3D printers can print guns.

There would be a presumption of intent. Probably an "aggravated" add-on to whatever charges you might be facing.

I highly doubt we would send goon squads door to door to check your firmware. Then again, given today's situation in MN, I wouldn't rule it out either.

That proves only one thing. We just have nothing to do in our lives. The tenacity of government that invents useless laws directly proportional to nothingness to do that it provides to its citizens

That would likely fall under some DMCA like protection against circumvention. RMS is going to be pissed and I can totally see the FSF, EFF, and potentially the SFC having issues with this

So pretty much the same as jailbreaking your phone or something, which millions of people do without worry.

What a great way to inhibit a path for a nation to advance it's manufacturing capabilities - putting roadblocks in the way of individuals learning how to manufacture things.

It's clear for all to say: The US is no longer a serious country.

This is New York. Not the US as a whole.

Note that Washington's similar HB 2321 defines a "3D printer" as any additive or subtractive manufacturing machine. So these idiots want to regulate CNC machines too.

Public comments can (and should!) be submitted here: https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/2321 Keep them polite and respectful; insults and threats won't help.

For hundreds of years people have been making guns without 3D printers and CNC mills. All that is needed is some metal machining skills, a lathe, and some other tools.

If you want to be really simple you can make a slam fire shotgun with two pipes and a nail, no machining skills required

I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).

New York are going to be very angry when they discover that pipes and hammers exist.

This is a frustrating replay of the DRM (digital rights management) / copy protection debate from about 20 years ago. That time, it was about restricting fully general-purpose computers and storage devices from copying or displaying certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping media piracy. The pro-restriction side spent enormous amounts of money, engineering talent, and legal firepower, yet hackers have defeated every copy-protection system ever devised.

This time, it's about restricting fully general-purpose 3D printers (and perhaps CNC machines) from following instructions according to certain bit patterns in the hopes of stopping the manufacture of firearms. I have a feeling it's going to play out in the same way, leading to an long and expensive intellectual war that accomplishes nothing.

Fighting a war against general-purpose tools is as futile as making water not wet. When will legislators learn this and give up?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".

The irony is it’s really easy and cheap to get a type 7 ffl, basically a background check and $150. Legally manufacture and sell all the guns you want. The reality is no one would buy your 3d printed junk anyway.

Any state laws trying to restrict the 2nd amendment are always going to be useless. You're not going to stop someone who's determined at causing harm with firearms in a country where firearms outnumber people. All these little "bandaid" solutions do is allow for fishing expeditions by police and prosecutors.

On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.

Year 2027: beep boop beep boop, scan your implanted rfid digital ID chip to authenticate:

- your social media consumption and any post you make

- your app installations

- registering a new account or keeping an already existing one

- driving your car

- 3D printing something

- watching a YouTube video

- buying anything online

- receive any gov support or healthcare

- any transaction including cash ones

And all of that is synced with your digital wallet (TM) for convenience, internet is not needed!! I am so glad we are protecting the 16yo from accessing tiktok, or something something deportations if you are the other team!!

Lol no.

Trump is gonna cancel or fuck with elections in 2026 like he has said multiple times he will, and by 2027 and 2028, he will likely install himself as 3d term president.

Its gonna be an era of economic decline and social dirtiness as shit gets worse and worse and eventually things like crime is gonna rise up again as the lower income sector transitions into the "nothing to lose" crowd.

And not for the first time:

2025: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228

2023 (before Mangione): https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A8132

Maybe there are others.

Really garbage administration they have in NY. Hochul and a lot of her ilk have done things like block right to repair after years of activists trying to get it passed.

The way it worked was as follows:

1. Local groups push to get right to repair passed

2. Fails repeatedly for years

3. They finally get it past the houses and onto the governor's desk

4. Governor gets a visit from a 'unknown' (hint likely Apple) lobbyist, refuses to sign even though they have to

5. They wait until the very last second and then adds last minute 'amendments' neutering the bill.

6. Their sycophants then try to shut down any discussion on Reddit/other social platforms from anyone who criticizes the bill.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fair_Repair_Act

They are going to keep doing this crap, the government needs to be voted out but just like NJ, NY is captured by really corrupt 'neoliberal' Democrats so its an uphill battle to get someone better in there. The incentives are not there: In NJ and most of NY the economic base is the wealthy suburbanites who like the way things are and will fight efforts to make radical change. That results in a lot of 'think of the children' type people who would welcome any and all bans on things like 3D printing of guns.

"This is defined as software or firmware that scans every print file through a “firearms blueprint detection algorithm” and refuses to print anything it flags as a potential firearm or firearm component."

I'm sure this won't inadvertently flag nerf/band guns, models, tubes/pipes, etc...

Until metal 3D printing becomes common for consumers, this isn't really a big deal. Plastic components have limited lifespan and even questionable safety. It's pretty much always been legal to create your own firearms. Blocking some 3D printers isn't going to stop that. If nothing else, the criminal enterprises will just use out of date software from before the ban and even create their own 3D printers.

3D printing companies need to simply exit the NY market, including the industrial sector. Once you start inspecting businesses, education, and enough individuals, they will cave.

just sell almost-3d-printers.

All it is missing is a screw with a serial number on it.

"This printer is for collecting and research purposes only. Note that certain 3D-printed objects are forbidden by the law. If you notice any of these objects growing inside your 3D printer, power it off IMMEDIATELY"

Reminds me of those prohibition era alcohol kits that basically came down to "whatever you do, do not put this yeast in that mixture" and "should that happen, under no circumstances should you let it sit in a dark cabinet"