This first bill allows the state of California to regulate and oversee all 3D prints in the name of public safety.
Can’t regulate the parts as they are used in many many many devices. So as far as I’m concerned this is worthless. I can build a fucking 3d printer from an old VCR and a hot glue gun.
I might print some guns purely out of spite.
In Minecraft.
Everytown for Gun Safety says recoveries of 3D-printed crime guns across 20 cities have risen nearly 1,000% over the past five years,
So… They found a total of ten 3d printed guns in the last 5 years?
325 are 3D out of 350,000 guns found in CA in connection to a crime in 2024, according to random assholes on reddit.
This is a pretty dumb thing to pass legislation on considering it’s still VERY easy to buy a gun even in CA, another method of getting a gun isn’t making it easier in any real sense.
Now to be totally fair, 325 is 325 more than 0, which would be the ideal number of 3d printed guns used in crime… But also, how many of those 3d printed gun users had access to a different gun and simply opted for the 3d printed one? I get the feeling it was somewhere around 325 of them
This is all ignoring the fact that I’m using a very liberal definition of the phrase “3d printed gun.” I doubt anyone is using Songbirds for armed robberies lmao
Given they’ve postponed the standards until 2028, I am skeptical our legislators will be able to develop a viable benchmark. And then I don’t imagine it’s possible to enforce it.
This is likely to die in court.
They’ll ask chatgpt to generate it. It doesn’t need to be viable, it just needs to be impossible for manufacturers to comply with
I don’t think California intends to act in bad faith and try to kill the 3D printer industry (or community). I think this is due to misconceptions similar to the notion that one can create encryption with a backdoor that only the good guys can use. It just doesn’t math.
And that’s exactly what is going to kill the law in the courts, much the way that they’ve upheld strong encryption and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Allowing the law to come into effect will cause too much damage to industry and the economy.
Granted I can’t be absolutely certain of that. We’ve had a lot of incompetent (or corrupt) judges get confirmed in recent decades, so really anything can happen. But the thing they don’t want is what happened after they tried to criminalize printed gun designs in the first place, and see the already-robust 3D printing underground get another growth boost.
My first 3d printer is a RepRap running marlin firmware… They couldn’t make me make that 3d printer compliant.
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I wonder if the microcenter locations in CA are suddenly going to have empty shelves where the 3d printers used to be.Mine is next to a harbor freight, and I have a 25% off to HF. Don’t tempt me OP
Man what a way to fucking make everything unfun
Jokes on you, my 3D printer is offline
Shit, same. Mine is basically a custom built Ender3 with open source firmware. I could (theoretically anyway) write my own firmware for it and ignore the law.
2D printers are next.
2D printers were more than 15 years early https://www.pcworld.com/article/485139/counterfeit_money_on_color_laser_printers.html
The biggest difference between 2D and 3D printers other than a dimension, is their complexity. People can make their own 3D printer, so trying to regulate it is absurd. With 2D printers, the governments just have the handful of printer manufacturers build the restrictions into the machine and it’s much harder for a random person to get around.
Can’t you just buy one used?
I meant the pre-computer, monochrome type of 2D printer, the one referenced in “freedom of the press”, heh. Quick web search finds a prototype:
https://chytomo.com/en/accounting-for-typewriters/
Typewriters were relied on to create unauthorized self-published books, brochures, leaflets, and magazines. As a result, Soviet authorities began imposing strict controls on typewriter distribution. Every typewriter had its own registration number, which allowed the KGB and other repressive organizations to determine the source of unauthorized documents. Each typewriter’s unique imprint made it possible to find out who wrote the paper and where it could be printed. In “Diaries: Uncensored,” Les Taniuk mentioned that there were typewriters for checks on which nothing “like that” could be typed, and two more – carefully hidden. Ukrainian writer and translator Halyna Kyrpa had to destroy her typewriter after a reprint of “Internationalism or Russification” by Ukrainian literary critic, social activist, and dissident Ivan Dziuba was typed on it. (In her interview with Chytomo, she said that she smashed the machine with hammers and threw it into a lake.)
2D printers already have government mandated shit in them to prevent printing and scanning dollar bills.
And yellow dots have been around since the 80s.
Under the proposal, printers would have to evaluate STL files, CAD files, or other geometric code using a firearm blueprint detection algorithm and block files flagged as capable of producing a firearm or illegal firearm parts, including conversion devices.
California’s Department of Justice, or another relevant state agency, would have until January 1, 2028, to publish performance standards for detection algorithms and software control processes.
This is the problem when lawmakers write technical bills without speaking to technical people. They’re going to publish standards for evaluating if your gcode is a firearm or firearm part? THAT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
It’s not even that, building a firearm…is legal…this shit going after printers makes no sense at all, it’s fucking legal to print firearm parts.
Fun time to introduce/remind people of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
Same thing goes for laws and lawmakers. It’s almost as if selecting our “leaders” from a narrow band of society who, for the most part, don’t know shit about anything, does not lead to enlightened laws.
Lol I was just talking to my wife about that yesterday and how it’s exactly like AI.
If you read something in the newspaper about your job, you’re like “these fucking idiots got this all backwards.” If you see AI output of an attempt at your job, it’s the same thing.
But if you read an article about someone else’s job, you think “that makes sense.” Same about seeing AI trying to do someone else’s job.
Cosplayers are going to be pissed.
Yes they have no idea what they are asking. Stl is just gcode how do you look for a gun out of coordinates.
BANNED
I bet they end up using a fucking llm
Kinda, render a few images from the gcode, use a CV algorithm to identify the object.
On device it’ll be slow or expensive.
Define gun is a lot harder then you think. For example
I know, but they want a solution implemented, that’s a solution.
Your faith in this mystery algorithm is stronger than mine. Here’s a diagram of the parts in an AR-15:
So we need an algorithm that renders the gcode I’m printing, then compares it to… something?
Look, I was just saying, it could be done, train it on current real and 3d printable gun parts and there, you did your best to create algorithmic gun filtering. I wasn’t saying that it would be good or accurate.
The algos don’t need to deny any or every part of a gun, but the most critical part must not be printable and it’ll already be effective.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist for a gun, but I suspect there’s a few very important pieces that need to be printed a certain way or the firearm falls apart or is at least a lot less useful.
All that said, I’m generally against such limiting mechanism in any printer or compiler. Try close sourcing all compilers so they can’t create malware? Forget it.
3D printed gun designs these days don’t even use plastic for most of the critical parts. The goal is to print a frame, which you can then assemble into a full gun using durable off-the-shelf parts that are available from any hardware store. No need to 3D print a bolt (and deal with all of the manufacturing issues that entails) when you can just buy a bolt for 5¢ at any hardware store. Especially when that bolt will be more precise and durable than the plastic bolt you would have printed.
It’s the old carpentry idea that if you can’t get precision by hand, you can borrow it from something else. Need to cut a bunch of identical boards, with precision in 64ths of an inch? A #8-32 bolt will have 32 threads per inch. So a half turn on the bolt will advance or retract the bolt 1/64 inches, accurate down to whatever the bolt manufacturer’s clearance is. Probably a few thousands of an inch. Build a jig to hold your boards at the saw, and thread a bolt into the jig to act as the board stop. Now you can turn the bolt to adjust your clearance as needed, and you’ll be accurate down to 1/64 by only making half turns each time.
And 3D printed guns use the same concept. You don’t print a plastic barrel that will explode after two or three shots, you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe to fit into the frame. The pipe will be more durable and more precise than anything you could feasibly print. You don’t need to 3D print a firing pin that will blunt/shatter/jam after a few uses, when you can just use a steel nail that will have better durability and avoid jamming. And all of the parts you need can be bought at a hardware store without raising any suspicions. That’s part of what makes this so dumb. They’re not just requiring printers to scan for potential gun parts. They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts. And that is a much broader spectrum than simply scanning for the shapes of the parts directly.
They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts.
It’s worth explicitly noting that this effectively bans 3D printing entirely. The whole point of this law is to be able to charge owners of 3D printers with a crime. Real useful if they find out some anti-zionist protestor has a 3d printer in their garage. Can’t get ya on the free speech thing, but they can get you on the owning a non-compliant 3d printer thing.
For the rightoids out there, replace anti-zionist protest with anti-abortion protest. Or any other speech the government doesn’t like. This exists for the sole purpose of punishing innocent people.
That makes a lot of sense. If the print just holds the critical parts, forget it.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing
Unfortunately that’s the crux of the issue. The people who have written and signed this bill aren’t either - and they weren’t as big of a person as you to recognize that.
At the end of the day, 3D printing gcode is telling your printer to spit out a shape. And you simply cannot ban shapes. Am I printing a firing pin or a part for my shoe rack? There’s no way to tell. Any politician that’s telling you there is is either ignorant or lying to you.
And you simply cannot ban shapes.
They have banned numbers, I mean hell go around shouting 13-12 and see how long it takes for you to get a fine/get arrested. I wouldn’t say that banning shapes is far off
Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and “draw” the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.
And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as “gun parts”… The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.
You’re gonna hate this, but… AI can literally do it, and for the large models it’s terrifying how accurate they are. You will argue that your little ESP32 powered reprap or klipper or whatever printer can’t handle it, to which regulators will go ok then, either the printer has to call out to a service with an http request to upload the gcode every time it wants to print anything, or your slicer has to do it (and we dont care that it’s open source, it’s illegal to operate if it doesnt make the call and you’re getting fines or jail time if you get caught).
This is what AI was built for 😟
Even AI can’t do this. It is an impossibility. AI might be able to make the shape, but it will NEVER be able to interpret the intent of that shape. It will never know if a cylinder is meant for a gun or for a rolling pin. It will never know if I’m making a trigger for a gun or a replacement trigger for my hot glue gun.
AI cannot be made to recognize whether a piece of gcode is intended to produce a piece of plastic that is intended to be used as part of a gun. It would need to simulate the machine that that gcode is made to run on, and then simulate the gcode running on that machine, and then analyze the simulated output of that simulated 3D print.
At best, it can arbitrarily decide to decline print jobs. Which is of course the whole point, because anyone with a printer would need to bypass this filter, and bypassing this filter would be against the law.
Theres countless gcode use in the world, much of it is offline
Doesn’t matter. Has nothing to do with online.
You can run OpenCV on an RPi, it’s just super slow, and you could probably use a cheap GPU chip to do it faster. You store the pretrained model on the device.
You may even get away with an asic designed for the model, though with that one I’m talking out my ass.
That would makes printers more expensive and my guess is that they’ll prefer to force online connectivity
100%
I suppose my old Prusa just jumped a bit in value.
You can use a 3d printer to build a 3d printer. When they figure that out, will they try to stop those parts from being printed too?
Who did they consult on this, and did that person or persons purposely lead them astray, or were the consultants equally ignorant?
Hell, with modern stepper motors and extruded aluminum box frame, you don’t even need a 3D printer to build a 3D printer. It would certainly make it easier, but it’s not required. You could manufacture an entire 3D printer using off-the-shelf parts and a raspberry pi (or maybe even an Arduino) to control the motors. It wouldn’t be elegant, and it would require a lot of calibration… But it would be doable if someone were so inclined.
Repraps were controlled with Arduino Megas for a very long time. Up until the MK4 series, Prusa’s Rambo or Einsy boards still ran on the ATMEGA2560 microcontroller.
All of this work is done.
“Uhoh, can’t 3d print a gun. Guess I’ll just go to Walmart.”
Or google zip gun. All you need to shoot 9mm is 9mm internal diameter pipe
Me when I walk 30 feet to the east and buy a gun under the table with no paperwork for less than the cost of a 3d printer
More like “Guess I’ll just print this file labeled ‘hyper realistic movie prop lazer blaster’.”
Jokes aside it’s to prevent having one that’s not registered
Not all legal firearms are registered anyway already. Not to mention it is completely legal to build your own gun in the US. So long as you aren’t building something NFA regulated (full auto, over .50 caliber, short barrel shotgun, silencer, etc.) and you are not distributing them to anyone, you are allowed to just build a gun. There are places online that sell “receiver blanks” with plans for how to finish them with very basic machining, and then you can buy all the rest of the parts off the shelf at any gun store without any registration at all because only the receivers are regulated even a little bit.
This has nothing to do with gun control. The entire concept of “ghost guns” has been a scare tactic to get enough public on-side to pass draconian surveillance and manufacturing control laws like this. The goal of this is to monitor “at-home manufacturing” (of anything, nothing to do with guns anymore than it has to do with warhammer compatible miniatures) and restrict the practice.
For reference of just how easy this is, most AR-15s that I’ve seen have been units built from individual parts, my own included. That’s kinda the AR-15’s whole schtick, is that it’s super modular and customizable, so much that a lotta people joke that it’s “LEGOs for adults.” It makes good sense, if company A makes a good upper, but Company B makes good triggers, so why not mix and match for the best of both worlds?
I doubt you can do that in California
Guess I’ll go to Nevada.
This guy gets it.
Supporters say the measure tackles the problem before a downloadable file becomes an untraceable weapon. Everytown for Gun Safety says recoveries of 3D-printed crime guns across 20 cities have risen nearly 1,000% over the past five years, and argues that cheaper, more capable printers are already being used in illegal ghost gun operations.
Ooooh, that’s two large red flags for me (disregarding the litany of red flags the concept in general has). Every town being involved makes me question the data on its face, given the number of times I saw gang violence near a school out of school hours listed as a school shooting in their database, as does a large percentage increase with no hard numbers. If they recovered 1 gun last year and 11 this year, that’s a 1000% increase, but the percentage sounds so much worse than the real number.
- Buy a kit.
- Buy a mechanical kit and an electronics package.
- Build from scratch
- Buy out of state
- Buy an open source machine and flash the firmware
- Buy your fucking gun in an alley (way easier, and maybe cheaper.)
- Design and distribute stls that have parts that may be interpreted by whatever brain dead software is going to watch out for files, and print in two batches, say, something that may look like a lower, and then an upper, for a a nerf gun, for example, to glut the system.
The list goes on…
in the name of public safety
In the name of gutting small manufacturing and the ability to repair your own devices. This has never had anything to do with safety, as they can’t even do the thing the bill demands. Fucking asinine
Next steps I’m sure. Then they ban you from printing anything that resembles a patented device, anything that looks like a medical device (can’t skip certification), and anything that looks like a toy (SAVE THE CHILDREN!).
Register as a manufacturer of 3D printers
Government gives you an updated, comprehensive archive of STL files your firmware must reject
???
Profit
If only the government were that incompetent. But even I have my doubts they would distribute anything more than hashes.
Still, changing a hash is ridiculously simple.
True haha. But yeah, a file hash is actually uniquely useless in this case, any gcode spun out of a slicer is going to be hardware and user specific.
Just seems like there would be opportunities for hacking and reverse engineering this measure. At it’s root, it’s a measure that builds firearm information into the firmware, surely that could be exploited by a person who wanted to do that sort of thing.
