I understand the intent, but feel that there are so many other loopholes that put much worse weapons on the street than a printer. Besides, my prints can barely sustain normal use, much less a bullet being fired from them. I would think that this is more of a risk to the person holding the gun than who it’s pointing at.
There’s a community that builds 3d printed guns, and those don’t last very long either. They’re not printing barrels, they’re just printing the trigger housing and grip. They go out and buy the dangerous bits.
This is all a bit pointless.
Even more pointless when you consider that once you have a 3d printer, you can make a lot of the components for a second 3d printer, and go out and buy the other parts, without ever buying a 3d printer. Now you have two ghost gun machines!! Oh the horror.
Tbh, you print em right they’ll last a good 2k rnds and you can rifle the barrel with ECM at home these days, they’d get “the job” done, save an extended firefight, and then “NY reload.”
That said I agree this is pointless.
A self replicating 3D printer? I like it.
The reprap movement was exactly that. A self replicating rapid prototyper. While it never reached true replication, it got close enough to cause an explosive growth of the community. That, in turn led to the huge number of low cost suppliers and designs we have now.
Yeah it’s called RepRap
As others have said, the RepRap concept was trying to be that. At first the idea was to 3D print as much of the machine as possible, but what it realistically achieved was you would buy metal frame rails, nuts & bolts, the hot end assembly (a glorified hot glue gun), motors, and a controller board (in many cases literally an arduino) and 3D print connectors and bracketry necessary to hold the thing together. Josef Prusa took the “Mendel” pattern Reprap and simplified it into his now ubiquitous upright plate style “Prusa i3” pattern.
I’ve built several 3D printers from “scratch” and at least 20 from kits. My own 3D printer has printed many of its own parts.
Will they require a background check for CNC machines and lathes as well?
They’re eventually just going to demand you’re under AI monitored video surveillance at all times, even while bathing.
Kinky
On a positive note, you’ll be able to buy different subscriptions, so it’s not a complete loss for you. The medical subscription for the probe, which will notify you if it spots any polyps or rectal cancer. Or a “recreational” subscription, where you can engage the vibrating bit that’s near to your prostate.
Oh the joy when you get a notification on your phone saying “what did we find in your rectum? Pay 50USD to find out” and it’s a piece of corn.
Routers and lathes, both CNC and manual … and calipers! The name sounds like something to do with bullets and they look like tiny machine guns.
Pretty soon they would have to ban backyard foundries, aluminum cans, molding sand, metal files, and drill bits!
Why them flat bastards!
(A flatbastard is a common file type)
Is this a real problem? How many crimes are being committed with 3D printed guns?
It’s a rounding error… basically just politicians virtue signalling that they’re doing something.
I’m reminded of Leland Yee. California politician who was in favor of gun control all while doing gun running stuff himself. Guess he felt gun control was good for business.
Fast and furious…ATF gun running to the cartels…
No, but often gun control is an “if it stops even one” type of thing. Most of it is predicated on mass shootings which are .001% of gun violence in an attempt to ban the gun that kills <500 out of 60,000 people a year.
Owning a ghost gun is a crime, right?
Nearly 500 were recovered last year. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/public-safety/2023/09/20/nypd-unit-combatting-the-growing-problem-of-ghost-guns
From the picture in that article, those guns would blow up in the shooter’s hand.
What a shame that would be
I can kind of see the logic.
Like book piracy was never a huge thing because you’d need a hell of a set up to make a book from scratch. Music piracy however…
I’m sure a decently skilled craftsman could make a decent firearm with a short trip to Home Depot, but the average Joe can’t make that happen too easily. With a 3D printer, you could have a gun with next to zero skill. Like a decently motivated person is going to find a gun anyway, but this maybe addresses the less motivated people/crimes of passion, etc.
That being said, if these are the same people advocating for a waiting period, they obviously don’t know how long 3D printing a gun takes.
Edit: for those downvoting, I’m not saying this is a good idea. I think the same result could be had by going after whoever is hosting the design files. Like at least keep them off thingiverse and make them slightly hard to find.
Book piracy was huge I don’t know what you’re talking about. You could get professionally printed books or you could always just photocopy them.
Ebook piracy is a thing. Often done by the same professor who wrote the textbook.
I mean before ebooks we’re a thing. Like before music piracy was a thing.
In other news: virtue signaling politicians are considering banning [scary items that their core voters know nothing about] in order to appear tough on crime, while avoiding doing the logical things experts recommend, because that would look bad in the eyes of the voters. Instead the only consequence is extending the stigma related to excons resulting in greater recidivism
Googling 3d printed gun homicide returns a story from Rhode Island in 2020 (where the police can’t figure out if the gun was actually printed), an attempted murder in Reykjavík in 2022, and this story from 2022 that claims a total of 44 arrests were made related to 3d printed guns… world wide https://3dprint.com/291684/3d-printed-gun-arrests-tripled-in-less-than-two-years-3dprint-com-investigates/amp/
In contrast there were 48117 firearms related deaths in the US during the same period.
Maybe statistics and proportions should be a core part of math from an early age?
These guns are increasingly being found at crime scenes. You may not like NY’s solution, but the problem is growing.
I have two issues with your comment, and the tldr is this “I don’t think the problem warrants the resources needed” and “I don’t think the proposed bill will solve anything, problem or not”.
These guns are increasingly being found at crime scenes.
Probably, I don’t have a source for that, but I suspect that you’re not wrong. What I would like to know is the proportions of gun grimes involving 3d-printed guns vs gun crimes in total. I suspect what others have said in this post, about the percentage of gun related crimes that involve 3d-printed guns, to be within a rounding error, to also be correct.
You may not like NY’s solution, […]
It’s not that I don’t like the “solution”. It’s that I don’t accept the proposed ban as being a solution in the first place. I don’t want to come off as being snarky, I just wanted to make sure that my understanding of the word “solution” was correct. English not being my first language, I sometime miss the salient details. So, I took a moment and googled “definition solution”. According to “Oxford Languages” a solution is a means of solving a problem or dealing with a difficult situation.
Can you in all honesty claim, that you believe that limiting acquiring 3d-printing capabilities, in a single state, will reduce the use of 3d-printed parts in gun crimes?
[…] but the problem is growing.
Again, the occurrence of 3d-printed guns or gun parts may be growing, but is it actually a problem big enough that it has to be dealt with? And with the resources necessary to enforce this proposal? Isn’t gun manufacturing already limited? As others have pointed out, why not limit access to other tools you could use to make guns?
As OP pointed out, the intent may be noble, but the attempt is futile.
Sources please?
Some things cannot be effectively regulated in this manner. At all.
There is simply no way to stop people from building their own 3D printers. There are too many open source designs, and they can be built with very simple parts that are readily available at the hardware store. Most hobbyist-level 3D printers basically come as a kit that they have to assemble themselves anyways. What happens next? Background checks to buy stepper motors? Background checks to buy a microcontroller?
To me this is like trying to mandate government backdoors in encryption algorithms. There is literally nothing that would stop criminals from just using an open source encryption algorithm that doesn’t have a backdoor, so you end up just making it so all legitimate communications are less secure than they should be.
By that logic, they should ban water pipes to stop people from making water pipe shotguns
Must pass a background check before entering Home Depot.
You mean Crime depot
Hey congress, so uhhh… you can 3d print a 3d printer
Or just buy parts. What are they gonna do? Regulate stepper motors and heater cartridges, and generic microcontrollers?
The cat is already out the bag.
That’s hilarious, assuming they only regulate prebuilts or full kits, all you’d need to do is something like add everything from a voron parts list to your cart to get around it. I wonder if sellers would also be able to offer partial kits to bypass it too (like offering a frame kit, x axis kit, extruder kit, etc and you just add all to cart)
The thing is, if 3D printed guns were a significant problem (and not primarily just an excuse to do nothing about failing gun laws), your situation would still be a massive improvement.
Domestic terrorism is planned. At some point, every mass shooter has thought about how they could kill the most people, with the least effort and lowest chance of failure.
And of course when they can walk into a gun store and buy cheap, semi-automatic weapons on a whim – even with a long history of red flags – that’s exactly what they do.
Sure, maybe they could kill more people with a bomb. But they’d have to learn how to build one, then actually build it without being caught or blowing their hands off. On top of all of that, there’s no for-profit death cult for explosives so many of the most effective tools will bring men in suits to your door.
The reality is if they had to buy, build and tune a Voron, then print a gun, then clean up the spaghetti and print another gun, then test the gun wouldn’t explode in their hands many of them simply would just try and stab people instead (or better yet, just do their suicide without taking innocent people with them).
Means reductions has been proven to reduce suicide rates. Mass shootings are a form of suicide.
This proposal is just an awkward attempt to address an issue early, because they can do so without the gun lobby sicking their lawyers and reactionaries on them, who are the ones pushing "Why bother with gun control when you can just 3D print full auto weapons?“ in the first place.
Just with household items you could already come up with half a dozen options that are better than a gun, kitchen knife, or explosives.
Security is fragile and we are kind of lucky that there aren’t too many intelligent manicas.
If any of those (conspicuously unnamed) household items were used to kill even half as many people as guns, there would absolutely be legislation to reduce the public safety risk.
If that legislation failed as routinely as America’s gun laws do, it would be improved or replaced until it worked.
Say goodbye to your pipe clog cleaner.
Baking lye roll at home? That’s NaOH too.
Old car battery or battery acid somewhere? H2SO4
Chlorix? People have accidently killed themself by releasing Chlorine. That’s why there are warnings to not mix it with other cleaning agents.
There is far more in a normal household and don’t even touched on the old stuff still laying around.
You might say those are not lethal: Panic is a strong weapon and an attacker has the advantage that he chooses the where, when and how with as much planning/preperation as he likes.
Yet with all these amazing weapons of mass destruction in their pantry, every single domestic terrorist just goes and buys a gun instead.
I’m sure the executives over at Chlorox are thrilled to hear that if radicalised psychopaths started killing and maiming thousands of people a year with their products, you’d fight to protect their profits.
But I’m not interested in solving every vague act of violence you’re able to inflict on the people in your imagination, I’m interesting in solving the violence that is happening right now, to real people, using a specific tool.
You just described how guns are regulated.
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So it’s almost like the guns are the issue 😩 I can’t believe this
You wouldn’t download a gun
I don’t have a use for one. A car though? I’d download the fuck out of a car.
Make it a bicycle and I guess it’s almost feasible.
This isn’t even low hanging fruit. This is fruit that’s been on the ground rotting for a few months that no one is going to pick up and eat anyway. Let’s throw ineffective solutions at the problem and when they fail go, “weeeeell, since you can buy a 3d printer and a gun online, let’s just do background checks for internet access”
That was sort of my point. I’m going to go out on a limb and say without any research that bears kill more people every year than 3D printers.
“We’ve done absolutely nothing, and nothing has changed, guess school shootings are the new norm, get used to it”
Guns are not the problem people are the problem. People do stupid shit and hurt others. Its all mental heath related but no politicians want to touch mental heath with a 10 foot pole every mass shooting has been from somebody mentally unwell. Guns are like cars, when used correctly they help the people using it and people around them protecting against criminals that illegally got guns and other illegal acts. Also if you don’t believe me on that look at south side of new York and Chicago Illinois. They both have large death counts do to gun violents. But the crazy part is guns have heavily restrictions especially in Illinois. But the criminals still get illegal firearms. And just like a car if used incorrectly can kill and hurt people.
Its all mental heath related but no politicians want to touch mental heath with a 10 foot pole
That’s because the underlying causes of the poor mental health are things like inequality, consumerism, and car dependency (not just the burdensome cost, frustration of wasting time in traffic, and poor health from lack of exercise, but also the direct harm to mental health from replacing third places with non-places). Since pretty much all the politicians (of either party) are full steam ahead on the crony-capitalism train, of course they have no interest in solving any of those.
“sir were going to need to do a background check, so you can buy this book that has the word “GUN" in it."
There are more deadlier things that are way less expensive I can buy at the local tracker supply with not even a second thought from the cashier. Let’s just limit the public from scary things like “3D printers”.
There fighting Human ingenuity. And can’t win
Holy shit, it would be so funny if this started an 80% 3D printer market.
No need. You can buy ALL of the parts off the shelf for a 3D printer and assemble it yourself. None are regulated (Aluminum rails, motors, arduino controllers, LCD panels, Power supplies, heating elements, thermistors, wiring). Strictly speaking there’s nothing about a non-resin 3d Printer you can’t procure and build yourself. And you can even 3d Print the housings to make it look nice once you’ve assembled it. Oh… and the designs and parts are largely open source.
In the future, only outlaws will have 3D printers…
Whats next? Criminal background check to buy cutlery for your kitchen?
You know what would be even more effective than regulating 3D printers like this? Regulating all guns better.
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Federal laws. Prohibition of handguns. From your first link, concealed carry permits stand out as something completely unnecessary.
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Handguns are only used to shoot people, hunting rifles and the like have some valid purpose. But they should be heavily regulated, moreso than they are now. Licences and training requirements, for a start.
The people downvoting you but not commenting are likely the same people who foster the insanity that is gun culture in the US.
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People who like double laws are weird.
Anything to regulate and restrict the people/end users but not address any real problems in society.
Go after the gun companies, gun lobbies, NRA? No, never. Address housing, income, and educational inequality? That sounds complicated, tough, and expensive.
This has similar vibes to shaming/regulating people for using too much water in their showers and for washing their cars, but when a multi-billion dollar oil company spills millions of gallons of crude into the sea causing years of environmental damage due to negligence, fine them a few million dollars and tell them they’ve been very naughty…
So tired of politicians being in the pocket of Capitalist scumbags.
You’d be surprised what a hoffman lower or FGC9_2.0 can take.
I personally have a 3d printed gun that I’ve put a few hundred rounds though and is still holding up just fine 3d printing is plenty strong enough
Oh really? Do you mind telling us how the barrel was 3D printed?
Way to tell on yourself.
In general, most people can legally build their own firearms in the US. “Ghost” guns aren’t illegal unless you’re selling them or giving them away.
It isn’t a crime unless you’re a prohibited possessor, they’ll be alright.
