> I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.
I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes.
Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.
Good for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered.
Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.
The rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience:
1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”.
2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world.
3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk.
4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil.
Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk!
Because of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?
California voters, write to your state senator. I'm in San Francisco, and I wrote to Scott Wiener, who recently voted to pass this out of committee.
Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage.
But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are paying attention. The tech capital of the world shouldn't have artificially impaired tools.
It doesnt matter. you know how much campaign financing is tied up with gun control groups? It sucks to lose all your campaign funding and get primaried, right? Wouldn't want that!
What reason do you have to think that writing Congressmen changes the slightest thing? Even when they receive a pile of related letters? Seems to me this wouldnt shift the needle at all vs lobbying interests. Seems to me that there is a general unrealistic idealism and faith in democracy at play here.
Each congressperson's staff gathers all of the comments they get, counts them up, and reports back to the congressperson, passing along anything they think would be useful information; if you write a clear and careful letter about an obscure topic there's a decent chance the congressperson themself will see it. Congresspeople typically have local ties in their area and caring what their constituents think is their job.
It's a serious problem that there are some congresspeople who don't do any local events, send all comments straight to the trash, etc. You should vote those folks out.
In the longer term, we should push for significantly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives to 5–10x the current size and implement serious campaign finance reforms. In combination, these will help make congresspeople more responsive to constituents and less reliant on donors.
Not an American, but I've wondered about increasing numbers myself. Certainly, giving each representative fewer citizens to represent could help.
I worry about the size of the bodies, however. Too big, and they become less wieldy. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder about other solutions. I was thinking of, for example, 10x the number, but each grouping of 10 has a representative, and they each give proxies on votes. Maybe best though of as, junior representatives. It'd allow more direct interaction, and in a sense you'd be electing regional representative staff for each congressperson.
I guess there are a lot of ways to handle this, but regardless I overall 100% agree.
With modern electronics I really don't see why we can't have arbitrary numbers of representatives.
In fact I think my preferred system would be representatives get a number of votes equal to the people who voted for them, and anyone can assign anyone as their representative. Gate things like getting speaking time on representing more than x% of the vote, and maybe even have a minimum threshold if we're insisting votes are cast in person for cyber security reasons, but generally the bar for being able to represent people should be low and there shouldn't be winners and losers in elections but just people who represent different numbers of people.
The modern democracy is unchanged from original Ancient Greek version to adapt to having 100,000 voters per representative from 100 when democracy was invented. It was never questioned if it supposed to work at this scale.
This is correct. At this point all constituents believe something like "oh that's just a MAGAT and they don't matter" and throw it in the garbage. I personally think all congress people left or right should be thrown out if they don't personally reply. We're paying them to do this. If many people write about the same issue, they should not have to reply personally, but they should hold a press conference, recorded town hall or issue a statement.
We're losing our government and voice to radicalization.
My letter opened with the fact that I generally favor reasonable gun laws, then elaborated how this is not that.
It's possible that nobody reads it and captures the nuance, but I did spend time to consider the framing. Nobody who actually reads it will think I am an extremist or that I haven't carefully considered the topic.
By the way I also know for a fact that Scott Wiener's staff reads San Francisco's subreddit. Commenting about Wiener's vote in there will reach his staff. Given the bay area presence here it's also possible somebody "who knows a guy" will even see this thread name-drop him.
If we're talking written letters, most of these offices at least have staff that read them. I've sorta lobbied before and they don't get quite as much mail as you imagine.
And they respond more often than you'd think. Your attitude is pretty prevalent so the chance to write back and change a voter's impression is hard to pass up.
We'be been this way for decades, the government has been far detached from the will of any but the rich. The only thing Trump has done is demonstrate that, as a politician, you dont really have to try so hard to pretend otherwise anymore. And the people can and will do nothing but fight eachother.
From what I know about legislators (I am a longtime SF resident but I am also a DC native and have known some congressional staff over the years), it is pretty rare that informed constituents write to them in a cogent and authentic voice about specific legislation, and they do pay attention to this.
Calls may work even more.
It won't work all the time and how much they do will depend on the issue and why they are supporting it etc. But it's worth a shot.
Remember I said: they should know you're paying attention. This can cause them to also pay attention.
Alright, you won me over. I emailed my congressman from the EFF website with my own message. That's the best I can do right now. I just feel like politics is a losing battle. If its taken over by special interests and there doesn't seem like there is any end in sight, as it gets easier and easier for them to sway the people that are actually suppose to be working for us. What is the point? When we are combating legislation that no sane person should have to deal with there comes a time where the whole thing is unlawful and it we should stop investing our power into it.
Why? There are better ways to spend your time than yelling at walls. I'd say it's better to be disillusioned and realistic than idealistic and ignorant. Even if the latter feels better.
I've written a state rep and had legislation come out of it. I've written a congressperson and had federal bureaucracy expedite my case out of it. People who think their government is unresponsive generally haven't actually tried asking their government for a response.
There seems to be a propaganda thread in the culture now to get people cynical and thinking everything is rigged against you in advance, and a prerequisite to accepting this is to ignore how to the system actually works. The end result is to prevent you from getting involved. You never know if you don't try.
As an example (maybe some of the HN audience will dislike the outcome here but the point stands nonetheless), this week two sitting members of Congress were knocked out in New York, and their party told them the previous year to not bother trying.
Manufacture a bunch of guns with a lathe instead lmao. Or if they try to take that away, forge weld smoothbore musket barrels the old way with bar stock spiraled around a mandrel. Just make sure you use enough 20 team mule and hear a crack every time, or it could make a mess when you proof it ;)
Looks even more draconian than the New York law. For example, it seems to mandate proprietary, locked down slicers from the printer manufacturer.
--
For integrated preprint software [slicer] design, guidance for how vendors shall demonstrate that printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.
Over the last few years, I’ve felt as though I’ve been living in a feverish dream all the time. Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve. And this is yet another example.
Five years ago, the masses told the authoritarians that they could have as much power as they wanted. The authoritarians loved it and now know the uprising against their excesses will never happen. This is just the beginning.
We're bombing Iran to suppress technology form the 40s. We're suppressing advanced AI. We're suppressing 3d printer technology. Then there are the encryption wars. Control of advanced technology, not just weapons, is a larger and larger battle every year. When the robots get here, you'll need the governments ok to do anything at all with a robot. Mark Andreessen's comments that government regulators told him that they've suppressed whole branches of physics is ominous in that regard. Technology suppression is a whole separate narrative of history practically.
Andreessen is going to be undone by stone age tech with the masses pulling his distended head from its body. Can’t speak for the rest of them but I can hope and cheer from the sidelines.
How is enforcement supposed to work? The firmware narcs pull your printer over and checksum your SD cards against permitted firmware? Or they scan it for illegal gun-algorithms?
I share your hopeful optimism, but here's the reality of the mass-email campaigns targeting congress:
[email received 6/18/26 from the office of Steve Scalise, majority leader in the house, who is one of my representatives. I have trimmed for brevity.]
>>
Due to advancements in technology, many third-party organizations use their mailing lists to send advocacy letters like this on your behalf. With the increased volume of third-party letters being sent to my office, I want to be sure that I am able to more appropriately address your thoughts and concerns.
I will be sure to consider the views you have sent me, but if you have any additional thoughts on this issue, or need other assistance with a federal agency, please contact my office directly through my website scalise.house.gov or by calling (202) 225-3015
-----------
In case it is not clear to anyone reading, this is kosher political speak for "I am ignoring automated emails. Consider this your notice."
Honestly, I am surprised it took this long, although I'm quite certain it has been going on for a lot longer and generally they simply do not provide the courtesy of telling you they are ignoring you.
This is exactly why I had an LLM customize the letter as I said in my other comment; I've had a similar response from another of my representatives. It might not help much if they're filtering based on where the email is coming from, but on the off chance that they are filtering based on identical content, changing the content might make a difference. With LLMs, the effort needed to customize the content has gone down significantly (otherwise, I would agree with the more cynical commentators that such letters are a waste of time and energy).
Also, if you have a couple extra minutes to spare, consider handing the letter and the name of your senator to an LLM (I used Deepseek V4 Pro) with instructions to research your representative and tailor the message to them specifically.
Imagine if you couldn't buy a lathe unless it refused to make a baseball bat (which could be used for hitting people).
Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines).
Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over).
And if all of those checked with the government before functioning.
It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce that law, and create societal conditions that don't nudge or force people into doing undesirable things.
In fact, right up front in TFA they point out that California already bans manufacturing firearms without a license. This 3D printer regulation is entirely duplicative and unnecessary.
It is not their job to enforce federal laws, but they are actively thwarting federal law. Both through refusals to notify the federal government about criminal illegal aliens being released, refusing detention holds, lawsuits against building facilities, lawsuits blocking arrests, etc..
pedantic. You can use lawsuits, within the law, to thwart the law. You can do it knowing you will lose, just to cause delays, like Califorinia and the 9th circuit are ACTIVELY doing to slowdown gun control cases from reaching the supreme court where they 100% will be struck down. Refusing notification is an action.
Why should it enforce a law from a separate sovereign entity, is the question. And the answer is, it shouldn’t. I don’t think states do, or should, enforce federal anti-discrimination laws. The feds do that. The states pass their own anti-discrimination laws if they want something to enforce themselves.
We used to ban the undesirable action! Then DEFCAD got that ban overturned, convincing the federal government that they have a First Amendment right to publish 3D-printable firearm plans. So now our choices are to allow widespread 3D printed firearms (which I and many others won't accept) or restrict the means by which they can be made. I genuinely do wish the DEFCAD folks had made different choices that would not have led us here.
I want to know how on earth restricting the publication of plans could be consistent with the first amendment. That's like prohibiting the publication of books with content you disagree with.
Certainly not on First Amendment grounds, and in general I expect powerful AI will quite imminently make people more sympathetic to random manufacturing restrictions on potentially dangerous goods. I can imagine 2A arguments against any regulation that's specifically preventing the use of X for gun manufacturing, but my weakly held best guess is that they wouldn't be persuasive here.
> ...our choices are to allow widespread 3D printed firearms...
Which parts of a firearm can be printed in a consumer-grade 3D printer? Be as specific as your knowledge permits.
Of those that cannot, how much money does one have to spend in order to purchase a 3D printer that is capable of printing those parts that cannot be printed by a consumer-grade printer?
Are you aware of "slam fire" firearms? If you were not, you owe it to yourself to learn how to make a functional "slam fire" shotgun. The tutorials are pretty widespread.
I'm aware of "slam fire" firearms and know why and how it's easy to produce them. They're much less concerning to me because their rate of fire is extremely slow.
I don't know the details of what can be printed in a consumer-grade printer, not having performed firearms manufacturing myself, but I've seen things claiming to be pretty complete kits and it seems to me that most components should be possible. Barrels of any reasonable length might be hard, perhaps firing pins too. (And springs, but of course those are trivial to manufacture by hand.) If it's not actually possible to 3D print an effective gun, perhaps someone should make that argument in detail.
When people talk about 3d printing a gun they are almost always talking about 3d printing a single part—the lower receiver. Federal law considers the lower receiver to be a gun, and it is the part with a serial number.
A lower receiver is not a complicated. It essentially just a quirk of the law that the ability to 3d print a lower receiver is useful to people who want to manufacture “untraceable” guns.
You could change the law so that barrels have to have serial numbers and accomplish nearly the exact same thing as completely banning 3d printers.
Also buying a kit, 3d printing a lower receiver, snd assembling an effective firearm is about as difficult as buying a kit to assemble an 3d printer and using existing open source slicers.
You can make all of those things. First you pick up two sticks and rub them together real good (maybe use the inner bark of a hickory tree or similar to make some cordage s.t. you can make a bow drill and rub them even better). Using the little coal you've created, build a fire. Now pile a bunch of wood on it and starve it for oxygen. Great, you've created charcoal. Now skin a big animal and make bellows from its hide. Now build a big fire and blast it with the bellows to make it rull friggen hot. Put some rocks in it that have iron in them. Collect the iron from the bottom of the fire (exercise left to the reader) into a stone tub. Build a few forms using wood, sand, and wax in the shapes of the various parts a lathe. Melt the iron in the stone tub and pour it into the forms. Scrape the mating surfaces of the lathe parts flat and clean with a hard stone.
If this becomes law, it will give rise to a fun new form or protest art in this vain. What is the cutest thing you can design that nobody would consider to be related to guns, but which gets flagged? An obvious example... a llama sitting on the ground, legs hidden, and head held high in the air, chewing its cud. Llamas can be really cute! Sell them on Etsy/eBay/etc., printed by an out-of-state 3D printing service. I just used the EFF form to promise my state senator in Sacramento that I'd send her (and reporters that cover her) one of them if the bill passes.
I'm glad I don't live in California (or America in general) but this is such BS.
I don't think we will have much of this in Europe because guns are pretty rare here and so is ammo. We just don't really have gun problems except with organised criminals but they don't 3D print them, they just buy them.
But anyway, 3D printing isn't rocket science. It never was and it sure isn't now. Anyone can build one in their garage and many of us have in fact done so when it was a new tech. If someone wants to be printing gun parts they are going to be printing gun parts.
But seriously, given that the 3D printer movement started out with people building their own printers from scratch and there continues to be a healthy open-source hardware ecosystem within the community, I can't see this stopping anyone.
Unless you also make it illegal for 3D printers to print 3D printer parts...
These laws also apply to subtractive manufacturing methods like CNC machines. They just aren't as common in households so they don't get the headline space to grab our attention.
I am old enough to remember when the fax machine first became ubiquitous in the 80's and read about how the Soviets were threatened by it. Unauthorized use was a crime and they stationed guards at fax machines to prevent mis-use. Perhaps I naively fell for CIA propaganda at the time but if true we can hope/estimate that California Commies will fall in less than 10 years since things are moving much faster in today's world.
It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter.
We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].
It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.
We just reeeeeally want to believe, more than other states, that our government is The Good Guys and we can Fix The Problems if we only added more laws and more taxes. Every two years we are presented with 20 earnest-seeming ballot measures that each have roughly this message:
> "We have a major problem in California -- ____ is not as ____ as it should be. Prop 1234 authorizes the state to sell $__,000,000,000 in bonds[1] to be repaid over the next 30 years. This will completely fix the ____ problem. By the way, it looks like a lot, but it's actually a good investment that will SAVE TAXPAYERS MONEY in the future."
Then we get another almost identical one in 3 years saying that ____ is worse than ever and this new round of $__,000,000,000 will finally fix it once and for all.
Voters approve like three quarters of these, and usually don't even remember we just gave them billions of dollars to fix the same thing a few years ago. I've heard plenty of people in my social circle who basically vote by reading the supposed purpose from the title ("Anti-Homelessness", "Schools", "High-speed rail", "Animal welfare") and they vote based entirely on the assumption that this proposition is the only and best way to help the homeless, improve schools, etc. They don't even entertain the idea that the prop might be a pork-filled piece of trash written by lobbyists that might even make the problems worse while costing eleven figures and still not be paid for in 20 years.
We just trust Sacramento so blindly.
[1] That, or the other alternative funding: A tax raise "on big corporations" which will 100% definitely not affect you, dear voter.
> plenty of people in my social circle who basically vote by reading the supposed purpose from the title
In my experience, if there's anything that shouldn't be judged by what it's called, it's typically political things, ballot props and bills especially. Sometimes I even adopt an inverse intuition, which is the proposal will have an opposite effect to its nominal one.
Yes, that has been clear for a long time, about as long as CA has been a one-party state. The real question is why you supposedly smart Californians keep on falling for the... same... old... lie... every... damn... time. It is not as if the pie-in-the-sky people haven't promised a chicken in every pot and a cow in every shed and a car on every driveway - replace these with whatever modern equivalents you like - a thousand times before without delivering even a single chick, calf or push bike. Why do you keep on falling for the same old tired this-time-it-will-work lies? This is not limited to CA and might even become more prevalent in NY now that the DSA has seriously started to hollow out the remains of what used to be the Democratic party but it has been going on for much longer in the formerly Golden, now somehow tarnished state. Why? California Dreaming used to be a thing, not a nightmare.
There are states which are worse, but don't get as much press coverage. Louisiana is essentially just a a US state controlled by petrochemical companies, so portions of the state have extreme rates of cancer.
California is just a population that tries to solve problems with maximal regulation and selective enforcement. So you get to see the effects. Here are some laws that I think the HN community would be hugely in favour of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652773
Yeah, I'd prefer to have an offline 3d printer but it seems I've made a mistake with my Bambu P1S.
Offline printing would be illegal in printers sold after the law goes into effect.
*printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.*
Sometimes they do good. Prop 65 cleaned up off-gassing plastic products in the entire country. Harbor Freight stores used to be mini gas chambers leeching away your health.
Some states, like California, and New York (which recently passed the first 3d printer ban), have restrictive gun control. These laws are in conflict with Supreme Court rulings supporting the 2nd Amendment, but the litigation and appeal process is very slow. It is 9 years into the Duncan case in California challenging magazine capacity limits, 7 years into the Miller case challenging California's Assault rifle ban.
Unlike the downvoters, I'm genuinely curious: do you believe a narrative that the US has no gun control laws? Sometimes I wonder if that is what people outside the US think.
I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”.
I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand.
I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.
I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes.
Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.
Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.
1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”.
2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world.
3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk.
4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil.
Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk!
Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage.
But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are paying attention. The tech capital of the world shouldn't have artificially impaired tools.
It's a serious problem that there are some congresspeople who don't do any local events, send all comments straight to the trash, etc. You should vote those folks out.
In the longer term, we should push for significantly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives to 5–10x the current size and implement serious campaign finance reforms. In combination, these will help make congresspeople more responsive to constituents and less reliant on donors.
I worry about the size of the bodies, however. Too big, and they become less wieldy. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder about other solutions. I was thinking of, for example, 10x the number, but each grouping of 10 has a representative, and they each give proxies on votes. Maybe best though of as, junior representatives. It'd allow more direct interaction, and in a sense you'd be electing regional representative staff for each congressperson.
I guess there are a lot of ways to handle this, but regardless I overall 100% agree.
In fact I think my preferred system would be representatives get a number of votes equal to the people who voted for them, and anyone can assign anyone as their representative. Gate things like getting speaking time on representing more than x% of the vote, and maybe even have a minimum threshold if we're insisting votes are cast in person for cyber security reasons, but generally the bar for being able to represent people should be low and there shouldn't be winners and losers in elections but just people who represent different numbers of people.
We're losing our government and voice to radicalization.
It's possible that nobody reads it and captures the nuance, but I did spend time to consider the framing. Nobody who actually reads it will think I am an extremist or that I haven't carefully considered the topic.
And they respond more often than you'd think. Your attitude is pretty prevalent so the chance to write back and change a voter's impression is hard to pass up.
Calls may work even more.
It won't work all the time and how much they do will depend on the issue and why they are supporting it etc. But it's worth a shot.
Remember I said: they should know you're paying attention. This can cause them to also pay attention.
As an example (maybe some of the HN audience will dislike the outcome here but the point stands nonetheless), this week two sitting members of Congress were knocked out in New York, and their party told them the previous year to not bother trying.
--
For integrated preprint software [slicer] design, guidance for how vendors shall demonstrate that printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.
(did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)
[email received 6/18/26 from the office of Steve Scalise, majority leader in the house, who is one of my representatives. I have trimmed for brevity.]
>> Due to advancements in technology, many third-party organizations use their mailing lists to send advocacy letters like this on your behalf. With the increased volume of third-party letters being sent to my office, I want to be sure that I am able to more appropriately address your thoughts and concerns.
I will be sure to consider the views you have sent me, but if you have any additional thoughts on this issue, or need other assistance with a federal agency, please contact my office directly through my website scalise.house.gov or by calling (202) 225-3015
-----------
In case it is not clear to anyone reading, this is kosher political speak for "I am ignoring automated emails. Consider this your notice."
Honestly, I am surprised it took this long, although I'm quite certain it has been going on for a lot longer and generally they simply do not provide the courtesy of telling you they are ignoring you.
Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines).
Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over).
And if all of those checked with the government before functioning.
It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce that law, and create societal conditions that don't nudge or force people into doing undesirable things.
Califoria would not be a sanctuary state if they actually cared about enforcing laws.
The undesirable action is shooting people, right? That's still banned.
It seems like you think the undesirable action is publishing plans for machines you don't want people to have.
Which parts of a firearm can be printed in a consumer-grade 3D printer? Be as specific as your knowledge permits.
Of those that cannot, how much money does one have to spend in order to purchase a 3D printer that is capable of printing those parts that cannot be printed by a consumer-grade printer?
Are you aware of "slam fire" firearms? If you were not, you owe it to yourself to learn how to make a functional "slam fire" shotgun. The tutorials are pretty widespread.
I don't know the details of what can be printed in a consumer-grade printer, not having performed firearms manufacturing myself, but I've seen things claiming to be pretty complete kits and it seems to me that most components should be possible. Barrels of any reasonable length might be hard, perhaps firing pins too. (And springs, but of course those are trivial to manufacture by hand.) If it's not actually possible to 3D print an effective gun, perhaps someone should make that argument in detail.
A lower receiver is not a complicated. It essentially just a quirk of the law that the ability to 3d print a lower receiver is useful to people who want to manufacture “untraceable” guns.
You could change the law so that barrels have to have serial numbers and accomplish nearly the exact same thing as completely banning 3d printers.
Also buying a kit, 3d printing a lower receiver, snd assembling an effective firearm is about as difficult as buying a kit to assemble an 3d printer and using existing open source slicers.
They cannot take this shit away. It's futile.
im looking forward to the idea that the outline of Ca. may trigger false positives
Maybe it would be possible to just embed a prompt injection into metadata or the STL mesh itself.
https://dpmsinc.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7217d38013ee...
I don't think we will have much of this in Europe because guns are pretty rare here and so is ammo. We just don't really have gun problems except with organised criminals but they don't 3D print them, they just buy them.
But anyway, 3D printing isn't rocket science. It never was and it sure isn't now. Anyone can build one in their garage and many of us have in fact done so when it was a new tech. If someone wants to be printing gun parts they are going to be printing gun parts.
This joke of a law isn't going to stop any 3D printed handguns from getting made, it will only add one more relatively easy step.
Then what, ban stepper motors?
Don't give them ideas.
But seriously, given that the 3D printer movement started out with people building their own printers from scratch and there continues to be a healthy open-source hardware ecosystem within the community, I can't see this stopping anyone.
Unless you also make it illegal for 3D printers to print 3D printer parts...
You've come a long way, RepRap.
We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].
It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfe...
> "We have a major problem in California -- ____ is not as ____ as it should be. Prop 1234 authorizes the state to sell $__,000,000,000 in bonds[1] to be repaid over the next 30 years. This will completely fix the ____ problem. By the way, it looks like a lot, but it's actually a good investment that will SAVE TAXPAYERS MONEY in the future."
Then we get another almost identical one in 3 years saying that ____ is worse than ever and this new round of $__,000,000,000 will finally fix it once and for all.
Voters approve like three quarters of these, and usually don't even remember we just gave them billions of dollars to fix the same thing a few years ago. I've heard plenty of people in my social circle who basically vote by reading the supposed purpose from the title ("Anti-Homelessness", "Schools", "High-speed rail", "Animal welfare") and they vote based entirely on the assumption that this proposition is the only and best way to help the homeless, improve schools, etc. They don't even entertain the idea that the prop might be a pork-filled piece of trash written by lobbyists that might even make the problems worse while costing eleven figures and still not be paid for in 20 years.
We just trust Sacramento so blindly.
[1] That, or the other alternative funding: A tax raise "on big corporations" which will 100% definitely not affect you, dear voter.
In my experience, if there's anything that shouldn't be judged by what it's called, it's typically political things, ballot props and bills especially. Sometimes I even adopt an inverse intuition, which is the proposal will have an opposite effect to its nominal one.
Yeah, I'd prefer to have an offline 3d printer but it seems I've made a mistake with my Bambu P1S.
*printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.*