San Diego County authorities say Polymaker made a "strategic business choice" to market and sell 3-D printer filament to Californians for the express purpose of building illegal weapons.

San Diego County jumped into California’s sprawling ghost gun fight this week, suing a 3-D printing filament manufacturer it says hocks material for homespun firearms in violation of state law.

Working with the Giffords Law Center, the county counsel sued manufacturer Polymaker, alleging the company made a “strategic business choice” to market and sell 3-D printer filament to Californians for the express purpose of building illegal weapons. The polymer filament is sold in spools that feed into 3-D printers, allowing the devices to form designs created by their owners.

  • Noite_Etion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    112·
    2 hours ago

    Americans can order guns to their doors, but the 3d printers are the issues you choose to tackle…

  • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish
    211·
    2 hours ago

    They used fear of guns to attack Right to Repair and small manufacturing. It was never about guns.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    18·
    4 hours ago

    hold on let me go sue home depot for selling black iron pipe and nails because someone made a pipe bomb. Nowhere has poly-maker ever advertised or suggested their speciality filaments could make firearms.

    Someone’s looking for a payout settlement, fuck California

    • Sludgehammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      331·
      4 hours ago

      I believe they’ll eventually come for those too.

      IMO the real end goal of these laws isn’t to ban ghost guns, it’s to ban plebs from being able to build or create anything at all. 3D printing a plastic piece to fix a broken tab in some gizmo cuts into corporate profits so a manufactured moral panic about ghost guns appears. I’m sure they’ll eventually get to a pipe rifle moral panic at some point to lock down DIY plumbing.

  • Alph4d0g@piefed.socialEnglish
    19·
    5 hours ago

    Maybe they should sue steel manufacturers too since that’s the main material used for most fire arms.

    • Tim@mastodon.world
      15·
      6 hours ago

      @jballs that’s like suing a hardware store for someone hit with a piece of wood my point is filaments are legal it is the end-product that is meant to be perceived
      #3DPrinting

      • jballs@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        11·
        5 hours ago

        Yeah, and they also want to make it illegal to print something without a magic algorithm sitting between your computer and printer determining if it’s a gun part or not. I can’t help but feel like these people don’t know the first thing about how 3d printing actually works.

    • chewypoops@lemmy.worldEnglish
      824·
      6 hours ago

      Polymaker is a Chinese supplier, selling to California residents, while also running ad campaigns through ghost gun content creators aimed at California residents, defining themselves explicitly as a ghost gun ingredient.

      If they didn’t want to get caught up in this, they shouldn’t have gotten involved in the illicit arms business. But they wanted to be known as the plastic supplier that is cool with you making ghost guns, and that isn’t going to fly in California.

      Plastic suppliers that don’t advertise themselves explicitly as being part of the ghost gun supply chain will be fine.

  • Gil, The Shitposter Of Ages@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    131·
    5 hours ago

    under the second amendment, and under the ATF’s ruling, citizens are allowed to manufacture their own firearms. this is getting struck down… if it were in Texas and not the gun-stealing California. I hope to the gods it gets struck down, because this would be a travesty for all my brothers, sisters and non binary pals in California… my heart goes out to y’all.

    • just2look@lemmy.zipEnglish
      31·
      4 hours ago

      States are allowed to add some restrictions to gun laws. So the new ATF rules likely won’t be decisive in this case.

      • Gil, The Shitposter Of Ages@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        4 hours ago

        If this goes up to the federal court level, it’s almost certainly getting struck down. It’s a pretty clear infringement upon the 2nd amendment.

        It’s a miracle that the CA gun laws haven’t been struck down at the federal level yet… By the gods, I hope they do. The situation in CA is utterly miserable for y’all.