California’s new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report on themselves targeting general-purpose machines.
Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the “California Firearm Printing Prevention Act,” on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models… certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with “firearm blocking technology.” Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn’t on the list by March 1, 2029, it can’t be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.
Someone more eloquent than I am needs to craft a compelling argument that this violates the 2nd amendment.
Wow…they got us, no way we can print an STL from a USB stick.
This is going to make life hard for hobbyists not criminals.
This is so fucking dumb. Anyone can Smith a gun at any hardware store.
Btw, this doesn’t include 3D-printer parts?
This is all politics is, convincing morons to vote for puppets of the ruling class.
Bauer-Kahan is a Democrat, if you wonder.
If the bill is passed, I’d be surprised if Newsom didn’t sign it.
I imagine it wouldn’t really be too difficult to design parts in a way that they would be completely inconspicuous until trimmed and assembled
I bet the code is cracked within the hour of every update from now until eternity. It’s like the shit physical locks we put on everything. Nothing but a display of safety.
or a 3D printer that doesn’t call the FBI
Wow a great bill to stop people from making weapons. Y’all gonna ban pipes and steel ball bearings next?
The fuck is our country coming to man.
I would like some regulation of middle aged men with beards 3D printing excessive numbers of Magic the Gathering characters.
Here’s the thing. This isn’t about banning weapons. It’s about controlling access to IPs and preventing right to repair.
A forcibly Internet connected online. Only 3D printer that has to first check a public database to see if it’s allowed to print the thing you just sent is most definitely going to be used to block you from printing parts to fix your appliances or devices.
And definitely going to be used to provide copyright protection and blocking to IPS of large corporations and companies.
Even if this bill was in good faith, I wouldn’t want it: I believe that the USA is headed into a civil war, and I want the good guys to have the ability to manufacture stuff if they need to. Be it guns or tractor parts, having flexible logistics will be invaluable. Not just for military use, but also for civilians who don’t have access to official parts.
In any case, the implementation of universal healthcare and UBI would be much more helpful for quelling violence. People who can have access to mental healthcare and with enough prosperity, are much less likely to become deranged enough to murder people. Measures like this, often exist to keep the peasants from being able to rise up against their overlords.
This thing is a product of malicious greed, not for the sake of good.
Mental health care is a challenge even in universal health countries. MH is very time intensive.
I guess that’d make open-source firmware illegal.
If you haven’t noticed open source is under attack. Hammer has been rising for a while.
edit: meaning FOSS
That’s just a happy by-product for them.
Just messaged my assembly member asking to vote against it. I suggest those who live in the state to do the same thing too.
Messaging your representatives is a waste of time and only exists to make you feel good about yourself.
The only way to fix problems like this is to vote for better reps, but we’re too stupid to do that so the problem doesn’t get solved.
Sorry, I’m just a guy from overseas trying to understand why, in a country where 1 out of 4 people possess weapons, the 3D printer is the problem. I mean, there are companies selling industrial-grade firearms—why the heck is the 3D printer the target?
See Luigi.
It’s not the gun, it’s gun makers worried about DIY gunsmithing. The politicians are just the bitches.
It’s not about firearms.
It’s about controlling what you can 3D print.
When your 3D printer has to connect to a third party service to check if it’s allowed to print what you just sent it. That’s a clear vector for companies to enforce IPs.
Printing a replacement part for your appliance? Sorry, they’re blocked.
Printing parts to repair part of your vehicle or snap something back on? Sorry, that’s banned.
Printing something that resembles the intellectual property of any other company? Sorry, that’s banned.
Can’t have you cutting into the profits of corporations by self-servicing and self-repairing.
Also a mass surveillance device to produce surveillance of what people are 3D printing and report it to a central authority.
Ok however its hard for me to believe that such measures could render effective. Regulating the tech literate people in such a way will always fail. The only effect it could have is that when its illegal to posses a unregistered/hacked you are an easier target for “law enforcement actions”
Because money. Firearms are everywhere in the US because of gun lobbyists. If citizens print their own guns then money is lost.
Because it doesn’t make money for Big War
Because it makes firearms available to people without having to jump through hoops the government can track, but they can make a machine that makes flexi-dragons into a boogyman, so they throw a “protect the children” in the bill and it automatically passes.
Because between them, the legislators don’t have two brain-cells to rub together and figure out why this is an un-enforceable bunch of bullshit.
Because it makes for a good distraction from actual problems that they don’t care to solve because those problems would require them to heavily tax millionaires and billionaires.
Because our government is run by old dumbasses.
Printing guns wouldn’t be a problem if you just make all bullets cost $5000.
Bullets are even easier to make than firearms.
The second amendment itself prevents ammunition from being marked out of people’s budget. Two, people could just reload their own bullets. Three, bullets are extremely cheap to manufacture and making them cost that much would be a scam on the levels of health insurance companies. Also, did you forget about what a certain bearded man said in 1898?
Damn that guy must’ve did something! They put $50,000 worth of bullets in his ass!
If they were smarter, which they are not, they would look to place restrictions on the slicer software. I doubt the printers even have the capability to recognize what is being printed. Most of them are like move left 3 steps, extrude .1mm of filament, move right 1 step…. yada yada yada.
This is just insanely dumb. They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
Slicers are open source so anyone can and will remove surveillance malware from it.
Require printers to check digital signatures on STL files and have only approved slicers add those
So we’re back to placing restrictions on the printers…
They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
That’s not surprising, that’s just what politicians do. Especially politicians who are 65+ years old and completely out of touch with technology.
I am reminded of a senator from Alaska trying to describe the internet as a series of tubes.
I mean…replace the word “tubes” with “cables” and it’s apparent it’s not completely wrong. he’s reasonably correct on an ELI5 level I would say.
That was way more accurate and intelligent than this. Like orders of magnitude.
Sen Ted Stevens, rest in piss.
“The internet would be a series of tubes if we rolled out fiber, but as the literal chairman of the Senate committee regulating the internet I’m somehow against that.”
Frankly it seems more like a mild inconvenience then actual prevention. I don’t really care how smart a software gets, it can’t predict and prevent all possible configurations of prints that could possibly be used to create functioning guns without being so overly restrictive that even perfectly innocent prints would get flagged constantly in which case they simple won’t sell to normal users.
It would be a constant game of whack a mole with new creative designs, using multiple printers or with non-printed parts in the design. But no hardware or software that a smart enough engineer has their hands on is impervious to mods either, especially if they’re motivated like someone seeking to produce firearms would be.
It’s an overreaching law that will likely solve little to nothing, but might make 3d printers in general a bit more annoying to work with. “Sorry, you can’t make your dice tower because there’s a 16 percent change that it could be capable of firing an RPG out of the dragon’s mouth. Please make your design at least 12 percent less gun-ish and try again.”
Wow. I hadn’t even thought about some of these ways around this. Excellent points!!
So in other words, what else is new?
The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.
It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.
Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
It seems they are rationally putting pressure upon those willing to own guns or 3d printers.
Like most of rifle shots fired in WWI didn’t kill anyone and were meant for suppression.
Making you afraid of everything that can be a legal trap. Thus possibly dropping the thought of even owning this or that thing.
I haven’t read the bill, but from the description I think you could actually get around this by building your own. They can’t sell a printer that doesn’t have this, and you can disable it, but it doesn’t say here that you can’t build your own that never had the software. In that case, I assume we’ll see kits that are totally not meant to be assembled into printers with all their parts you need, and then unrelated documentation online somewhere on how to assemble it.
I was just talking with a friend about the microstamping idea. I’d never heard of it before.
This is why politicians should be automatically retired at 65. We shouldn’t be allowing people who grew up without seatbelts to make any decisions involving technology.
FWIW, the person that proposed this legislation is 47: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Bauer-Kahan
Maybe have an exit poll, if they deserve retirement or must do community service to clean up the damage they have done…
This is a lost battle either way but a non-lost opportunity to acquire some power
They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
You’re surprised that law makers are trying to regulate things they know nothing about? Oh…oh I have like 2000 years worth of news for you…
Laws are much older than 2000 years. To be more specific, at least about double that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
Not surprised. Just frustrated.
