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.
Let’s entertain the thought. How would one identify what is a gun part being printed, and what is a tube, a mechanical latch, or whatever else. Heck, I printed a plastic replica of a movie prop once. Would that be illegal?
I mean, I’m not in the US, and I know how to drive three steppers according to a list of extremely basic instructions that never ever represent anything “final part-y” looking, but the question remains. How do we go from “lots of gcode” to “yep, that’s definitely illegal” without saying that everything is illegal?
Ever heard of the EURion constellation?
This is the same, just an additional dimension.
“Markus Kuhn, who uncovered the pattern on the 10-euro banknote in early 2002 while experimenting with a Xerox colour photocopier that refused to reproduce banknotes.[2] The pattern has never been mentioned officially; Kuhn named it the EURion constellation as it resembled the astronomical Orion constellation, and EUR is the ISO 4217 designation of the euro currency.[3]”
It would seem governments always poke into corporations for debatable “safety”. Even if they don’t say it.
You can of course build your own printer from stepper motors and belts. Good luck, see you in a year. Also 3d printing in general has improved lightyears, so it’s becoming a decent-sized corpo thing => tools becoming scrutinized by government vogons.
That’s… not applicable here. Like, at all. To reproduce a printed document, you input it. To make a 3D print, you produce tailored list of operations depending on many, many settings. Usually, the file that reach the printer have little in the way of knowing what is printed, aside from expensive reconstruction that would only give the general shape, if even that. And even if you can send actual 3D model files to a printer that would do the slicing locally, there’s no “absolutely required” fingerprint there. A tube is a tube.
And, just so you know, there’s a slew of public printers and scanners that will just plain not recognize any of this, too. There’s also some “protection” pattern in some official document; large office printers would choke on them, where a home scanner was fine. This is, at best, only enforceable in the flimsiest of ways.
Applicability is in the eye of the beholder… of bureaucracy.
It is not really enforceable what people grow in their nook with led lights, or what they produce with metal lathes and metalworking tools, or what they mix up with common chemicals, and yet!
With EURion, printers/scanners that are capable of somewhat convincing replica go into the “definitely need to do this thing” money bracket I guess.
Printer instructions are also usually quite convoluted (don’t event know if anybody really knows the actual format), but definitely it’s not the actual document being sent to a printer (except some last decade printers perhaps), just the actual dithered inkjet patterns, though I am heavily guesstimating. And yet, from inkjet patterns, the printer knows to crash, presumably, though I dont know, the knowledge of currency steganography seems spotty…
There is a semi-infinite amount of processing that can be done on the slicing machine, so detecting gun-like item is wildly possible. Making your own slicer is the same as making your own photoshop (or hacking it). I definitely don’t see 3d printers having enough horses to figure out a non-watermarked-model produced geocode to have gunlike things. But! We forget! With legislation, everything is possible. Probably will require any decent (especially things like metal) 3d printer to have an ISIC specifically programmed to rebuild a model from geocode and do analysis :D (Honestly, completely easy with current technology, MNIST 99.99% accuracy fits into 10k transistors or so)
But I guess this assumes same amount of know-how and confident skills that they had in 90s. It will probably all crash and burn and make all honest customers very unhappy.
Additional note: Since 2003, image editors such as Adobe Photoshop CS or PaintShop Pro 8 refuse to print banknotes. According to Wired.com, the banknote detection code in these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies such as Adobe as a binary module.[13]
Everybody with Photoshop / Paintshop pro literally has an unexplained (likely uninvestigated) government binary blob that might be a backdoor :D
That, the coming war against VPN in other states and countries, … Can’t we cut through all these baby steps and get straight to a 1984’s telscreen mandatory in all rooms?
Oh come on! Think about all the domestic violence’s victims!
Easy solution. Sell a separate “motion platform” and an “FDM module” as distinct products that basically snap together.
That’s basically what we used to do before big printer came in :D
You can build a weapon with common tools you find in any metal workshop.
Story time:
Right after the war my grandfather - a locksmith by profession - build a cap and ball revolver in his workshop just with the tools he had and scrap metal.
Wasn’t there a guy who built an AK-47 out of a shovel?
THAT is a story i would be very curious to hear… but if you look at the whole stuff that is build in some huts or caves in the middle east, lets just say i wouldn’t rule it out.
Private workshop are next on the chopping block, then. Totally feasible. /s
firearm blocking technology.
grep -r "gun"It’s very funny that people think they need a 3D printer to make a tube, a stock, and a trigger.
If you can make a rubber band gun, you’re 70% of the way to a working firearm. And it’ll be sturdier then extruded plastic.
Is what killed Abe
Fallout plays a comedic take on it, but I can very much see a gun being made out of iron pipe and a shovel handle.
You can make a slam fire shotgun with 2 galvanized pipes and a roofing nail
It seems like that should be invalidated as a law? Like it would be if the feds pre-empted it.
But the courts have previously ruled that you can’t illegalize dual use devices that have legitimate legal uses and possible illegal ones, as they tried to do with CD burners back in the day for the record companies, may they burn in hell.
Not sure that would apply?
If it involves firearms then the law, constitution and existing precedent mean nothing to the 9th Circuit of Appeals. When it comes to guns, no right is too important to not invalidate to prevent guns.
Sooooo you want to stop gun violence in the US so your first instinct is to fuck over 3D printers because gun violence is okay as long as the guns are bought from the normal vendors?
This paw isn’t about lowering gun violence, this is something pushed to protect the gun manufacturers
The 3D printing lobby isn’t as big as the NRA.
I don’t think it has anything to do with gun manufacturers, or gun violence. Someone who wants to shoot something is going to find a way.
I’m betting it’s pressure from AI companies. “We need to find a use for this product soon or we’ll lose social permission” or whatever Mr. Microsoft said the other day. And suddenly a couple of states that have big AI companies in them propose legislation that could only be answered by large amounts of machine learning power.
This isn’t in reaction to some shooting with a 3D printed gun, is it? I’d have heard about that, the America Bad crowd here on Lemmy wouldn’t have passed up a chance to blast that from the rooftops if it had happened. School shootings have faded into the background; that’s not “newsworthy” anymore because it’s become normal. A shooting with a 3D printed gun would have made headlines, and it hasn’t. Until we all got used to it and moved our attention elsewhere, there would be a shooting, the 24 hour tabloids would broadcast a liberal arts major’s understanding of the firearms used, the bleeding heart left would call for a ban on those specific kinds of guns, the childrape right would call them retards for getting the technical details extremely wrong, a governor 3 states away would sign a ban on bayonet lugs and collapsible stocks on rifles, in time for someone to shoot up an army base with a pistol. If a 3D printed gun shooting had happened, you could get another round of that cycle going.
That’s not what happened though. So what did?
Because it’s not about stopping gun violence, it’s about ensuring the state has the final say over who gets a firearm, and keeps them out of the hands of people who might genuinely need them for self and community defense by any means possible
Nope, it is about competition with the firearms industry.
Sorry but no. That is ik no way a competitor to regular manufactures. That is like building a soap box car and thinking Chrysler is gonna sue you.
3d printed guns are interesting because they can be made to not trigger metal detectors. Iirc the models I have seen were single use only. Don’t think accuracy is great either.
You are simply wrong, this legislation is being pushed by gun manufacturers.
Do you have any information such as sources You could point me to?
I have been looking into it. It is a combination of WIPO (which is a trade organization promoted by corporations that are against 3D printing in general) and Billionaire Bloomberg’s Everytown.
There are some other notable players as well but these are the two main forces. At first glance Everytown seems like a sensible organization. As I dig deeper it appears they want to counter balance the NRA, but they are not anti-gun at all.
This leads me to believe that they are just an alternative NRA (which has been used as a tool to increase gun sales for years).
I will keep on researching it.
That sounds like you are on it! Let us know where land.
So far this is nothing id consider as evidence but as plausible speculation. Not necessarily wrong but … It’s not enough for me to put my money on it.
This
They know they can’t take the gun industry head on, so they chip at the margins. They figure hobbyists aren’t numerous enough to fight back, while the real gun owners shrug.
I honestly wonder if this might be held unconstitutional if challenged.
Can have the military complex lose money.
How does this “firearm blocking technology” even work? How does a 3d printer id whatever code the slicer sends it as a gun part?
The only possible way I can think of to make this work is require the firmware to only be able to print G-code files that have a cryptographic signature from some central slicing authority that users submit models to, which then analyzes the STL file with AI or some shit for approval. The only technology that can remotely go “is this STL file a piece of a gun?” is machine learning. You’re outright not going to get that done on the 3D printer locally; you’d have to increase the processing power of a 3D printer control board from “microcontroller” to “GPU” entirely for this dumbass tech. Maybe you’d run that on the user’s PC but PCs aren’t for sale to the public anymore so it will be done in the cloud.
It occurs to me that these initiatives are all popping up on the West coast where Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are based. The other day the CEO of Microsoft came out and said “We’re going to have to figure out something for our bullshit tech to actually do before the unwashed masses riot.” and what do you know, a couple states that are home to large AI firms start proposing legislation that can practically only be answered by AI out of the blue.
Yeah it seems like this is an excuse to implement complete surveillance of these machines under the guise of preventing guns, just like child abuse is used to justify age checks and chatcontrol to id everyone with id and biometrics and connect them to everything they say or do, in person and online, and make secret social scores, Palantir making those scores at that, the one that wants to use drones to spray people he doesn’t like, like his critics, with fentanyl, by his own words.
Every addition of spying by the government is accompanied by giving more spying power, and commercial value, to tech companies as well. They are co conspirators.
They upload the following meme to everyone’s printer and call it a day:
From what I’ve heard, it’s like inkjet printers and a signature. Add a squiggle along the inevitable seam that is on the print. Each squiggle is different, and it may even skip every three layers or so.
But it’s not about signing the weapons but about blocking the weapon even being printed. Also, 3d printers are a lot more prone to failures and not holding the exact line.
Banning guns is so easy. But dealing with the systemic problems that lead people to guns who definitely should t have them seems impossible to grasp.
Ban spears, knives, pipes, cars, fertilizer, aluminum, bows, blowguns, poison, fists.
Or, just run a decent society where nobody feels opressed, and has no desire to lash out.
Tax the billionaires out of their billions, or put a tight leash on everyone to allow the billionaires to become trillionaires. Which is it?
Let’s not forget how Gavin Newsom vetoed universal healthcare in California. Also, Gavin Newsom gave prepaid phones to a bunch of CEOs and told them to call him if the CEOs need anything. Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/18/newsom-ceos-burner-phones-00235044
They will need to ban breathing while poor soon the way they are going.
Can’t ban your way out of the greatest wealth inequality since the Great Depression. But they will try, won’t they?
Banning anything is easy. Enforcement is hard.
When you’re next door to Arizona - regularly in the top five more prodigious gun manufacturing states - it seems absurd to worry about weapons made out of extruded plastic. Ruger & Company is going to do a better job
Jokes on them. I already block my printer from talking outside the LAN.
printers can literally be built with dumb electronics, some pieces of metal and an arduino.
juat saying.
Funny enough, guns can be made from a handful of hardware store parts.
there it is. yes, and you guys have a constitutional right to bear arms, with an infinity of them already in circulation.
That didn’t work well for that doctor that was murdered by ICE.
hardware store parts didn’t work out so well for Shinzo Abe too.
Not personally. But Sanae Takaichi was Abe’s ideological successor. Now she’s right back in the PM with an enormous majority.
You can doohickey the man, but you can’t doohickey the movement.
Very frustrating to see people confuse Gun Ownership with Being Bulletproof.
As though you’re going to quick draw on the entire LASD, at which point they’ll all just tip their hats and proclaim “this person has constitutional rights, we will leave peacefully and not bother you again”.
But he didn’t draw on them, it was in it’s holster, they removed it from his holster, then murdered him
But he didn’t draw on them
Because he was rushing to help one of his neighbors recover from tear gas. Which is what an EMT is trained to do.
they removed it from his holster, then murdered him
As they were trained to do
that’s because usians have the illusion they live in a democracy and that weapons are a right instead of a duty.
the fact they can have a weapon doesn’t mean the regime will take lightly to dissidents, just that they can in fact have them for now. fascists certainly have them, that’s for sure.
and historical figures or whatever said this was gonna happen and shit.
My main printer up until last month was powered by an Arduino Mega. Like not even an “Arduino-compatible ATMEGA 2560-based 3D printer control board” an Arduino Mega, with the infinity ± logo. Reprap style.
my current printer is powered by an arduino mega, and it’s staying that way while i can. the best appliances are the ones you can control and replace yourself if you need to. 😉
all parts you can find at a hardware store + some 3d printed pieces. repraps and foss printers are the best period.
I am the owner of a brand new Prusa MK4S. A lot of its components aren’t open source, but it’s an i3, I can keep it running, and I can hit its wifi module with a hammer if I want to.
Are you suggesting ghost printers? Lol
i’m suggesting regular, non-enshitified printers.
Until they make that illegal.
oh, i would bet on it.
i wanna see them try to enforce it though.
Well the answer is banning Arduinos, obviously 🧐
Someone more eloquent than I am needs to craft a compelling argument that this violates the 2nd amendment.
It also violates the first and fourth. And it does nothing about gun violence.
It’s also impossible to actually implement and is no more than one more privacy violation to add to the pile.
Any proper printer should work offline.
Any normal printer doesn’t have nearly enough processing power to run analysis on bgcode/instruction files (it’s nor needed for normal operation).Good luck idiot lawmakers
Knowing the internet, I also assume that a custom firmware or some other workaround would be released in about a week anyway, making the whole thing utterly pointless.
This is what I’m talking about. We are stating to get to a cojent argument that I can call my representatives with and bitch them out, politely.
Am a Californian by choice.
this violates the 2nd amendment
This is going to make life hard for hobbyists not criminals.
Silly woman who proposed that bill, if passed the law will only create a black market for 3D printers.
And largely unenforceable. Like, it can only really block the sale of prebuilt, proprietary crap like Bamboo, but most of these things are built out of common parts that are used for a verity of applications and there are countless completely open source printers you can just built from sourced parts that this literally cannot apply to.
Even for most of the prebuilt or kits you get you put open source firmware on it. They can boot lock the board that comes with it, technically, but the board is easy enough to replace on most printers and it’s a standard micro controller and/or raspberry pi nowadays.
Half the time people who get those kits end up replacing various components to customize for their use case. I have a Sovol SV08 that I put stock Klipper on and want to do the multi-print-head mod someday. I’ve even considered replacing the main board with a more powerful one so I can run higher microsteps without overloading the processor.
I had 3 printers (long story), but sold 2 and kept one, an Ender 5 plus. Of the original printer, there is the frame, a couple motors, the electronics case, and little more. Its now an Endorphin, direct drive sherpa mini, rails, Hybrid coreXY, Octopus Max board, Pi with Klipper… Anyone can take measurements, and make themselves one of these, or a Voron, or a VZbot, or… Good luck, California.
The abject retardation spirals off infinitely in all directions like the blades of the time knife. I mean, just out of my own twisted head:
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they’re talking about making it illegal to traffic 3D printers that don’t have a “certified gun detection algorithm.” Okay, what part of the 3D printer are you going to control? Hot ends? Control boards? 3D printers don’t have lower receivers. If I were to disassemble my Prusa MK4S back into the ~1000 weird shaped hunks of plastic, metal plates and sticks, wires, circuit boards, nuts and bolts it came in as a kit, and then drive through California, which exact piece am I going to be arrested for carrying?
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I can’t wait until someone Man With The Golden Gun’s one of thes “certified algorithms”, prints stuff that looks like cabinet hooks, musical instruments, a walkie-talkie case, a toy dinosaur, which clip together in a certain way to make a functioning weapon. I’ve never 3D printed a gun before, this might just get me into it.
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Wow…they got us, no way we can print an STL from a USB stick.
They are banning USB sticks next
Imagine the processing power needed to analyse bgcode for gun or gun part-like shapes!
Not to mention it’s easier to make a pipe gun than to learn 3d printingI want to see someone 3D print me some gunpowder.
