It absolutely won't do that. You know how many millions of early generation Prusa and Ender 3 printers are in the US? Many of these models have no internet connectivity whatsoever and print from SD card.

What that means is they will also try to incorporate spyware into your CAD and/or slicer software, which is even more invasive.

This is a anti-privacy bill.

It's like making a normal printer that's mandated by the government to never print dicks

It absolutely will not stop some people. But those are not the ones committing gun crimes

No, it won't.

I suppose they don't care because the purpose of the laws is not to prevent the printing of guns, that's only the justification.

It’s to neutralize “right to repair” work.

It's funny, I live in a country with very few privately owned guns, where ammo is tracked and everything.

No 3d printed gun murders have taken place here. Why would they happen in the US where anyone can just get a real gun?

Not nearly as much of a problem as real guns that's for goddamn sure.

3D printing working, safe-to-handle and durable guns is a pretty complicated technical problem. Don't need to be a genius to figure out that making 100% plastic guns is asking for trouble. Tiny explosion = big plastic cracky.

Meanwhile, any monkey can bash together pieces of scrap metal and produce a durable gun that way. And that was a thing long, long before 3D printers existed.

Someone played Watch Dogs and got a-scared.

No. It's made up nonsense, like 99% of justifications for gun laws. The people writing the laws are rarely actually knowledgeable on the subject they're writing legislation for.

iirc some of the parts you need like the lower are considered guns, but your point still stands. the last paragraph, i mean. it’d just surveillance state horseshit with the added benefit of protecting corporate profits in an industry that was developed with public funds and innovation.

Please stop conflating Democrats with "the left."

Democrats are centrists or even center-right. Actual leftists tend to be just as gun-happy as conservatives. Both for protection from those conservatives, and because Marx was pretty explicit about the proletariat needing to revolt.

Are we going to start fitting [CNC lathes and mills] with “you might be making a gun” detectors, too? Of course not.

I've got some bad news for you about just how fucked-up these proposed laws actually are.

I'm pretty sure the law says any machine that takes sets of automated instructions, which includes CNC cutters and lathes

You absolutely need to know how to use any machine tool. You can't just download a file to a CNC mill and have it spit out a gun. I worked as a machinist when I was in college, it takes a lot of skill and talent to setup a CNC to make parts.

Uhhh nope. Palantir said so

They'll get there. They hate the idea of individual people being able to make things for themselves or having any other escape from consumer serfdom.

Guns are extremely simple devices. It's not something you can solve with 3d printing legislation... It's just people giving lip service to gun control IMO.

If you know how to 3d print a gun, you can easily find out how to make a zip gun with a bit of pipe, the kind you'd probably need to 3d print a "ghost gun" regardless.

Like ffs I saw a YouTube video or a dude getting two pieces of pipe, closing one end and putting a nail in it, then making a one shot shotgun out of cheap fucking material. You just need closed space and to hit the end of the fucking bullet. Guns are not magic. They're simple as fuck, and hard to regulate partially because of how simple they are.

These laws are probably more for surveillance than preventing ghost guns.

https://armamentresearch.com/luty-sub-machine-guns-past-present-future/

Famous examples that don't use 3d printing, the Luty guns he made as a crypto anarchist psycho trying to disseminate open source plans lol. The knowledge is very easily accessible.

Not a major problem AND going after 3D printing doesn't actually solve the problem - the core components that make a gun a gun, such as the barrel, firing pin, etc., still need to be manufactured in the "traditional" way (unless you're trying to make a single use, one shot gun, but even that has better alternatives than 3D printing).

As it's been pointed out above, the pieces of equipment - lathes, mills, CNC machines - required to make the aforementioned parts require no licencing, no safety mechanisms to prevent gun part manufacturing.

It's not a problem. "Ghost gun" refers to any gun without a serial number, whether it was manufactured without one or simply scratched off. Even under that exceedingly broad definition, these unserialized firearms represent less than 0.1% of all guns in existence.

3D printers aren't the only way to make a gun. Traditional tooling also works.

Manufacturing guns for personal use is completely legal in most US jurisdictions.

It's already illegal to manufacture and distribute or sell guns without a license.

"Ghost guns" are a boogeyman invented to sell more surveillance.

Shit, just browse makerlab.com and you’ll find all sorts of gun parts!

Know you're local laws. It IS illegal to 3d print guns in NY amd CA already.