Anywhere in public is great. If you're in a place where ICE is less active, you'll want to package the whistles with instructions to alert the local rapid response hotline.

Which STL do you prefer?

A lot of small coffee shops will allow them in their bulletin board area

Good luck adding drm to a microwave to prevent it from microwaving "fish and fish adjacent shapes". 3d printers consist of a couple of motors and a hot bit. No computer in there, unless you go for the high end stuff and even then they can't run that sort of software. MCUs are clocked in MHz, but even a 10 year old computer is clocked in GHz. Even with a cloud connections, how much money have companies poured into "AI" only to have it still get things wrong? Do lawmakers expect a podunk garage team to figure out what Google, Meta, Apple, and literal billions of R&D haven't?

Since this is effectively a ban, it would result in "healthcare CEO shot by wooden ghost gun" if gun kits are still sold, because 3d printers don't print guns. They print the "lower" that has the serial number, which is legally, but not practically, defined to be the "gun". Any gun that doesn't have a serial is a ghost gun, but the point is moot.

More realistically, it would result in: "healthcare CEO shot by a 2026 special edition 9mm VEHHFU746582 on sale for 1984$, get it before it is banned" because for some reason the legislature is running on rich people feelings, and this shooting is special because of the gun, and not because of EVERYTHING ELSE.

Not super into guns but I'm a bit frustrated with the technical ineptitude of some of these lawmakers. Gun control existed before 3d printers did, this is just half assed. Feel free to correct me if I missed something.

If I understand correctly, this affects 3d printers that can read STL. What if someone, hypothetically, uses an open source slicer, like Orca, and print from gcode?

IIRC that's only potentially going to be a law in Washington state (for now). It's not really enforceable. It's a law made by people who don't know what they're talking about. My printers and my slicers are blocked from communicating outside my local network. Once shape-blocking firmware gets pushed people will just revert back to the previous firmware version.

Whatever people in power try to stir up about this, it's literally impossible to legislate and block shapes from being 3D-printed. Any attempts to do so are a fool's errand, and/or just being used to justify misguided (and doomed) attempts to lock down 3DP technology for other reasons (read DRM/copyright forces in big business.) Blocking parts that might be for a gun from being printed simply cannot be done.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/04/what-a-load-of-filament-the-case-against-3d-printer-gun-detection/

https://michaelweinberg.org/blog/2026/02/04/3d-printer-gun-screen/

Yeah, these laws are incredibly invasive, and potentially crippling to smaller manufacturing operations.

Wow! No sovereign citizen is advocating for this!

We always have to remember: There are a LOT more of us than them. These whistles help us remember that.

a whistle won't stop these goons from harming you.

No it will not, but it will alert everyone around you to ICEs presence so they can have an opportunity to be somewhat prepared.

You'll at least give your neighbours a chance to put some pants on, hide, barricade, or even arm themselves; before ICE tries to kick in their door.

It also calls others to your aid; quickly forming mob that out numbers ICE, forcing them to focus on crowd control instead of targeted kidnapping.

You both make good points, but prevention is better than de-escalation or alerting. Being known as protected is a preventative measure.

Of course alarms/monitoring and response (de-escalation) are very important. But stopping it before it starts should get attention as well.

Intentional deescalation does more right now than having the people closest to ICE or Border Patrol agents carrying weapons.

The standard for now is that responders with guns stay back to deter massacres.

What is bpp?

If you really want to fight back, learn from the Mexican cartels and Islamic insurgencies.

We have data on what works.

Ironic. If you want to reduce crime, invite the Black Panthers to keep the ICE Apes away.

Printing isn't enough, but it's a piece of what needs to happen.

They take forever to print and use a lot of filament.

They're printing liberty ships, not cruise ships.

Article isn't paywalled for me. Headline is ok. 3d printing a whistle supposedly costs under 5 cents. OTOH, that type of plastic might be less safe to put in your mouth.

That’s weird, it shows up as a gifted article for me

Its a gift link. Unless you're doing something fairly uncommon, like removing the gift token, access is free. You can also use one of the various archive sites

Its hard to import them in quantities of a few hundred thousand, and cheaper to print them than to buy in quantities of a hundred

• Customizability (hotline numbers, etc)
• Independence from billionaire-owned supply chains
• Encourages and strengthens local support networks

Because 3D printer owners not only get to feel validated about owning a 3D printer, but also get to help the community during these harsh times.

There's a lot of people saying here that it's cheaper to 3D print. It is not. Even if the claim of 5 cents a 3D printed whistle is true, and I don't really believe it, it's not hard to find bulk plastic whistles with the price dropping as low as 2 cents per unit.

Why buy one when a superior one can be 3d printed? Hard to stop people from printing them. I've printed thousands over the years. I'm unfamiliar with the one shown in the article. The ones I print are very loud but probably take more time than those to print per unit.