This first bill allows the state of California to regulate and oversee all 3D prints in the name of public safety.
What does this accomplish?
In the USA it’s easier to buy an ar-15 than configuring a multi material 3d printer to print a fidget spinner
And btw if someone really needs to 3d print a weapon they would CNC a receiver from a metal block using a $500 AliExpress contraption rather than making a single use plastic thingy that will probably amputate your fingers at first shot
What does this accomplish?
Spies on people who are printing large quantities of whistles.
This is America, wouldn’t it be easier just to buy a gun? I get that 3D printers can make ghost guns that aren’t traceable but how many crimes have occurred where that is the murder weapon?
One CEO. More important than every dead schoolchild.
They asked about crimes.
Agreed. Every time I’ve looked into printing one I look at the process and just buy it. All the ghost guns I’ve made were from hollowed-out 80% lowers. And one time a hardware store slamfire shotgun.
I fully support one’s right to print a gat, but it sure ain’t for me.
Thats the neat part: they can make weapons the same way I can theoretically make a bomb from enriched uranium in my backyard.
Proposal: All elected officials must install Corruption Blocking Software that scans all their communications, financial records and assets, and uses advanced Corruption Pattern Matching Algorithms to determine if they might be taking bribes from industry lobbyists, pumping up their own investments, or secretly serving special interest groups, or if they’re just general nutjobs.
Honestly though… What’s the process for a regular idiot to try and suggest or propose new bills? I think I’d like to actually propose such a bill
That’s what “representative government” is all about. I’ve never tried to do this but theoretically you could write to your representative or senator and try to impress them with your idea. You’d probably get more traction by starting local with a city or town ordinance, or by creating a campaign on social media and in person - rally an impressive number of people to stand around city hall with signs requesting/demanding this kind of action, get noticed on news media, and build it into a credible movement. In many states citizens who collect enough signatures can place proposed legislation on ballots during regular elections.
Why stop at elected officials any company has to do this. If they can infringe our rights why not make sure everyone has their rights taken away.
Why are they so scared of us that they must enslave us?
Because we could fuck up their shit pretty easily with just the slightest mass motivation.
So…maybe let’s get some of that, before we can’t.
Okay, I’ll meet you there! I’m sure everyone else will also show up after seeing this exchange. Let’s gooooooo! This is iiiiiit!
We need to organize a group that can show tangible benefits to its members for joining.
And retain member engagement when it’s inevitably attacked and it costs members something to continue.
It’s also pretty much a technical impossibility if you know anything about 3D printers.
3D printers can’t read CAD. They aren’t fed STLs or any other kind of 3D model. They’re fed G-Code, which contains no geometrical details. It’s a list of instructions saying “turn these 4 motors this speed this for this amount of time while heating that part to this temperature and turning this other motor this speed, then heat this part while tunlrning that motor that fast…” with hundreds or thousands of instructions, and then new instructions for the next layer.
In order to print a model, you first have to run it through a program called a slicer that generates that G-code by slicing it into layers with instructions for how to move, heat and cool the nozzle, build plate, and chamber, feed the filament, etc.
The printers just follow those instructions with minimal on-board processing and zero information regarding the final model’s structure.
to comply, vendors would need to require printers sold in california to be locked (presumably by encryption) to a proprietary slicer with ai vision that could try to determine if the thing being printed looked like a gun. Maybe if there was a bullet sized barrel and access around the striker area.
Makerbot more or less did this. It was a pain in the ass to use a non-makerbot-desktop slicer with a 2/2x series.
But that actually wouldn’t meet the law. The law requires the printer to do the check.
The software becomes part of the printer. They are linked in a way that one cannot operate without the other.
I didn’t say the law was well written, I find the the most likely way to comply.
I wouldn’t be that hard to read the g-code and reconstruct the model programatically checking for bores and firing pin access, feed that data into a model with some RAG about internal gun dimensions, but the printers are generally too underpowered to do such a calculation.
it’s all a fools errand really, guns can be made out of a handfull of hardware store parts and a drill.
Those instructions can be translated into the final product. It isn’t hard when you know what each instruction produces…
It’s pretty hard when you have to also account for extra printing to conceal the item. You can render a result, but if it just looks like a box with convenient breakaway pieces that snap to leave behind just the part, you’ll need some more complex work than simple pattern matching. And even then each piece of a gun isn’t a really a unique shape only used for firearms.
Assuming there is extra printing. That wastes resources and your iterative designs are also captured in sequence, which reveals the direction of your efforts.
Right, but it’s not something the printer does at all right now, I assume. Someone gives me Russian text to retype, I retype the letters, but I don’t speak Russian so I can’t be meaningfully asked to specifically not retype anything about highway design.
True but if you’re an organization tasked with spying of what ppl to make sure they aren’t innovating, or whatever, it isn’t hard to setup, it being in gcode isn’t a big hurdle here.
But the most popular brand right now forces server interaction.
Only if you want to use cloud printing. I print on my A1 using Orca all the time.
Speaking as someone that knows basically nothing about 3d printing (though has done similar with CNC), do you think it’d be possible to reverse-engineer the code in some way? I’m thinking something like a simulated 3d printer 🤷♀️
You can, sure. but then you have a new file that is entirely distinct from the original model (as far as computer hashing is concerned). So you have to do several steps to legally comply with this:
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Receive gcode file
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use costly ai to convert the gcode to a 3d model.
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use costly ai to try to figure out what the 3d model is.
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do all of this either via a remote connection, or on a processor weaker than the median game console from the 1990s.
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repeat for every single attempted print, which can be several dozen per completed product depending on how annoying the calibration was that day
So if you’re a 3d printing business you now have to have your own data center basically dedicated to the tens of millions of potential prints you’re going to receive, because it’s near impossible to fingerprint g-code as it’s dynamically generated from each different CAD software differently based on thousands of settings.
Essentially any 3d printer manufacturer is going to just say “not for use in california” instead of paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to try to comply with this.
I don’t think you would have to use AI to convert gcode into a 3d model. The way I would approach it is basically run the gcode and take all the 3-D coordinates you get for where to print, then maybe run it through a filter or some such to extract just the outermost wall passes for each layer. Stack those up, do some sort of automated linking to create your triangles, and ship it off to the recognition AI.
it’s possible you could run that on a printer processor but unlikely.
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there are many open sourced software applications than can produce G-Code for any printer. All of it can be done offline.
I’m sorry you can’t print a garden hose nozzle because AI thinks it is a gun.
I’m sorry you can’t print a caulking gun because AI thinks it is a gun.
I’m sorry you can’t print a water pistol because it’s a gun.
I have a stupid glock fidget toy that would almost certainly set this thing off. God forbid I make myself a toy.
I read the article and what a load of shit. So you can’t 3D print a cosplay gun? How far will this go? Water pistols? Ray gun props? Children’s toys. Plastic guns are not illegal, just certain ones.
If I lived in California, I think I would invest in a really good 3d printer now-ish and just never update the software. Big brother is watching everything.
Guns are just a weak excuse, as if it’s hard to get a gun in the US.
They want to monitor what you print. This means trademarked toys and figures, or copies of parts used in self-repair projects. The next stage is to charge fees to print copyright, or patented objects, or parts to repair. This also means they can spy on your designs and intellectual property.
It’s almost like governments of all sizes have been captured by companies and now protect them against the evil consumer which is completely backwards to what governmental organizations were originally created for.
My favorite irony of all of this is that it’s very possible to build a 3D printer from scratch (hell that’s how the hobby got started in the first place) with open source software that never talks to the Internet. It’s more work, but not to the extent that it’d stop anybody determined.
Sure, one of the best printers is a Voron. People build those all of the time.
They really must take every single last one source of joy from everyone who hasn’t turned into sheep at this point.
Same California that is supposedly against the federal government’s assaults on people’s rights and freedoms…?
Same California governor that wants to run for president to end fascism in the country…?
The real fascists are usually the ones calling everyone else fascists, as that in itself is a means of control.
It’s two right wing parties who are both heavily engaged in fascism. The average American democrat is right wing by the European standards.
Can’t regulate the parts as they are used in many many many devices. So as far as I’m concerned this is worthless. I can build a fucking 3d printer from an old VCR and a hot glue gun.
my interest is who is PAYING to fund the bill, i wouldnt be surprised if its gun companies or palantir.
You can, but 90% 3D printer buyers can’t, and that’s a good enough amount of people to spy on.
90%?
More like 99.999%
Including op.
There’s a difference between building a pile of crap and actually building something that works effectively. It’s a difficult hardware and software problem.
https://www.reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
The work has all been done long time ago.
The designs and software are all open source at this point.
exactly but that’s also good fuel to defeat the bill.
Under the proposal, printers would have to evaluate STL files, CAD files, or other geometric code using a firearm blueprint detection algorithm and block files flagged as capable of producing a firearm or illegal firearm parts, including conversion devices.
California’s Department of Justice, or another relevant state agency, would have until January 1, 2028, to publish performance standards for detection algorithms and software control processes.
This is the problem when lawmakers write technical bills without speaking to technical people. They’re going to publish standards for evaluating if your gcode is a firearm or firearm part? THAT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
It’s not even that, building a firearm…is legal…this shit going after printers makes no sense at all, it’s fucking legal to print firearm parts.
That’s the point. This is just a foot in the door to block your access to print things that might be trademarked copyrighted or affiliated with your corporate overlords.
And a foot in the door to start blocking your right to repair your own things.
Guaranteed.
BANNED
I bet they end up using a fucking llm
Yes that’s probably how you would do this. Get a bunch of data of gcode of 3d printed gun parts and not-gun parts, for different slicers and printers. Then train some transformer as a classifier. Based on how good object recognition is, i would say its possible that you would get reasonably good accuracy and precision. And because you are scanning for code the architecture will likely be similar to an llm.
Then five minutes later, someone figures out how to make a 3d printable gun that bypasses the gun detector on the 3d printer. It’s not like you’re printing a whole gun; you’re printing parts, most of which look nothing like a gun. How hard would it be to design an algorithm that takes a gun part cad file and then adds a bunch of extraneous pieces to it that can be easily removed? Just keep adding extra crap until the system no longer detects it as a gun part.
Yes that would probably work. There could be some essential features of weapon parts that an algorithm might still be able to learn, and a printer could also keep track of previously printed parts for the classification. I think its unlikely that there are essential features of gun parts that are specific to gun parts so there would probably be a lot of false positives.
just rotate the piece at different angles on the plate, which would change the positions of vertexes and generate an unrecognizable set of printer head instructions. No extra pieces necessary; and even if there were, there’s no need for them to be printed attached to the main part.
Isleepinahammocks idea would probably work. But rotation and translation would not. Thats something you can easily take care of in your training data, by reusing the same training data in multiple random positions and random angles.
are you familiar with 3d printing? The print head’s instructions will be completely different if you rotate the model. Unrecognizably different.
Cosplayers are going to be pissed.
That’s a whole section on OnlyFans
The controller in my printer that was manufactured at mininum cost can’t “analyze a part using an algorithm”. Do they think it has any decent computational power?
Yes they have no idea what they are asking. Stl is just gcode how do you look for a gun out of coordinates.
Kinda, render a few images from the gcode, use a CV algorithm to identify the object.
On device it’ll be slow or expensive.
Define gun is a lot harder then you think. For example
or
I know, but they want a solution implemented, that’s a solution.
Ah yes. Another passive asshole that codes this type of thing and goes home without even batting an eye because I got mine before someone else did.
Big assumptions
Its just either completly ineffective, or effectively bans 3d printing. Then you are going to run into enforcement, and legal challenges. Oh and even if all that is done guns will still be present at a ratio above 1:1 in the states.
Anyone who has a highschool level of metal shop can also make a firearm, 3d printing is not even well suited for the task. Just look at Japan, one of if not the most restricted nation for firearms, and someone shot a leader with a homemade firearm.
Your faith in this mystery algorithm is stronger than mine. Here’s a diagram of the parts in an AR-15:
So we need an algorithm that renders the gcode I’m printing, then compares it to… something?
Look, I was just saying, it could be done, train it on current real and 3d printable gun parts and there, you did your best to create algorithmic gun filtering. I wasn’t saying that it would be good or accurate.
The algos don’t need to deny any or every part of a gun, but the most critical part must not be printable and it’ll already be effective.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist for a gun, but I suspect there’s a few very important pieces that need to be printed a certain way or the firearm falls apart or is at least a lot less useful.
All that said, I’m generally against such limiting mechanism in any printer or compiler. Try close sourcing all compilers so they can’t create malware? Forget it.
3D printed gun designs these days don’t even use plastic for most of the critical parts. The goal is to print a frame, which you can then assemble into a full gun using durable off-the-shelf parts that are available from any hardware store. No need to 3D print a bolt (and deal with all of the manufacturing issues that entails) when you can just buy a bolt for 5¢ at any hardware store. Especially when that bolt will be more precise and durable than the plastic bolt you would have printed.
It’s the old carpentry idea that if you can’t get precision by hand, you can borrow it from something else. Need to cut a bunch of identical boards, with precision in 64ths of an inch? A #8-32 bolt will have 32 threads per inch. So a half turn on the bolt will advance or retract the bolt 1/64 inches, accurate down to whatever the bolt manufacturer’s clearance is. Probably a few thousands of an inch. Build a jig to hold your boards at the saw, and thread a bolt into the jig to act as the board stop. Now you can turn the bolt to adjust your clearance as needed, and you’ll be accurate down to 1/64 by only making half turns each time.
And 3D printed guns use the same concept. You don’t print a plastic barrel that will explode after two or three shots, you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe to fit into the frame. The pipe will be more durable and more precise than anything you could feasibly print. You don’t need to 3D print a firing pin that will blunt/shatter/jam after a few uses, when you can just use a steel nail that will have better durability and avoid jamming. And all of the parts you need can be bought at a hardware store without raising any suspicions. That’s part of what makes this so dumb. They’re not just requiring printers to scan for potential gun parts. They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts. And that is a much broader spectrum than simply scanning for the shapes of the parts directly.
you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe
So you’re saying the answer is to scan for voids! Thanks for your technical input
- your congressman, probably
They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts.
It’s worth explicitly noting that this effectively bans 3D printing entirely. The whole point of this law is to be able to charge owners of 3D printers with a crime. Real useful if they find out some anti-zionist protestor has a 3d printer in their garage. Can’t get ya on the free speech thing, but they can get you on the owning a non-compliant 3d printer thing.
For the rightoids out there, replace anti-zionist protest with anti-abortion protest. Or any other speech the government doesn’t like. This exists for the sole purpose of punishing innocent people.
That makes a lot of sense. If the print just holds the critical parts, forget it.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing
Unfortunately that’s the crux of the issue. The people who have written and signed this bill aren’t either - and they weren’t as big of a person as you to recognize that.
At the end of the day, 3D printing gcode is telling your printer to spit out a shape. And you simply cannot ban shapes. Am I printing a firing pin or a part for my shoe rack? There’s no way to tell. Any politician that’s telling you there is is either ignorant or lying to you.
Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and “draw” the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.
And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as “gun parts”… The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.
You’re gonna hate this, but… AI can literally do it, and for the large models it’s terrifying how accurate they are. You will argue that your little ESP32 powered reprap or klipper or whatever printer can’t handle it, to which regulators will go ok then, either the printer has to call out to a service with an http request to upload the gcode every time it wants to print anything, or your slicer has to do it (and we dont care that it’s open source, it’s illegal to operate if it doesnt make the call and you’re getting fines or jail time if you get caught).
This is what AI was built for 😟
EDIT:
In case it isn’t abundantly clear, I am not in favor of what I just described. I know that it is possible though and know how to architect exactly these mechanisms. If I can build them, so can they. (I won’t, of course, that goes against everything I stand for).
Those cheap printers that don’t have onboard hardware to do this also generally don’t have any networking either. You’re lucky if you can get them to connect to a computer with USB - most of the print jobs exclusively get sent via a physical SD card.
The slicer is in a better position to do this draconian business, but they aren’t aiming this bill (from what I have found) at slicers at all (probably because they are all open source and, unless the law gets passed world-wide, they would just get forked and hosted by someone else in a place where they are still legal to be “dumb”). They are aiming at hardware. It is effectively a complete ban on cheap 3d printers, and turns the models “legal” to sell to a white-list style of control. The manufacturers that play ball get to continue business in the state, others do not.
All of this to stop a very tiny and difficult avenue for someone to get a gun, when there are much easier and more reliable options available and being used orders of magnitude more often. This has nothing to do with gun control, or guns. This is absolutely a play against 3d printing, at home manufacturing, and right to repair in general. The end goal is DMCA on 3d printing.
AI cannot be made to recognize whether a piece of gcode is intended to produce a piece of plastic that is intended to be used as part of a gun. It would need to simulate the machine that that gcode is made to run on, and then simulate the gcode running on that machine, and then analyze the simulated output of that simulated 3D print.
At best, it can arbitrarily decide to decline print jobs. Which is of course the whole point, because anyone with a printer would need to bypass this filter, and bypassing this filter would be against the law.
And you simply cannot ban shapes.
They have banned numbers, I mean hell go around shouting 13-12 and see how long it takes for you to get a fine/get arrested. I wouldn’t say that banning shapes is far off
Printer: “not a hot dog”
Theres countless gcode use in the world, much of it is offline
Doesn’t matter. Has nothing to do with online.
You can run OpenCV on an RPi, it’s just super slow, and you could probably use a cheap GPU chip to do it faster. You store the pretrained model on the device.
You may even get away with an asic designed for the model, though with that one I’m talking out my ass.
That would makes printers more expensive and my guess is that they’ll prefer to force online connectivity
100%
Everytown for Gun Safety says recoveries of 3D-printed crime guns across 20 cities have risen nearly 1,000% over the past five years,
So… They found a total of ten 3d printed guns in the last 5 years?
325 are 3D out of 350,000 guns found in CA in connection to a crime in 2024, according to random assholes on reddit.
This is a pretty dumb thing to pass legislation on considering it’s still VERY easy to buy a gun even in CA, another method of getting a gun isn’t making it easier in any real sense.
and to be clear to naive: you can’t actually 3D print a gun. You can make parts that can be smithed together with metal parts to make a working gun. There are some fully plastic designs, but no way would I shoot those twice.
with metal parts to make a working gun.
That’s always convention “forgotten” in all these breathless “think of the children” arguments.
You can’t fully 3-d print a working gun that isn’t as dangerous to the user as it is to the target.
Now to be totally fair, 325 is 325 more than 0, which would be the ideal number of 3d printed guns used in crime… But also, how many of those 3d printed gun users had access to a different gun and simply opted for the 3d printed one? I get the feeling it was somewhere around 325 of them
This is all ignoring the fact that I’m using a very liberal definition of the phrase “3d printed gun.” I doubt anyone is using Songbirds for armed robberies lmao
3d printing isnt shit except for ease of use. I can make a 12 gage slam fire shotgun in a couple hours with maybe $100 on a home depot or Lowes gift card. As a machinist and welder, I can make a whole lot more than that.
On the one hand, its moronic to think that limiting 3D printing will in any way affect ease of access to firearms. On the other hand, literally anything making it harder for people to kill or harm each other is probably for the best in the long run.
A comedian I watched a while back had a bit about if the government really wanted to stop gun violence, they’d put a massive tax on ready made ammunition. You really gotta hate a bitch to spend $5k on a bullet to kill them. Obviously this doesnt take into account making your own ammo, but the point stands.
Add to that the fact that some gun parts are not printable and have to be made out of metal. Printing an entire firearm on a $500 3D printer is possible but that gun will be good enough for 1 bullet, and probably will hurt shooter at that.
Also, if inmates can make a handgun out of whatever they have access at prison - 3d printing is the afterthought. Some parts can be bought in a department store, the others can be ordered online as a replacement parts. If someone really wants to make a gun themselves, 3D printing ban wont stop them.
Percentages without a baseline are useless.
You can find more magnet fishing.
in the name of public safety
In the name of gutting small manufacturing and the ability to repair your own devices. This has never had anything to do with safety, as they can’t even do the thing the bill demands. Fucking asinine
Next steps I’m sure. Then they ban you from printing anything that resembles a patented device, anything that looks like a medical device (can’t skip certification), and anything that looks like a toy (SAVE THE CHILDREN!).
What’s to stop anyone from driving out of state to buy the printer, or having it shipped from out of state? I swear to dog legislators are virtue signaling dip-shits.
Eventually they will all fall in line.
Authoritarians just doing what authoritarians do.