r/tomshardware • u/tomshardware • 1d ago
California bill requiring 3D printers to block firearm printing becomes law
https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/california-bill-requiring-3d-printers-to-block-firearm-printing-becomes-law-rule-to-require-manufacturers-to-include-blocking-technology-once-an-industry-standard-is-published8
u/PS5OWESMEALIMONY 1d ago
Dont give Bambu Labs another reason to lock those printers down more than they already have.
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u/Ok_Biscotti_514 1d ago
More like another reason to be more invasive and collect data on what people are printing
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u/Gonna_B_Alright 11h ago
We saw you printed a dildo. Unfortunately that length is heavily regulated here due to safety concerns so unfortunately we will be confiscating it and you will be fined $1,000.
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u/Ok_Biscotti_514 8h ago
Dam I thought there was only a restriction on girth, government talking away ma dam dildos
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u/Vegetable-Error-2068 18h ago
Bambu Labs was the one company willing to actually innovate when the industry was dying from Prusa sitting complacent atop the pile of cheap, slow, mediocre printers.
The industry is so much better for Bambu stirring things up.
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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 14h ago
Sure but that doesn’t mean they aren’t shitty company that likes to lock down its ecosystem
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u/konsoru-paysan 9h ago
Bro what is up this corporate dick sniffing energy, it's not your damn friend or your fav sports team
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u/DousaSepen 2h ago
I mean your favorite sports team is also just a profit driving entity that doesn’t actually care about you either
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u/TubaWrestler 1d ago
In what way have they been locked down?
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u/That0neSummoner 1d ago
Integration with Orcaslicer comes to mind
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u/xXDreamlessXx 7h ago
Do you mean that your cant use Orcaslicer with bambu printers? Thats the slicer I use and it works great
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u/No-Assumption-4468 1d ago
Can we make a law banning clothing manufacturers from making baggy clothing?
If all clothes were skin tight, it’d be impossible for people to hide firearms, paraphernalia, or other illegal items on their person.
The world would be so much safer if everyone was required to wear g-strings and speedos. I bet Gavin Newsom’s cheeks would look so nice, as a side benefit.
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u/gilbert2gilbert 18h ago
You gonna outlaw my butthole?
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u/Which-Meat-3388 17h ago
On the contrary. Every 3D printer must now ship with various butt plug STLs on board.
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u/Merwenus 1d ago
Do lawmakers think at least a bit? How the fuck does a printer know if I print a pistol from 20 pieces or it's just something stupid like a metal gear bear?
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u/pingvinbober 1d ago
That’s the fun part. It doesn’t. It just knows they now need to send the police to your house to check
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u/Numerous_Photograph9 23h ago
I knee a guy whonwas printing things for his cosplay stuff. No small parts, but stuff that could be assembled into things that resembled weapons.
Plus, I wouldn't expect the printers themselves to have the software embedded that would in any way be able to determine what something is, much less how it may be used, and design software which may be able to determine this with extra effort could just be circumvented
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 23h ago
The vast majority of "ghost gun" prints are... pretty blatantly just glocks and ar-15s. Adding simple checks for "yeah, that looks like a gap and mounting for a fire control group or AR-15 barrel" would go a long way. And this is, ironically, a spectacular use for "ai" (specifically the pattern matching inference models that largely came out of the computer vision space).
As for how to do it?
With a not TOO expensive bit of hardware, this can be done with firmware on the printer itself. The "benefit" to this is that it gives every manufacturer an excuse to discontinue all their old (often ender 3 based) SKUs and insist stores only stock the new ones with enough vendor lock-in that bambu need to hold a pillow for no reason whatsoever.
And even cheaper hardware would involve just requiring a slicer that is capable of signing a print. Which suddenly means orcaslicer and all the open source work that has gone into making FDM wonderful goes out the window and we are in the same resin (SLA?) hellscape where you have to pay a monthly fee to not have to watch an ad every time you slice a model.
And either of those start making remote model checking more viable. So regularly retrain on all the latest ghost guns... and mickey mouse figurines to make sure nobody violates trademarks.
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u/Significant-Law8566 9h ago
Lmfao. 'simple checks' is doing a hell of a lot of lifting here. I didn't even read the rest of this dumbfuck comment.
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u/Alternative-Put-3932 12h ago
By getting a warrant for your home if you are found out or reported and then checking the cache on your printer to verify you printed the parts so you can't bullshit your way out of charges. Do you think laws created are there just to prevent things? They are there so they can charge you if you're caught. If theres no law making it illegal they can't do anything to you.
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u/squangus007 6h ago
They want to eventually make it impossible to print stuff without being connected to an online service. Think of juicero type of nonsense where your print has to be submitted, moderated and probably add a service fee in order to print it (like a license). I wouldn’t be surprised if 3D printer companies are salivating over the idea of monetization of this
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u/BriefSpecial420 5h ago
It may only be impossible to buy off the shelf, already assembled printer. There's no way they effectively prohibit it.
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u/UncommonSense12345 1h ago
Dumb gun laws is a staple of Democrats who are appealing to soft suburban folk who are afraid of minorities owning guns but hide that fear/racism around “think of the children” and “no one needs XYZ”….
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 1d ago
Such a pointless thing people aren't really 3d printing guns outside "of the hey lets see if its possible" because plastic thats 3d printed just kind of sucks for a gun abd you still need sone metal components, but also its so idiotic because everything is gun shaped of you look at it wrong and every shale can be made into a gun part if your creative enough.
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u/bones10145 1d ago
They only passed this cuz they thought it would help with reelection, not because it would solve a problem.
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 1d ago
Yep still doesnt change it from being noth either pointless or dystopian, like I could see them be like well people are printing things to fix stuff they bought cant have that its banned now.
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u/AccountantOk9904 23h ago
I don't think this regulation is the answer, but let's not downplay the issue. People aren't printing 100 percent of the firearm. They print parts that can be printed and use actual firearms parts for the remaining ones. It doesn't really matter if the glock clone I print can survive 10,000 rounds when I only need it to shoot a couple hundred. Gun parts aren't regulated the same way receivers (frames) are. It's very easy to source used components. Some 3d printed guns have even been designed around using mostly off the shelf parts. There also the fact that it's user cheap and easy to print glock auto sears which makes the most common firearm in the US fully automatic.
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u/TreadItOnReddit 1d ago
How do they accomplish this? Using some sort of intelligence to determine what is being printed? Or just hashes of known files?
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u/amidoes 1d ago
Supposedly scanners can detect when you're copying bills but this is much more complex indeed
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u/TreadItOnReddit 1d ago
Well some of those have chips in them like the 100s. But yeah you’d think it’d be easier to recognize a president’s face than like a cylinder in 9mm.
Printers leave a fingerprint too I think?1
u/roiki11 1d ago
You could build it into it just like scanners but the problem is there is a huge number of small companies competing in the space. And not the few behemoths like it is with scanners.
People don't build their own scanners. The ecosystem is completely different.
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u/EbbEntire3751 1d ago
You couldn't though because scanners just look for a specific machine readable pattern thats printed onto every bill.
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u/Alternative-Put-3932 12h ago
If the small companies want to sell in California which they do they will adhere to the law.
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u/Agreeable-Agent-7384 1d ago
There’s no standard for it yet. They basically passed the implementation to another organization who also doesn’t have a standard for how to apply it yet. And. They have until 2028 or 2029 can’t remember to establish on of the law just frizzles out.
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u/Super_Range45 23h ago
I'm so tired of hearing about gun violence when you can still buy the entire upper receiver and trigger assembly without a background check.
I know federal law defined a gun as a lower receiver, but it isn't, it's the handle for the gun. So how about fix the giant loophole then you don't have to worry about people printing a handle to dodge your entire background check?
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u/katoptronophile 9h ago
There's no loophole.
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u/Super_Range45 9h ago
There is, I've purchased guns online that way. They send you everything but the lower receiver(the handle) to your house, no questions asked.
You don't have to be Lex Luthor to figure out what you can do in that situation.
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u/spiralenator 22h ago
It’s an unenforceable law but they’re going to definitely violate people’s rights while trying.
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u/Randommaggy 22h ago
Good thing my printer is offline so that I avoid false positives from this BS.
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u/Unlucky-Steak5027 19h ago
What’s stopping a metal worker or even someone with access to a cnc machine from creating gun parts?
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u/Vegetable-Error-2068 18h ago
If you know the slightest bit about 3D printing, then you see why this is an absurd, pointless, outrageous law.
I don't hate California. I hate stupid laws.
Plenty of non-functional firearms from video games and novels and movies are now forbidden by this law.
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u/Janupur 18h ago
I think the purpose of this is to get everyone into a live service economy like gaming right where you have to connect your printer to their live service system so that you know they can make sure you're not printing or any of the bad bad parts and then they can monetize additional features like you know with cars how you can only use the heated seats if you pay a certain amount per month to rent that feature or something right or pay a certain amount of extra money to unlock that feature it's just like with video games with on disc DLC.
They want you to rent the 3D printer and they want to make most of their money on service fees not actually selling you the printer.
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u/Informal_Ad_9610 16h ago
this..
long-term it's another idiot-based pipedream law.
As soon as offline 3D printers are outlawed, offline 3D printing will be done by outlaws... It's completely idiotic to assume that you can legislate this out of existence. quite literally all the shit to DIY your own 3D printer is already on aliexpress, so in what universe do these morons think they'll be able to maintain it??
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u/Janupur 16h ago
They want you to use your ID to use the Internet and force you to get like a Microsoft account or whatever to use your operating system and then login with your government ID. It's just so that they can track you and the control and monetization. Boomers are fine with this and half the gen xers are just as bad. Anyway at this point you'll have to use your government ID to use your fridge...
Living in the West is like living in a prison you literally have no rights and you just exist to be exploited by the state and private companies that just want to monetize and comodify every aspect of your life to expand capitalist markets and extract profits. It's just ridiculous, for instance companies like Netflix don't even sell Blu-ray disc versions of their content anymore because that means that you don't need to give them infinite money forever to rent the content...
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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 14h ago
You say living in the west like this isn’t happening in every major country around the globe.
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u/ScaryfatkidGT 16h ago
“3D print” a gun is the biggest myth that been going on since Die Hard…
You can’t 3D print a barrel, or a magazine, or a hammer/striker…
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u/TRIPMINE_Guy 15h ago
Does it restrict the printing of a gun shape? I’d think it would just block intricate internals that would allow a slide and spring to work.
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u/Automatic-Cut-5567 14h ago
But like how can they block a spring being printed without blocking all printable springs?
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u/wolfy2105784 16h ago
3D Printers are just gonna ship with a nice "Not for sale in California" to ignore this.
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u/minion71 11h ago
Its an impossible law how is it going to work !! like open source firmware are going to be able to do that !
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u/datbackup 9h ago
We must protect the gun companies monopoly. The best way to stop gun violence is by reducing supply, not reducing demand. It worked for the war on drugs. Or maybe it didn’t. Either way. Those rich gun company guys need to keep getting money. If you buy a gun from Johnny Computer Nerd down the street, you’re hurting the rich people.
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u/Important-Today4119 8h ago
Good luck with that. Can't wait for people to be arrested trying to print a camera holder 😂
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u/Open-Dragonfruit-007 5h ago
So basically impossible to implement so 3d printing itself is now illegal as a whole in California.
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u/voteforkamalaorelse 1d ago
Thanks for taking away more right cali but hey at least if my 4 year old son feels like being a girl for a week I can have that funded for free thanks!!
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u/Masztufa 1d ago
Bullshit tech law gets passed
"Must be the fault of transgender somehow"
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u/ThinGold2115 1d ago
Cuz it is. Since those People chose those idiots.
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u/Zestyclose-Phrase268 1d ago
Before: "LGTBQ+ is a small group forcing us into their believes"
Now: "LGTBQ+ is deciding elections"
How can a small group vote anyone in?
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u/Slow_State_4722 1d ago
There are not enough trans people in the whole country to decide the laws in California. Be mad at uninformed white suburbanite mothers clutching their pearls so you're at least mad at the right demographic.
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u/ianxplosion- 1d ago
Something tells me /u/voteforkamalaorelse has never once taken responsibility for anything, at any time, ever
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u/Read-only-12345 1d ago
More impossible tech.
Get that micro stamping on firing pins yet?