New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem!

Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, which appears not to be the case here, or (b) they went insane on social media.

(can't confirm this personally, but it seems from other comments that it's perfectly feasible to just drive out of New York State and buy a gun somewhere else in the gun-owning US? And this is quite likely where all the guns used in existing NY crime come from?)

I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.

I don't think they know what Ctrl+Alt+Delete means.

They want to restart it? They want to go to the screen where you can switch users or sign out?

Do they think it's just a fancier way of saying delete?

This will cause 3D printer usability to go down massively. A bit like the multicolored tracking dots - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots that causes the driver to tell you "you can't print black and white as you're out of yellow".

Hmmm... this is literally the intro of the narrative arc in the game that I'm making. Governments confiscating 3D Printers, powerful GPUs, robotic parts to prevent "simple people" the access to "dangerous technologies". For their own good of course.

Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"

It's not illegal to make your own firearm, you just can't sell it.

The most insane thing about this is that it is not illegal to manufacture firearms in the United States. Providing that you do not sell or distribute the firearm, it is entirely legal to manufacture a firearm in the USA for personal use only. Laws vary state by state, of course, and it may be different in the state of New York, but assuming that this federal law has not been overridden by some state law in New York, then this proposed regulation is 100% nonsensical.

Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?

I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm.

I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.

> The obvious problem: you cannot reliably detect firearms from geometry alone.

The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.

I will just continue to use my non-regulated printer and open source slicer. Fortunately I have a copy of the source.

If anyone needs help printing parts for a Voron just let me know. (Not a real offer for the public, but for friends absolutely.)

For hundreds of years people have been making guns without 3D printers and CNC mills. All that is needed is some metal machining skills, a lathe, and some other tools.

4th Amendment, unreasonable search. And of course the 2nd, but the former is more worrying. Also if printing is speech, then you can add the 1st to the list as well.

It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".

Any state laws trying to restrict the 2nd amendment are always going to be useless. You're not going to stop someone who's determined at causing harm with firearms in a country where firearms outnumber people. All these little "bandaid" solutions do is allow for fishing expeditions by police and prosecutors.

On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.

They can require whatever the want. Good luck stopping people from just building their own printers without such "blocking technology".

Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?

Edit, reading further it's even more insane:

> The New York definitions sweep in not just FDM and resin printers, but also CNC mills and “any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing.” That’s a lot of shop & manufacturing equipment!

This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

And not for the first time:

2025: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228

2023 (before Mangione): https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A8132

Maybe there are others.

Wait, so this is in the budget bill proposed by the supposed adults in the room, not from the usual types in the peanut gallery of the legislature?

But not CNC machines?

Policy in the pursuit of easy political narrative wins looks like this. US gun crime is a national issue, and therefore unsolvable in the current political climate, so useless posturing like this is what we're left with.

The real fix is something like a nationwide licensing system like for cars, with auditing of weapons and weapon storage.

perhaps people printing their own guns at home is actually quite bad and in fact should be controlled in some way without it being seen as a fundamental incursion on your rights.

just a thought from across the pond.

Weird how this is happening simultaneously in many states. Washington is considering a vague 3d printer and CNC law to address ghost guns. Gun crimes are mostly committed with regular pistols but that isn’t stopping politicians from passing all sorts of restrictions under the guise of keeping people safe. Meanwhile these states have serious budget problems that go unaddressed …

Washington state is pursuing a similar law at a similar time. Presumably pushed by the same advocacy organization, whichever one it is. The Washington one seems impossible to actually comply with -- how the hell is the computer in a CNC machine going to figure out what geometries are gun-like? A de facto ban on additive or subtractive manufacturing is pretty dumb.

I wrote as good an opposition as I could. Basically, I opposed it on multiple principles.

From the top, I absolutely detest this kind of censorship. But the bill states that the implementation will be defined (or rendered infeasible - yeah right) AFTER the bill passes. Said decision will be punted to a "working group" of industry folks. That alone stinks, since it places a lot of abuse potential outside of duly elected representation.

If you haven't bought a 3D printer yet then I think it's a good time to invest in one. This is going to be one of those technologies that slowly the government will erode our access to, so getting on board now is the best course of action.

Yet another case of lawmakers proliferating the “you should not have root access” meme. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern political landscape and a backdoor to much less well intentioned actions (intentional and unintended).

Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram:

https://i.imgur.com/gGIAApA.png

Hard to trust an article like this when the legal analysis and suggestions are being outsourced to an LLM.

Seems like a boon for small batch 3d printing companies.

Just reject printing everything or nearly everything :)

Inform users where this censorship filter is implemented, so users can go change the source file value from 1 to 0 :)

Malicious compliance is highly appropriate for a malicious law.

Gun nut Eric Raymond was cheering when the first printable guns came out. Checkmate gun grabbers, you'll never prevent us from having our shooty-shootys now! Haha! I thought, well the answer to that is simple: simply declare 3D printers to be weapons. You know, like how the Feds declared encryption to be "munitions".

"preventing firearms printing", aka "securing big companies' income from spare parts selling with 500% margin"

...what? This some of the stupidest, most out of touch garbage I've ever read and clearly made by uneducated lawmakers being out of their depth.

I really dislike this whole debate because I never wanted to be lumped in with 3D gun printing weirdos.

When I first told my very non-technical somewhat new friend about my 3D printer, they looked really concerned and told me they weren’t comfortable with it because of how people make weapons with them.

I’ve had to spend a lot of time building trust and showing that I’m not one of those weirdos.

Ultimately I don’t think any kind of printed gun banning law has a tangible impact (it’s not like guns with serial numbers aren’t regularly getting away with murder), but what I don’t like is that the law and discussion around it validates this stupidity and continues to lump me in with gun weirdos.

It’s weird to own a gun. It’s weird to print a gun. I don’t even think the 2nd amendment is very necessary and is clearly not capable of stopping tyranny (and the amendment itself says that’s not its purpose anyway).

At this point we could probably get a coalition of Trump cult members who have no consistent ideology (Trump doesn’t like guns) and “liberal pansies” to just repeal the 2nd amendment and become a normal country.

I can more or less understand where the legislator might be coming from: laser printers and copiers are already mandated to include fingerprinting in the output and disrupt any attempt of copying money.

I will just continue to use my non-regulated printer and open source slicer. Fortunately I have a copy of the source.

If anyone needs help printing parts for a Voron just let me know. (Not a real offer for the public, but for friends absolutely.)

It tells you all you need to know about their honesty, that such a dramatic expansion of government power into our private lives and property, was put into a "budget bill".

On a related point, trying to implement more gun control after seeing how this federal government is deploying the three letter agencies is pretty fucking stupid.

Wait, so this is in the budget bill proposed by the supposed adults in the room, not from the usual types in the peanut gallery of the legislature?

Just reject printing everything or nearly everything :)

Inform users where this censorship filter is implemented, so users can go change the source file value from 1 to 0 :)

Malicious compliance is highly appropriate for a malicious law.

It's not illegal to make your own firearm, you just can't sell it.

If I recall correctly, this is state-dependent. Some states just say you can't sell it, some require you to serialize anything you make even if you won't sell (the process of serialization isn't specified), and some ban self-made firearms completely. If you cross state lines with something you've made, you need to make sure you're following laws in both states just to be safe.

They want to make it illegal

I’d be careful with that. Much as I think we should regulate firearms, I despise how the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has been horribly abused to cover intrastate ownership. See, by making your own gun, you didn’t import one from another state, so therefore the Feds should be involved because it involves interstate commerce now.

For example[0]:

> Filburn was penalized under the Act. He argued that the extra wheat that he had produced in violation of the law had been used for his own use and thus had no effect on interstate commerce, since it never had been on the market. In his view, this meant that he had not violated the law because the additional wheat was not subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause.

…

> The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.

0: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111

Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.

Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.

Also, federally, not legal advice -- but I'm not aware there's any law against selling it. You just can't manufacture it for the purpose of sale or transfer. If it is incidentally sold later it's just like any other firearm without a serial number that's also legal (namely those manufactured commercially before the GCA, or those manufactured non-commercially by private persons after the GCA). I've seen the claim "can't transfer or sell it" over and over on all kind of gun forums etc but no one has ever been able to point where that is blanket illegal.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor

For hundreds of years people have been making guns without 3D printers and CNC mills. All that is needed is some metal machining skills, a lathe, and some other tools.

I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).

If you want to be really simple you can make a slam fire shotgun with two pipes and a nail, no machining skills required

I would also note that the Shinzo Abe doohickey wasn't 3D-printed.

As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.

It made me think of the tracking dots as well, but this is more like every time you hit print, it submits a copy of your document to the cloud for approval. With time, they could use AI to silently update the document to alter the offending portions and continue printing. They would then notify the authorities of the breach and decision could be made if further action is necessary

4th Amendment, unreasonable search. And of course the 2nd, but the former is more worrying. Also if printing is speech, then you can add the 1st to the list as well.

Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?

Edit, reading further it's even more insane:

This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

> The obvious problem: you cannot reliably detect firearms from geometry alone.

The obvious problem with this argument is that in just the medium term, world-model style AI will get good at this task, but having big brother pre-approve every print will still be bad.

Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread?

I can make a sword, grow poisonous plants, isolate toxins, or stab someone with a pencil. I do not. I shouldn't be punished for the idea that other people may.

And not for the first time:

2025: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228

2023 (before Mangione): https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A8132

Maybe there are others.

Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"

But not CNC machines?

I don't think they know what Ctrl+Alt+Delete means.

They want to restart it? They want to go to the screen where you can switch users or sign out?

Do they think it's just a fancier way of saying delete?

perhaps people printing their own guns at home is actually quite bad and in fact should be controlled in some way without it being seen as a fundamental incursion on your rights.

just a thought from across the pond.

They can require whatever the want. Good luck stopping people from just building their own printers without such "blocking technology".

The real fix is something like a nationwide licensing system like for cars, with auditing of weapons and weapon storage.

People print guns and gun parts. More than you think. Now even more since metal printing is starting to become affordable. I print grip and grip attachments for my 9mms and my AR15, trigger guards, barrel clamps, etc. I also find it stupid since, as the article suggests, what kind of algorithm can you implement to do smart detection of something that could be potentially dangerous? Will it also detect negative space? I print inserts in elastic filament with my gun outlines instead of foam (or as foam templates) for my carrying cases. Will the "algorithm" prevent me to do that too? What about my plastic disc thrower toy gun, or my PKD Blaster prop? Both look like guns to me. What about a dumb AI algorithm that lacks common sense?

Printing barrels and FCUs -- the fire control unit, which is the only thing tracked and serialized in a gun at least in the US -- is more difficult but not impossible. Actually, building a functional FCU that can strike a bullet primer, or a barrel that can be used once is not difficult at all and if you look around you can find videos of people that have tested that with a mixture of 3d printing and rudimentary metal working skills. The major issues on designing those parts are reliability and safety. In the Philippines there is a full bootleg gunsmith industry dedicated to build illegal guns that match commercial ones in those aspects too.

Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine.

Absolutely ridiculous.

And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

Actual shootings with 3D printed guns are relatively rare but it’s come up because Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one.

is it because guns are easy to get without printing?

Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).

The 3d-printed hybrid FGC-9 is readily and commonly made all over Europe[0]. Most notoriously exhibit by 'jstark' in Germany[1]. Ammo is no problem, as can be made with off the shelf components available in EU[2]. And fairly reliable, if not oversized, 9mm pistol, primarily printed except with an ECM machined barrel that is easily DIY'd by 3d printing a mandrel for the rifling electrode and a simple bolt. A really nice gun all things considered for people with no other options, that can be built quickly using simple instructions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygxGrxCEOp0

[2] https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/BWA-Ammo-V...

Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.

This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.

My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…

Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?

Preemptive regulation is absurd.

Few people would bring an illegal firearm into NYC or other major US metros because a) the penalties in most of those cities and states can be brutal and b) it's not that difficult to acquire a legal firearm in most cities. If someone's smuggling a gun it's likely because it's just a small part of more varied criminal activity. Or because they did it by accident.

Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.

i personally wouldn't described teenagers killing each other with luminous green hunting knives as a 'weird panic' but perhaps something that needs a lot of attention and a multitude of steps to solve. banning these insane weapons is, would you believe it, one quick step that might help.

I wrote as good an opposition as I could. Basically, I opposed it on multiple principles.

"preventing firearms printing", aka "securing big companies' income from spare parts selling with 500% margin"

Seems like a boon for small batch 3d printing companies.

...what? This some of the stupidest, most out of touch garbage I've ever read and clearly made by uneducated lawmakers being out of their depth.

For example[0]:

…

So don’t assume that just because it never crosses state lines that it escapes federal law, however utterly freaking ridiculous that may be.

0: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111

I have a copy of https://archive.org/details/gerard-metral-gun/ on my bookshelf (by a European, too!).

And so, Nick Bostrom's total surveillance required, starts

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

If you want to be really simple you can make a slam fire shotgun with two pipes and a nail, no machining skills required

is it because guns are easy to get without printing?

Because it is possible to print molds for cast iron, I wonder what else you need beyond that (although, don't indulge me if the topic is going in the illegal direction).

The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.

Exactly. The zip gun people are mostly just weird nerds, and not professional assassins. The latter seems to be doing it the old fashioned way which leaves no traces - buy cheap gun, file off serials, throw it in the river after.

Zip guns may get past a metal detector, but not the standard x-ray luggage scan. To the extent it'll make it past the x-ray screeners, it's because they let all kinds of stuff through, because it's a poor way to screen for dangerous things, and they are not high-skill employees, they are relatively cheap labor.

Source: I used to travel every week flying home Friday, cycle clothes out of my travel bags, and be on the road again on Sunday night. I learned to my horror I'd been flying with a pair of scissors for at least 5 weeks - during which, TSA forced me to open a Christmas present for my sister and throw away some hand lotion which was in too big of a bottle.

There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.

3D printed guns haven't been zip guns in a long time. That reads as willful ignorance. Only the receiver or frame are controlled. Every other part can be purchased online without any checks. Hoffman Tactical's Orca and a myriad of pistol frame can be used to produce weapons on par with commercial weapons. Many commercial pistols are polymer frames. A good 3d printed pistol frame is no different than a cast nylon polymer frame.

If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/@HoffmanTactical

https://www.youtube.com/@PrintShootRepeat

3d printing ghost guns with a 100% plastic construction is a silly thing only done for clickbait, and probably comprises less than a tenth of a percent of 3d printing gun related activity. Most people are printing frames, parts, flair, accessories, mounts, things like that, and using sensible real metal parts for things involving explosive forces and danger.

Not is it only dumb, but it is plain unimplementable. Are they saying the HMI interfaces on CNC machines need to be able to parse the GCode generated by any of dozens of CAM software options out there and divine if it might be gun related? That is not possible.

> Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?

Even in countries with strict gun control, like the UK, the most serious criminals can get hold of guns. And if lesser criminals 3D printed a gun, they'd struggle to get hold of ammo for it. So they stick to knives.

The only time a 3d printed gun is useful is if your country is occupied and you have a chance to secretly shoot one of the occupiers if only you could get a gun past their confiscation. Otherwise it is an interesting toy that you might shoot once to say you did it.

I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.

Is that true in New York? Maybe it currently requires permits, so at least there is a log and provenance chain someone could use in case it's used for bad stuff? Sounds like if you'd want to avoid that (like if you wanna shot a CEO and get away with it for example), you could use a offline 3D printer.

If I wanted to make a custom one-off weapon for some reason why would I use CNC? I'd just do it like normal on manual toolmaking machines. CNC is for achieving repeatability with less tooling in a manufacturing pipeline. Nobody is mass producing bootleg guns. Even if you buy the premise that someone might do this (which to your point they won't--getting a real gun isn't hard) it's completely flawed reasoning based in some CSI style TV trope. Next they'll demand CCTV cameras have an "enhance" mode.

How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?

I think it's still not a viable problem to solve.

What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?

Or how about you actually print an ice-cream scoop, and then stop the print halfway to just take the handle, and do the same for several other innocent looking parts which are carefully modelled to fit together after printing individually. There are just so many ways to get around any measures they could put in place.

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.

Really garbage administration they have in NY. Hochul and a lot of her ilk have done things like block right to repair after years of activists trying to get it passed.

The way it worked was as follows:

1. Local groups push to get right to repair passed

2. Fails repeatedly for years

3. They finally get it past the houses and onto the governor's desk

4. Governor gets a visit from a 'unknown' (hint likely Apple) lobbyist, refuses to sign even though they have to

5. They wait until the very last second and then adds last minute 'amendments' neutering the bill.

6. Their sycophants then try to shut down any discussion on Reddit/other social platforms from anyone who criticizes the bill.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fair_Repair_Act

They are going to keep doing this crap, the government needs to be voted out but just like NJ, NY is captured by really corrupt 'neoliberal' Democrats so its an uphill battle to get someone better in there. The incentives are not there: In NJ and most of NY the economic base is the wealthy suburbanites who like the way things are and will fight efforts to make radical change. That results in a lot of 'think of the children' type people who would welcome any and all bans on things like 3D printing of guns.

A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.

In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.

I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".

Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.

Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.

If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.

I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.

Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.

Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".

How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.

Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.

Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?

We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.

Looks like them too, both subtractive and additive manufacturing. Not bending sheet metal though.

The legislations includes CNC mills.

And muzzleloaders are pretty well unregulated.

invest in manual mills now, profit later.

Yeah they should also ban metal working in New York...

The stupidest thing is you can go to another state and buy a gun in Walmart, why even bother to build a plastic gun in the US?

The folks at adafruit probably do know, but it does make sense if you expand the words: "Control, Alter, and Delete"

I was going to post a similar comment, and then decided against it. I realized I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in decades and thought maybe there was a new use for it that I was not familiar. Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by it. Closest I could come was they were going to lock out the user, but that was Windows-L or something wasn't it?

Reminds me of people who think penultimate is just super-duper-ultimate.

It has been used as an idiom to mean stopping or restarting something (the former in this case) for decades: https://wordspy.com/words/ctrl-alt-delete/

I think it's because most people associate Ctrl-Alt-Del with the process of terminating a process, so they use the key sequence itself to refer to the act of terminating something.

Open process manager to force an unresponsive program to close. This has been part of popular lexicon for decades. Eg from the song Death to Los Campesinos, "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations"

Alter the control, and delete!

In modern Windows, the three-key salute is a way to lock your session securely. Maybe that's what they mean: locking it up?

Maybe we should just install this keypad on our printers and be done with it:

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/ctrl-alt-del...

Hey, it's similar to Weird Al's song:

Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you

If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you

Perhaps they were using Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the Task Manager so that they can kill an unruly process?

Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.

Should people be allowed to own basic metalworking tools, or is that something else that would be OK to be 'controlled in some way'?

Maybe we shouldn't let people write their own software either, as there's all sorts of crime they could get up to...

Do you support gun ownership absent of this idea? Or is your actual concern with guns?

The idea that we should let government software run on our printers to prevent the rate case where someone both wants to print a gun and do some crime with it is absurd. There are more important 1st and 4th amendment considerations here

NYC doesn't have a gun problem. They regulate the shit out of guns to no effect. They should regress closer to the national mean and spend the resources on stuff that matters more. And even if they do want to regulate it, micromanaging everyone's 3d printers is not the way to do it both because of bad efficacy and bad precedent.

I'm glad there's an ocean between us.

0. We will have to enforce blocking technology against printing printer components to bypass blocking technology

Goto 0

It is not weird in the slightest. These things are coordinated at the state level all the time.

This is probably one of those good tests of "is your 'conspiracy theory' meter properly calibrated", because if it's going off right now and you are in disbelief, you've got it calibrated incorrectly. This is so completely routine that there's an entire branch of law codified in this way called the "Uniform Commercial Code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code and see the organization running this' home page at https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc .

And that's just a particular set of laws with an organization dedicated to harmonizing all the various states laws for their particular use cases. It's not the one and only gateway to such laws, it's just an example of a cross-state law coordination so established that it has an entire organization dedicated to it. Plenty of other stuff is coordinated at the state level across multiple states all the time.

Meanwhile gun crime is near record lows, but it's still a "gun violence epidemic"

No thanks. We don't need law enforcement checking weapon storage in private homes. And there's already a national background check system for most legal firearm transfers.

The real fix is to leave it alone. You're wasting political capital by pushing for gun control yet again. You'd want the Trump administration to have access to a database of gun owners like the Black Panthers? Seriously?

They also declared that a shoelace is a machine gun until they declared that it's not

https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/ctdm3/oldie_but_goody...

https://imgur.com/7N6zc

Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram:

https://i.imgur.com/gGIAApA.png

Hard to trust an article like this when the legal analysis and suggestions are being outsourced to an LLM.

Not all AI assisted writing is "slop," especially if, as your screenshot shows, significant portions of the article were written by a human. Drawing attention to any and all hints of AI assisted writing is not the public service announcement you think it is.

Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.

That's more so another example of a law that shouldn't exist.

I really dislike this whole debate because I never wanted to be lumped in with 3D gun printing weirdos.

I’ve had to spend a lot of time building trust and showing that I’m not one of those weirdos.

This seems like a problem with your friend moreso than with 3D printing in general. Most people I know who hear about 3D printing don't immediately think of making weapons. Toys and weird gadgets tend to come to mind first, or maybe an office accessory like my laptop stands. The fact that your friend immediately jumped to the conclusion that it's for making weapons says a lot about the way they think about the world.

I agree that the law seems to validate the viewpoint, but I disagree that it's a common one, nor that you should have had to spend time building that trust.

A normal country? Like Iran that just slaughters or imprisons anybody that speaks or acts against the government. 2A is to stop that situation from ever happening. Is the government starts shooting we will shoot back. Before then we would prefer to resolve our grievances peacefully in court.

They want to make it illegal

Dexter Taylor is serving 10 years for doing so in NYC without a license[]. The guns were never used or even left his home, and he is not otherwise involved in crime.

Also in NY it's illegal to make an unserialized firearm. I have no idea what the serialization requirements are there, but what California did was require you report them to DROS.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor

Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Just imagine what happens when lawmakers discover the possibilities of every one with access to a lathe or CNC machine.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Actual shootings with 3D printed guns are relatively rare but it’s come up because Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO with one.

True, a terrible patchwork of different state laws makes it very easy to unknowingly violate a law.

Maybe they should look more at how other countries quite successfully banned fire arms. Hint: it wasn't by banning printers.

In Washington state I believe you need to serialize each firearm as well.

> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?

Every time I see one of these stories I wonder how many tools I would have to remove from my garage to make it impossible to build a primitive gun in there. With enough ingenuity I'm really not sure there would be anything left.

Or fire and a hammer

That case started over a year ago, I would have expected the topic to come up long ago if this was motivated by the shooting. Granted, lawmaking takes longer than public sentiment lasts, but I didn't really hear much about 3D-printed guns at the time.

And they're still doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.

EDIT: I think you mean "allegedly"

Does it really matter what "they know"? It seems like the entire post is written by an LLM.

They also declared that a shoelace is a machine gun until they declared that it's not

https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/ctdm3/oldie_but_goody...

https://imgur.com/7N6zc

That's more so another example of a law that shouldn't exist.

As far as I know, the tracking dots aren't even a legal requirement. Nothing stops you from making a printer without it, unlike is the case here.

Also, I find it unconscionable to suggest we should allow home manufacturing of automatic weapons without even engaging with possible ways to stem that tide.

True, a terrible patchwork of different state laws makes it very easy to unknowingly violate a law.

In Washington state I believe you need to serialize each firearm as well.

Or fire and a hammer

If you want to see what is possible with 3d printed guns now I recommend Hoffman Tactical and PSR on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/@HoffmanTactical

https://www.youtube.com/@PrintShootRepeat

I don't know where you get bullets for the gun though.

I think it's still not a viable problem to solve.

What happens if you print the handle on a different printer, and print it with an attachment which works as an ice-cream scoop?

Really garbage administration they have in NY. Hochul and a lot of her ilk have done things like block right to repair after years of activists trying to get it passed.

The way it worked was as follows:

1. Local groups push to get right to repair passed

2. Fails repeatedly for years

3. They finally get it past the houses and onto the governor's desk

4. Governor gets a visit from a 'unknown' (hint likely Apple) lobbyist, refuses to sign even though they have to

5. They wait until the very last second and then adds last minute 'amendments' neutering the bill.

6. Their sycophants then try to shut down any discussion on Reddit/other social platforms from anyone who criticizes the bill.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fair_Repair_Act

Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.

I actually think AI-human collaboration is quite beneficial. I have a more fundamental issue that it's just bad writing when you use pure LLM generated text. My general feeling is "why should you expect me to spend my time reading something that you didn't care enough to spend your time writing?"

Also, most of the suggestions provided in the AI generated section are just useless. While I think this law is terrible, the suggestions provided completely contradict what the lawmakers are intending. I'll explain what I mean with some of the suggestions provided.

> Narrow the Scope to Intent, Not the Tool

This is essentially a suggestion to throw out the entire law as written. Sure, but this is meaningless advice to lawmakers.

> Drop Mandatory File Scanning

This is the same suggestion as before but rephrased.

> Exempt Open-Source and Offline Toolchains

This is asking them to create a massive loophole in their own law making it useless. Once again, essentially just asking them to throw out the entire law.

> Add safe harbor for sellers and educators who don’t modify equipment or participate in unlawful manufacture.

Two fundamentally different concepts here jammed into one idea. Do you want to add safe harbor for sellers who don't modify equipment or do you want to throw out the entire law and have it not apply to anybody who doesn't participate in unlawful manufacture? These are very different ideas, it makes no sense to treat them as one cohesive concept.

All of these are signals that not much thought went into this. If a human had used AI for ideas and writing assistance, but participated in the writing process as an active contributor, I think they would have caught things like this. I don't think they would have chosen to make multiple bullet points semantically identical. I think they would have chosen to actually cite specific aspects of the law and propose concrete solutions.

Another example, one of their suggestions is to improve the working groups to add specific members. Genuinely a fairly good idea. Having actually read the law, I would have cited the specific passage, which requires that the working group "SHALL INCLUDE EXPERTS IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIGITAL SECURITY, FIREARMS REGULATION, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY, AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DISCIPLINES DETERMINED BY THE DIVISION TO BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS PRESCRIBED HEREIN." I would question, who do they consider to be experts in additive manufacturing? Why does it seem that the working group will be far more heavily weighed towards policy experts as opposed to 3D printing experts? The article suggests that "standards will default to large vendors" yet there is no evidence here that vendors will be included at all.

I agree that the law seems to validate the viewpoint, but I disagree that it's a common one, nor that you should have had to spend time building that trust.

Most countries aren’t Iran. Are the French unable to protest without the 2nd amendment?

Did the 2nd amendment save Mark Pretti from that exact situation happening to him?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygxGrxCEOp0

[2] https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/BWA-Ammo-V...

I've been saying the same about deepfake noods of hot girls.

Something something about distribution.

Is this even a problem that needs to be solved? How many people have 3d printed guns and used them?

Preemptive regulation is absurd.

Quite famously, Luigi Mangione. (allegedly)

Of course, this is silliness since it is very easy to just buy a gun in the US, and it is also legal to make one in your garage.

"The government has been notified that you are attempting to 3D print a copyrighted Door Wedge™ without a license. Local law enforcement has been notified, please prepare to be arrested."

or worse...

"You are trying to print a design that is 87% similar to Egg Cup™. Acquire a limited run license for $3000 for ten runs which expires in six months? Y/N"

Maybe they should look more at how other countries quite successfully banned fire arms. Hint: it wasn't by banning printers.

> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.

Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?

And they're still doing anything except addressing the grievances that lead to that.

EDIT: I think you mean "allegedly"

There's a reason they call it security theater. This is just more of it.

The 4th amendment has probably been the most eroded of all the major private liberty amendments, in my opinion. It is, at this point, a pretty worn fig leaf.

> Why would I bother with an unreliable 3D printed zip gun and 3D printing when I can go and get a real working gun off the street for a few hundred?

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca.

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

Do potato cannons count?

They could attempt it, but the Second Amendment is quite clear that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to ban firearms and ammunition.

It's not about banning, it's about taxing. Distilling liquor without paying taxes is illegal.

This is a bad example. I've been notionally pro-ownership but also pro-regulation my whole life, and one of the major problems with gun legislation in the US is that it's incredibly poorly written and does not reflect the technical reality of guns.

The government allows private ownership of automatic weapons, but hasn't issued any new tax stamps for 50 years. You can convert any semiauto gun into a full-auto gun for a few cents of 3D printed parts (or a rubber band). The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.

I think yes, it is reasonable for Congresspeople to fire a gun before they legislate on it, because otherwise they are incapable of writing good laws.

Good gun regulation in the US would probably look like car insurance, where gun owners need to register and insure their weapons against the possibility of crimes being committed with them. There are so many guns compared to the amount of gun crime that it would probably not end up terribly expensive, especially if you own a gun safe.

You're welcome to come up with a better litmus test, but it's beyond clear that lawmakers writing gun control regulation have less than a wikipedia level understanding of the topic. See "shoulder thing that goes up", the weird obsession with the Thompson, the entire concept of an Assault Weapon, etc.

NY legislators have been pushing for this in public statements over the past year.

e.g. https://d12t4t5x3vyizu.cloudfront.net/ritchietorres.house.go...

Right, because most people recognize that the US has become sufficiently polarized and radicalized that "If enough people are mad at you, a complete stranger might shoot you" is not a theory of change we want to encourage. Yes, even for causes we agree with, most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is, and even how civil and thoughtful you are in pursuing it.

How many crimes related to “foot claws”, “death stars” and “blow darts” were there before they were banned? The UK Offensive Weapons Act is a joke of a law that makes us look like morons afraid of cartoon turtles and farming tools.

It's just very easily substitutable with regular knives? Plus the Offensive Weapons Act already covers them? I would be very surprised if it has made a difference.

(those of us with longer memories remember the previous iteration and why the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles don't have "ninja" in their name in the UK)

Would they really do less stabbing if they had to use a mundane kitchen knife instead of a 'tacticool' knife or 'ninja sword'?

Back in college I was flying home immediately after the end of the semester for a family reunion. Flew there, attended, then flew back. On the flight back, I got stopped for additional search by TSA. Immediately, I remembered that I had left my lab dissection kit in my backpack which included a razor blade and long, pointed, pick-like tool. But it turns out that neither of those are what got me stopped....I had also forgotten a half full bottle of gatorade. They were however happy to confiscate my dissection kit as well, after I had (stupidly) informed them of it.

Same thing happened to me -- had a large vice grip in the duffel bag. Could have killed somebody over the head with it. They looked at their "regulations" and vice grips weren't on it so they let me through. You know who didn't let it through though - I left it in the bag and the Chinese security confiscated it on the way back.

btw don't try that with something that is on their list like ammo, even one bullet. Your life will be ruined.

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New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

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