US Gov to explore requiring 3d printer manufacturers and software developers to contain controls to prevent users from manufacturing firearms components
Law enforcement leans on 3D-printer industry to help thwart machine gun conversion devices
Yes, because it's so difficult to get a gun in America any other way /s
Probably the gun industry lobbying for this 🫢
Next up: Smith and Wesson is granted a copyright for DRM on STL files.
Clearly she has no idea how 3D printers or guns work
It is, yes. But it’s also legal to make your own.
Are they going to require government monitors if you own a CNC machine next?
Ban pipes when?
It wouldn't surprise me if somebody tried to get such a thing passed in a couple of years.
They should put controls on lathes and mills to prevent making guns. Metal guns are a lot more effective than plastic guns anyways. /s
My understanding is that the metal parts are bought. The only part of a gun that is controlled legally is fine in plastic
This is basically how today's 3d printed guns work, but even still the gun isn't good for more then a few magazines afaik. So it's interesting as a way to create a gun that isn't serialized and the ATF can't trace, but it's not durable, and it still requires a good deal of precision engineering/cost, so its not feasible to print a truck-load and sell them for cheap.
Taking this purely as an engineering task, how is this remotely possible? I can barely begin to imagine how restrictions on what can be printed could be set. Am I missing something obvious? Some kind of contextual understanding of the object seems to be necessary... please don't tell me their proposed solution is AI.
In any case it will never work because 3D printing is so easy for makers to do from scratch, so any solution will fail to prevent printed guns from being made.
Again, this is just the pragmatic engineering angle. Please don't respond with political arguments.
Just spitballing but you'd have to align the desired shape somehow, perhaps with a singular value decomposition. Once its transform was normalized you could compare its shape, or perhaps its convex hull, with a database of banned shapes.
The problem is this is pretty easy to defeat (by adding extra sprues and spikes to the object, breaking it into two shapes, etc) and the more aggressive you get with the check the more you risk false positives.
An AI training set would involve creating a dataset of all the banned shapes, then generating tens of thousands of permutations of them however you believe people might try to trick it. Ultimately the AI would lock onto some small feature of the shape that scores it as positive, perhaps something trivial. That also leads to weird false positives. This also creates an arms race as people figure out what that feature is subvert it.
This problem is much harder in 3D than in 2D (currency). Since you can also cut, file, and glue shit that comes out of a 3D printer later I don't think this is a solvable problem. Like most gun control measures in the USA it appears to be aesthetics.
You could also just aggressively go false positive all over the place and say "fuck the users", with exceptions for cops. This is basically the USA's approach to drones.
a database of banned shapes
banned shapes
banned
shapes
That would be an even more interesting solution for finding new gun-designs for mass-manufacture. Kalashnikov, Winchester, Glock, and Colt watch out!
Since the best available firmware is open source I don't see any way of imposing limits on it.
The printer itself doesn't even know what it's making since it's reading directions one by one, so any limits would need to be implemented at a slicer level, which are also basically all open source (at least any worth using).
The only way I could see it working would be mandating that all printers sold in the US come with software checks against it and be non reflashable, but considering a new driver board that would be able to drive 95% of printers is about $25 it is nothing more than screaming into the void.
You can also build a 3d printer from scratch pretty easily. Would need to regulate random electronics and robotics components
Open source firmware doesn't mean anything as long as tivoization is happening.
Which I don't know whether it's the case, but legislature might make this a requirement.
I don't know the answer to the question, but paper printers cannot print bank notes apparently
Which is a very easily recognized pattern, color, and size. The entire point of a dollar is that every single one looks identical.
Imagine if every single dollar bill was a different color, shape, size, printing pattern, etc… Now imagine trying to block that. Now consider that as soon as you figure out how to block all of the current versions, anyone in the world can just design a new version in 5 minutes.
Somewhat related, the US Gov provides play money that you can print for your kids, which I found helpful to teach my kids about how money works. https://www.uscurrency.gov/sites/default/files/download-materials/en/Printable-Play-Money.pdf
True, but nothing else looks like money. Lots of things have a similar shape as the barrel of a gun.
Money is also quite detailed, with a known list of configurations. Any counterfeit would need to match the details in those known configurations extremely well. Finding that match with a high degree of accuracy is a fairly well understood and common engineering task. This is not the same task as identifying anything that could possibly be used to represent money with a high degree of accuracy, which is essentially what would be needed in the gun printing problem.
Most currencies have a special pattern that printers are programmed to detect and refuse to print. Since illegal gun part designs can't be forced to include a marker declaring that they're gun parts, a 3d printer would have to 1) know what a gun is, 2) know how a gun works, 3) be able to tell whether any particular shape could be used as part of a gun, and 4) be able to tell whether any particular shape could be cut and reassembled into a shape that could be used as part of a gun
that's different, bank notes follow the same pattern/design, the components that could be printed for firearms vary so much in shape and size, even for the same components across different platforms.
Yup, this just sounds impossible without just banning the printers. Guns don't have to conform to typical gun shapes. You could just print anything that can function as a barrel and some of the other pieces and then just go in the garage and whittle a handle from a piece of wood or something. Make a part that is much larger and then just cut off the piece you want. I mean there are so many ways around this it's not even funny.
There is essentially no way to enforce, or even monitor this, like it's fundamentally impossible without controlling everything from stl creation, to weapon construction.
Hit the nail right on the head for what they want. Why do you think they are making laws to ban porn? It's a hide behind think of the children to get your foot in the door to control more
I love technological non-solutions to social problems. They are the only thing the work better then passing more laws that say you can't murder people with guns.
You can't 3D print a gun, but you can buy one without a background check. Brilliant.
Think of the stock prices!
I see 10,000 forks in the near future, and fully decentralized ways of hosting them. God forbid we actually try to regulate real guns, no it's those damn hobbyists who spent thousands on printers!
Trying to stop a printer from printing sounds like a tough ask.
Maybe they can partner with Epson or Brother, they're pretty good at keeping their printers from printing
Those are angels compared to HP
The pressure behind a bullet ~14,000psi. The pressure that a 3D resin can handle ~ 200psi. Any questions?
Oh yeah, how do 3D printed guns kill? 1) use non 3d printed parts or 2, hold the bullets in the gun-like case, carry a hammer, if you need to shoot the bullet just get the bullet out between two of your fingers, run like crazy towards the target, then bury that sucker with a real nice hammer thud. If you practice real good, you can hit a good 3 or 4 target spots. If you do it it slow enough you can probably hit one bullet with another bullet! Well, you can always do that. Heck you can put 10 bullets or more in a baggie and they will all hit each other.
I guess if you need a ruzzian war diy survivor gun, just go-to the hardware store and get a pipe. No 3D printed stuff. You can make the handle from wood! That's literally all a 3D printer is good for in gun making, the handle. But you can carve one out with a router. Are routers illegal yet because you can make a gun .... handle....?
Yeah like that won't be bypassed in about 3 seconds.
Worst thing is, with any systemic rule change, the change js not instant. Allowing something like that would wither cause a spike up in crimes, or we'd feel it down the line. On the other hand, banning them doesn't make sense, either.
Damn it's been a long time since I've had to use the whole thing:
Rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off.
Now available as a .stl file!
Maybe the dumbest possible idea here from government regulators. You think you're going to somehow legislate certain geometry out of existence? "Sorry, you can't print that ILLEGAL SHAPE with the printer you own!" Same vacant headed assholes that think they can ban encryption. Fuck off, shrivel up and perish, please.
They can explore the requirement, but they will get lost during their expedition.
Never stopped them before from still passing half-assed laws.
And those half-assed laws make great pretext laws.
"That guy has a 3d printer! He might be fabbing ghost guns!"
I built my own 3d printer 👉 👈
3d printing 3d printing machine. infinite money hax O.o?
No infinite money sink. Started by printed some upgrades for my printer, now i suddenly have 3 that can waste plastic at significantly higher speeds.
Lol, most of this crap is DIY, good luck with that
Boy THAT will work! Good idea government!
Was there a shooting with a printed firearm recently?
Irrelevant: the goal is not preventing shootings (I mean, they would go for the obvious solution otherwise)
not sure but I heard they recently caught the FGC-9 designer
EDIT found the story: https://news.sky.com/story/jacob-duygu-incel-who-mysteriously-died-unmasked-as-creator-of-worlds-most-popular-3d-printed-gun-12997178
This isn't really about safety, it's about gun manufacturer profits.
Like how machine gun owners don’t support the repeal of the nfa or fopa because it would tank the value of their stamp items.
Normally this is when the "small government" Republican party says "let's not get government that too involved"....
...that is if they didn't go full reich
Somebody needs to be seen doing something before the next election.
Incidentally, 3d printed parts aren't used for conversion kits. They're machined out of metal stock (and occasionally re-machined original parts).
From what I have seen 3d printing is used to create the exterior of the gun. The functional firing parts such as the barrel are made out of machined metal
That squares with the greyprints I've looked at. However, the article specifically talks about conversion kits.
where are people distributing 3d printed gun models? I'm guessing thingiverse has already cracked down on weapons
There are still a bunch of torrents being seeded out there.
Fosscad.org has a good zip archive, I still see some from time to time on printables aswell.
Prop guns for cosplay gonna get a lot more difficult for now reason if this passes.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's really funny if you think about it. There are currently more guns in the US than there are people. I guess they will combat this by limiting 3d printing.
What if you 3d print a 3d printer?
Given my skill with 3d model creation, i'd be more likely to create something that would hurt me than inflicting harm on someone else. Mostly when I take that razor sharp tool to remove anything from the build plate, but also just my awful measurements and tolerances.
If they could do this, it would be a good idea. It's just not possible.
Anyone ever try to photocopy currency?
Money is easy, many currencies have the "Eurion constellation" which can be recognized by the copier. It will be much harder to recognise a 3d printed part to detect something that can be made into a gun.
Yeah that was my thoughts too. It’s not like it can’t be bypassed but it’s not “easy.” This is kinda how I see it going for commercial 3D printers. It’s not a bad thing either. I’ve always been a fan of making people earn dangerous knowledge & skills. Even in fictional universes like Star Trek there’s restrictions on using a replicator to make weapons.
So it’s not unreasonable, imho, to put some kind of guard rails up that force people to actively bypass restrictions in making weapons.
The trick will be telling the difference between making a nerf gun, action figure guns, and an actual weapon. That I don’t see being possible at this time. Too many edge cases that don’t neatly fit.
Impossible. The only actual discourse I think they have is to either ban 3d printers outright, require that filament/resin etc designed for these is made somehow traceable, or license and/or registrate the purchase and/or used of the printers/filaments.
Can we get the names of these people so we can have their drivers licenses taken away?
wootwoot 3d printing mentioned 😎
Yeah good luck with that fuckheads
Down right idiotic. I'm all for some better gun control, but this is just a stupid idea.
If Texas wants to put a bounty on women, we should be able to put a bounty on guns. It'd be a lot more effective too.
I'll never understand why we just can't do the exact same things as Republicans do thats within the letter of the law (hopefully spirit-ish but letter is the main concern)
Illegal migrants employed? Texas bounty
Illegal guns possession or production? Texas bounty
Abuse of religious tax exemption or religious political activism? Texas bounty
Seperation of church and state violations? Texas bounty
Get the direct witnesses to trash some scratch for the trouble and watch the streets clean themselves
Something Chuck Norris could support….
Republicans literally hunting women
Liberals: "if only we could disarm women, things would be better."
Good luck with that given 3D printers are full of open-source software.
Don't bring that to their attention- they'll start banning open source too.
POLICE, HE RELEASED HIS SOFTWARE FREE FOR ANYONE TO USE, SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT