Back when 3D printers were brand-new, I was at a college event where the Engineering Club had one on display. I stopped to watch it, and spoke with the kid who had built it. He was a Freshman, and had built it during the previous summer, because he wanted to come to college and make an instant splash in the Engineering Department.
He certainly succeeded, because he was the one in the booth that everybody wanted to talk to, while the upperclassmen that hadn’t accomplished anything, sat in the back of the booth and glowered at the Freshman upstart.
So anyway, if they ban them, we’ll just build them.
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble…”
I believe the entire goal of RepRap was to build a machine that could build all the parts needed to build another machine. Most of the parts for a lot of machines are either 3d printable or bog-standard off-the-shelf parts that could be used for millions of other things. I have a feeling the really scary target would be software, something similar to the draconian age-verification BS being run around.
Targetting commercial offers would not cut it though. They would have to make octoprint, open source firmware etc a crime. A lot of printer run exclusively on non-commercial software and on Chinese control boards, with or without raspberry pi.
That’s one way do deal with the traffic: just make your state so shitty place to live that everyone moves elsewhere.
Do nothing about school shootings. Destroy hobbies and manufacturing instead. America is rotting from the inside.
And this is fucking progressive ass Cali.
The left and the right can’t stop fucking with their bases long enough to fix real problem.
America has been rotting from the inside since WW2 (MIC, FBI and CIA terrorism, etc), then supercharged with Reagan. Frankly, it’s surprising it took this long.
But like… are they going to prohibit all forms of melding materials into a shape? You can make a shank out of a stick rubbed on a rock ffs.
Or just use the rock.
So try and ban 3D printing guns, because that’s too dangerous. But still sell guns at wallmarkt to be bought without background checks? I have the feeling something is a little off here…
You can’t buy guns at Walmart in California.
FFS, you still need a bg check to buy from Walmart. There’s plenty of things to point out to fight for sane gun laws without making shit up.
Fair, however, the point remains, that the whole 3D printers are dangerous weapon manufacturing sources is BS. 3D printers, at least those affordable to hobbyists are a damn poor choice for creating fire weapons. Yes, you can print some non-critical parts but that’s about it. How many people died due to 3d printed guns in the US and how many to legally/illegally owned?
Maybe spend 5 minutes looking into it before commenting on something you know nothing about.
If it is so obvious, you could easily show me a source with the number of victims of 3d printed fire weapons, legally owned commercial fire weapons and illegally owned commercial fire weapons, in California or the US as a whole.
Or were you commenting on the suitability of FDM or resin printers for producing critical function parts of fire weapons? Which of the parts one could produce via FDM or resin, that couldn’t be produced with subtractive manufacturing methods? Please elaborate with actual arguments.
From who are these awful ideas in California governing coming from
The lobbying power of tech companies that profit from proprietary technology and feel threatened by open source. The same people who are behind DRM on everything from ebooks and music to printer inks, and legal restrictions on repairing the devices you own.
This but it’s not just tech companies, it’s all companies and a feature of our lovely system 🙃
The tech bros.
Who are owned by private equity for sovereign wealth funds pushing for nothing but returns. Hence they don’t care if they sign on the line with Goebbels or enshittify their product into uselessness.
Anti-gun/gun control lobby would be my first guess. You can basically print all the serialized parts (the part required for registration) for most any gun then get the rest of the parts and assemble it yourself. The gun parts don’t necessarily even need to be based on an actual manufactured gun, there are designs for completely homemade guns down to the barrel using parts you can easily pick up at any hardware store. Then there are also people who are printing parts that can turn some semi-automatic guns into selectable fully automatic.
Problem is the plans are already in the wild for printing gun parts and for open source printers. I don’t know what good would accomplish to deter people from printing when the person targeted is already motivated enough to print one to begin with.
Could you also just make these same parts out steel or aluminum? Seems like a weird arbitrary line to essentially say what material you can make them out of and what equipment you can use. Or are benchtop CNCs gonna be banned next?
Not sure about the California bill, but the similar shit out of Washington state does have language for subtractive manufacturing as well as additive. They basically are targeting any computer controlled manufacturing.
It all feels so obviously stupid when there are people on the internet selling partially complete metal parts with instructions for how to finish them completely unrestricted. They obviously aren’t worried about stopping the “ghost gun problem”, they are worried about people having the means of production and the right to repair things they own.
Ok so aluminum casting is still OK.
This is the sad state of the US I guess.
Two States, California and Washington, are not “The US” any more than France and Germany are the European Union. They are important no doubt but they do not themselves represent the entire entity.
Yes to your entire comment
Making a gun is already illegal in California and Washington. This stupid law won’t make any difference. If someone is willing to break the law to make a gun, they probably are not going to follow this law either. 3D printed guns are rarely used to commit crimes anyways. It takes a lot of time and effort to get one to work well.
This is probably about companies like Bamboo Labs wanting an excuse to lock down printers even more. It will also make it difficult or impossible for smaller companies to sell 3D printers in California to get rid of competition.
Unlike laws against making guns, this law applies to printer sellers, not to their users.
Yeah, kinda reminds me of when Sony music put a rootkit virus on their music CDs except this time it’s going through the state governments to encrypted things. This also feels as dumb as making math illegal in terms of outlawing encryption or making some numbers illegal because when arranged in a certain way they are an .stl file for a copyrighted character or an .mp3 file for a song.
This is just making something that is already illegal more illegal and opening a massive hole for government and corpo spying.
And probably an attempt to get licensing fees from printing STL file, so you can’t print any Disney figurine without paying them.
The problem with 3D printers is people are repairing things with parts made on them. We can’t have that.
Washington State. They have a identical (or at least similar) bill I heard about last month.
