California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business

Based on the fact that Claude Opus 4.8 decided I needed a cybersecurity exemption to debug a stupid pure virtual call bug (basically virtual method called inside of destructor) that I had already found, oh boy, I sure would love to have my 3D prints analyzed by Anthropic safe guards. We should also ensure that nothing shaped like a dildo can be printed without scanning our face and genitalia and keeping it on file with Persona while we're at it.

I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.

The future is almost certainly the terrible path: "applications phoning home to judge whether a use case is approved by the company." All writing is on the wall, and directionally that's the way software and hardware has been moving. We have unfortunately normalized the idea that users must have this ongoing tethered relationship to the product manufacturers and software developers, who measure, change, and control the user's usage at their whim.

You can no longer just buy a tool and use it.

Yes, I can imagine it too. And, if such a 'safety nanny' is enacted into law, I'm confident it will A. Refuse to print a significant number of innocent projects, or B. Be trivially circumvented by bad actors. The odds are high that it will manage to do both.

They will also refuse to print 3D printer parts, especially spares for the printer to print them.

Finally a llm trained on manufacturing weapons. "AI remove all the safe metal from a lower reciever so that the dangerous part can be safely destroyed without endangering the environment "

Knowing how governments do this stuff its going to be something lazy/easy to bypass like a list of stl files/hashes that are banned

When I was a kid I saw someone with a makeshift shotgun made out of a steel pipe, a strong spring, and and a rough striker. Not very effective, but it was working.

You missed the step where a DMV-clone of a state bureaucracy reviews the LLMs output before nixing the request a few weeks after the LLMs result.

A dedicated model for this purpose could easily run locally. Recognizing shapes is not exactly cutting age AI.

The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)

The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.

It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.

Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.

It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.

There are several snarky knee-jerk reactions in the comments here, but state assemblies pass things all the time that ultimately fail to pass or get vetoed. Now the public will debate it, contact their state senators to give their opinions...it's all part of the process.

Americans are not allowed to buy Kinder eggs.

You have to compare Europe to California.

CA != USA.

USA has plenty of saner places. In fact, one could argue that CA is a local minimum for sanity in USA

Regulatory speaking, California is America's Europe

california is the europe of the united states, for better or for worse.

Well that's one state, and the one that fancies itself as the most European in spirit, at that.

You managed to defeat the first layer of defense - the warning. The yellow identifying dots were present on your printed copy, should you have decided become a precocious criminal successful enough to warrant the attention of the Secret Service.

Do printers still do that? I wonder if the tracking dots are still there as well, haven’t used a printer in a while

What is the assumed intention?

Why does Bloomberg get into so much activism?

The problem is there is a lot of garbage about it. Ghost guns are a real issue, but ghost guns are not 3D printed guns.

3D printed is a very niche case. They're only good for one shot ever, they are not reliable even for that. And they're bulky. The one thing they do is make it much harder for a metal detector to find them.

Ghost guns made by CNC milling equipment are nearly identical to what you would buy from the manufacturer, except they do not have a serial number and you won't have the background check for a firearms purchase.

But politicians are reacting to the ghost guns by going after the printed guns.

All those terrible republicans against this common sense bill.

Sir are you a licensed chef of good standing in OnlyChef's database? That knife is dangerous. We can issue you a government approved plastic version if you need to cut something, but SoylentGreen(tm) is Ready-to-Scoop(tm)!

Fun fact:

There is a law in California that has been interpreted to mean that all clubbing weapons are illegal. So if you by a length of pipe and keep it around (e.g. under your bed) explicitly for self-defense purposes, you have committed a crime.

IANAL, but as far as I can tell, keeping a shotgun in your home for self-defense purposes would be fine, as long as you aren't planning ahead of time to use it as a club.

[edit]

My information is slightly out-of-date; there was an injunction against enforcement in 2024 from Fouts v Bonta. I have no clue the injunction is or is not still in effect, so ask your lawyer before carrying a club.

A single shopping to trip to Walmart or Home Depot can buy items that can be repurposed into bombs and physical and chemical weapons with only a little bit of know-how. Are we going to require mandatory ID and shopping cart analysis to all shopping too?

They'll also have to ban motors and microcontrollers. As they can be used to build 3D printers and drones.

Maybe they'll ban Github, too - as it hosts unregulated open source software that can power these scary tools.

For a long time, you couldn’t buy “strike anywhere” matches because they could be used in producing meth.

“That’s what you get for voting for fascist Republicans! Turns out elections have consequences.” /s

It does not. The gun lobby routinely lies about California regulations to try and get their way. They're on year 13 of boycotting the California handgun market, for example; new handgun models in the state are required to adopt microstamping technology, but firearms manufacturers are ideologically opposed to this technology, so they falsely claim that it doesn't exist.

The California legislature has a history of passing stupid stuff that later gets vetoed by Newsom. They tried to ban self-driving trucks last year.

It will be a grim day for democracy as well

If it becomes law, then other US states and countries will try to copy it as well.

With counterfeit currency, the whole point of the counterfeit is to look indistinguishable from the original. This makes it very easy to detect - you know exactly what to look for and you can block it with high confidence, because anything that is not sufficiently similar to the expected image is also too low-quality to be of use. There's also a fairly limited number of banknote designs in the world, and they are only updated rarely.

Not so with guns. Literally hundreds of existing designs, thousands if you account for all the variations. But more importantly, a working firearm is fundamentally an engineering problem with too many solutions. Real world designs tend to be as simple as they can be while still functioning (which is why most modern guns today are very similar internally - the field has converged, what difference remains is mostly legacy path dependent quirks). But if the goal is to defeat a filter, they can be easily made into something more complicated, looking very different but working largely the same.

And if you make the filter fuzzy enough to catch such things, it will also trigger on many completely unrelated things.

> commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency

They will refuse to print images that contain the EURion constellation, a cluster of points with specific distances between them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)

More generally, "Does this image represent US currency?" and "Does this 3D mesh represent a dangerous gun part?" are different kinds of questions.

Checking if an image is US currency is simple. Not only can an image similarity hash be used, but the design of the currency can be changed to make checking easier. The checking program just has to run a textbook algorithm and compare the result with a handful of hashes (we only have a few denominations of bills).

We can be confident that the checking program will always see substantial portions of the bill, so it can always see the pattern. If someone chopped the bill into tiny pieces, it would look fake when glued together. Looking like a real bill is the thing we want to control, and that's something we can reliably measure with simple algorithms.

Checking if a 3D shape is a gun part is an unsolvable problem. (It would be equivalent to making a program that can detect hidden "subversive" meanings in text.) The checker would have to understand how the piece could operate in the hands of a skilled person. Parts could be printed in multiple pieces, or have material removed after printing, so it'd have to anticipate all possible post-processing steps.

Even if the problem is limited to "match against these known gun part hashes", gun parts are not defined by their overall appearance. The files can be mutated until they no longer trip the detector, yet can be easily post-processed into functional components. (Also, a similarity hash for 3D toolpaths may not exist.)

(Such a hashing regime would be useless to stop "3D-printed guns" as a concept, because the design could be changed to not match the hash at all, without post-processing.)

Because you don't really have to do any additional steps once the ink is on the paper like you do with a 3D printed firearm.

Looking at just the silhouette or shape, you couldn't really tell the difference between the body of a firearm that was later going to receive a metal tube from the hardware store or a plastic bracket that I'm going to use to support a shelf.

And even if you could accurately tell the difference, how do you know I'm not helping my nephew build a Nerf gun?

They’re not printing the metal parts. They’re printing the frame (as in “polymer framed handgun”).

The frame is the part that gets the serial number and is considered the controlled part of the gun. Rather than the trigger, the springs, the barrel, etc.

Other than the frame, which requires an FFL for transfer, especially across state lines, the rest of the parts can be ordered and shipped from anywhere and are not controlled.

Mind, that’s changing, again notably in CA, as they now talk about “gun pre-cursor” parts.

The 3D printed frames are similar to the “80% lowers” which are aluminum blocks that are “80%” complete AR-15 lowers (the lower receiver, again, the controlled part of an AR-15).

With straight forward machining and some jigs, those chunks of metal can be finished into an operational lower receiver, and the rest of the rifle can be assembled from disparate parts ordered from anywhere.

The original “ghost gun” before 3D printers enabled folks to assemble Glocks in their garage.

It is fearmongering. You technically can print an all-plastic firearm that works for a round or so until they explode, but only after you have already printed and tested and refined multiple times over, and best case it is still an inferior material to metal. I would put it in the same category as "Yeah you can turn a tree trunk into a cannon, tell me when not to come over when you use it." You can probably make a similarly reliable firearm out of fired clay if you put in the same effort.

Some parts in regular firearms can be printed in plastic, guns with polymer parts have existed since polymers existed, but it is only marginally simpler than machining it out of metal. After all you can buy a metal CNC machine for handful of bucks more than a 3d printer and you don't have to worry about shitty materials breaking immediately.

And there are already plenty of examples of hardware store pipe guns that if someone spent more than a day or two working on it would by far surpass anything anyone can print.

People normally don't make guns that are entirely 3d printed. Homemade guns often get the parts exposed to highest stresses commercially.

Fwiw, when I paid attention to my local police department's released body cam vids, maybe around 1/3 of the guns they showed as evidence were polymer80s (edit: which I mistakenly assumed were 3d printed, but it turns out they aren't so feel free to disregard that fun fact)

In the US I believe there's many metal 'spare parts' for guns available, including the barrel, so don't need to print the whole thing. So they're usually not talking about entirely printed guns.

A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)

I know very little about guns but know 3d printing quite well. My understanding is that a fully 3d printed gun is not reliable, you need to acquire actual gun parts for the path where the bullet fires (the barrel?). Then can use 3d printing for the rest

They're pretty damn reliable if you either use a hybrid model (FGC-9) where the barrel is "explosion proof pipe" from china that is then electrically machined (easy with 3d printed mandrel) to form a nice rifled barrel.

Or you just 3d print the "receiver" for something like an Ar-15, which isn't load bearing. If you use the right materials and the beefier designs it will lats hundreds to thousands of rounds. The rest of the parts can be bought through the mails unregulated.

I heard a billionaire is funding this, he’s probably afraid of the one famous instance of someone like him getting killed by one of those.

They're inexpensive and you can learn the basics of using one in a few hours.

(But doesn't the bill also cover subtractive manufacturing?)

NY is controlling both 3D printers and CNC machines.

> As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.

My bet is the US militaro-industrial complex is busy preparing juicy contracts to sell shitload of drones and drones-related tech to the US government now that they understood that drones in warfare were a thing (Ukraine vs Russia showed it and Iran-vs-the-world showed it too).

The US has something like 12 tech companies in the top 20 biggest companies by market cap in the world: do you really think the US is "falling behind in drone tech" because a country that has never invented anything (besides mass killings of their own citizens) since religious extremists took over managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets?

That a country bent on violence (including towards its own citizens) where pick-up trucks armed with .50 cal, AK47s and explosive are the norm can slap explosive on DJI drones is resourceful but I wouldn't exactly call it "passing ahead in drone tech".

I don't gamble but I'd make an exception and bet big that the US is going to end up right next to China, at the very top, when it comes to drone tech. While I fully expect the EU to fall behind in drone tech.

They’re just waiting for the union to fall apart and then those will be next.

Lawful gun use means the guns must be registered and users need to be licensed and go through background checks. Presumably part of the concern with 3d printed guns is that anybody can print them without going through that registration, licensing and background check process.

Also don't they require real metal parts anyway?

This feels exactly like a feels good general public appeal law though. The average person doesn’t know or care much about 3D printers and is horrified by the level of gun violence in America and wants to see something done.

You think too highly of California voters.

All they have to do if frame it as an unnecessary freedom that only conservatives and wackos want to keep and they will 100% support it.

They see their state as a sort of oasis in the country and will do whatever it takes to keep the guns out. They really believe they’re just a few laws away from solving any issue a “reasonable” American could face.

Well, from the point of view of Californian politicians, was it their anti-balance-billing AB72 that was over-regulation before No Surprises Act? Or the CCPA? Or the Auto-Renewal Law? And looking back even farther: was it CalOPPA that was overreach requiring privacy policies? Paid family leave and sick leave?

Some made life hard for Californians like the CARB gasoline blend requirement but I think if you proposed removing any of those laws you'd find yourself downvoted here and called a corporate bootlicker on Reddit - which is not a poll of all people but should give you an idea of the fact that they're not unpopular.

The last time California Republicans had some power around 2009-12 they used it to manufacture crises and shut down the government. Since then voters have shut them out of power, including by passing 2010's Prop 25 which stripped the minority of the 2/3 veto they used to have.

also I would love to get the contract for the embedded firearm detecting LLM

do you guys even America? catch up

We collectively went from singing the praises of "essential workers" to striving to replace and deport them in a 5-year period.

The 10th amendment to the Constitution reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

I can't tell if this is a joke or a serious question.

Procedurally the US is closer to a EU style alliance of sovereign nations than a single one. Practically the federal government has long since overgrown it's constitutional role as the equivalent of the EU bodies but if you're looking at a US state and wondering why it's acting like a sovereign nation the answer is generally because it is one, on paper.

The 10th amendment is why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

Assuming this is a sincere question from someone who doesn’t know US history:

States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.

Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.

Here's a series of models, which of these is a gun part? https://imgur.com/a/p3UtJqW

Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.

But money counterfeiting is a different proposition: the printer is blocking exactly known patterns found on real currency. In fact, many bill designs incorporate patterns that are easily machine detectable for this purpose.

Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?

I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.

Yellow dots doxxing me whenever I print something is equally despicable, client side scanning on my iPhone is equally despicable.

Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.

Until America bans actual guns I don't want to hear about the "growing problem" of 3D printed guns.