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…
You can get a stamp for full auto easily, my neighbor is an FFL and gets them frequently
You can transfer them. You can't register a new one. This is why H&K transferable sears are like $50k.
My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
I’ll just build my own 3D printer lol. Did it college 15 years ago. I’ll do it again.
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.
Wikipedia has much better information about guns than most of the people talking about them in politics, generally speaking. It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony: https://www.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/a4gnr3/makes_perf... (Sorry for the reddit link, it's a common image but that was the first…
ATF rulemaking can be unintuitive and arbitrary but there really is a level below it occupied by people who have dedicated a significant chunk of their lives to trying to restrict firearm ownership, who genuinely seem to believe that Die Hard, Rambo, and Spaghetti Westerns are real life. Politicians who can't answer basic questions about their legislation, who have to be told live on air that magazines can be repacked, that just make up impossible crime statistics. Yeah it's stupid that the ATF has decided that vertical grips are a rifle feature but angled grips aren't, but it gets worse.
So what's next? People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks? Who's liable in this case?
> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?
The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.
It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.
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".
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.
To mandate tracking dots they would first have to admit they exist.
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…
Thats defacto gun registration- and worse: registration with a private entity not beholden to due process. Given current realities, anybody who registers their firearm in such a manner can expect a no-knock raid because they were nearby when somebody phoned in an engine backfire as a gunshot.
So make it allowed that the insurance is tied to the gun. You buy a lifetime policy for that serial number, provide payment, and you're done. Payment can be provided anonymously at a window in cash, if that's your thing.
If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.
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, whi…
> 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.
They haven't done this specific restriction, but there is a movement to make it illegal to possess the CAD files: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3877
Images of authentic $50 bills are pretty easily detected. They are designed that way. It's not technically possible to detect "gun geometry". The only way to comply with this law is to ban 3d printers entirely.
Good news, as the article notes, the proposed regulation creates a working group to determine of it is feasible and won't require any further regulation if it is found nonfeasible. If you're right and this does prove to be "not technically possible", then nothing will actually change.
Hopefully this working group would do the right thing but the worldwide battle against end-to-end encryption is a pretty bad precedent. Experts who disagree with government surveillance demands seem to get discarded and replaced with yes-men. The California microstamping law isn't a good situation either.
So what's next? People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks? Who's liable in this case?
> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks? The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not c…
There is close to zero chance the current Supreme Court would find a law that criminalizes possession of a file describing the making a gun to be constitutional.