Technically it’s for any printer capable of printing a firearm or the components of a firearm, which is…. every printer. What a bafflingly stupid proposal. If you’re in NY, please call your reps and tell them to oppose this bill.
This is second time they trying to pass this bullshit. 2023 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A8132
new york will do anything but fix actual problems lmao
This is braindead, are they gonna require background checks for the hardware store next?
Or worse, buying guns everywhere?
Don’t forget sporting goods and kitchen supplies. Heck, you can get a bunch of decent knives in IKEA, better put furniture outlets on a watchlist.
Any engineer worth their salt can do this without a 3d printer. Idiots.
Next up, you’re going to have to register your drill press, lathe, etc.
Are they going to require background checks for purchasing metal working equipment? Or maybe just make it illegal to bring any metal to melting point without a license.
Because you can make guns with metal.
Tell us your corporate paymasters are afraid without saying they’re afraid.
Someone go ahead and trademark the term “ghost printer.”
I built my own, so I guess stepper motors and heating elements should also be under the law.
Some actual gun control laws would be better, not to mention universal health care. What’s next on the list? Kitchen knives? Pans, pots? ;)
I grew up in NY. The gun control laws were draconian 45 years ago. I can’t imagine they have become more lax since I departed the state 30 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABpc_oPToQQ
This video shows the stupidity of new york
“Printed guns” by " tipsy duck"
How much harder would it be than getting an actual gun?
Road trip to Georgia and back, basically.
Just FYI, you can’t buy a firearm at a dealer outside of your home state without having it shipped to an FFL holder in your home state. E.g., I can’t drive to Family Firearms in Alabama from Georgia–where i live–to buy a gun. I have to order from them, and then have it shipped to an FFL near me, and then fill out the paperwork in my own state. In states that allow private, p2p sales (which is most of them), you could buy a firearm with cash from an individual, and they’d never do a background check or fill out a 4473.
Makes total sense
my granny got one in a Walmart parking lot so it can’t be that hard.
Still don’t know how that even happens.Well, maybe that’s your (US&A) problem, not 3d printers ;)
Oh my god it’s back? I was hoping we’d seen the last of it back in 2023.
Luigi would have passed a background check.
And didn’t even use his own printer (according to his confession/manifesto)…
was it even printed in new york? I mean im sure someone would never bring one in from jersey.
Everything is legal in New Jersey.
Why do you print like you’re running out of time?
Unexpected Hamilton ❤️
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How stupid, I use my printer to print minis for DnD. But, wait, it could theoretically print a gun, better get a background check, and have a waiting period of 6 months… fucking stupid.
Let’s try to address the problems that led to this. Nah, let’s try to ban stuff instead.
It won’t even be effective. As I pointed out earlier, hoodlums in the ghetto, who are the implicit targets of this, aren’t buying Bambus and becoming 3D printing experts overnight just to run off one off-the-books Glock. Someone with five or six brain cells to rub together is printing guns in quantity and selling them to the criminals. Anyone willing to employ that business model can and will simply kit build a printer rather than buying an off the shelf unit, which is certainly not difficult to do. It just adds one extra step to the operation for anyone who truly wants to do this, and 3D printing a working firearm is already a pretty decent commitment especially if you’re not already an experienced printer. Especially Glock frames.
Ehhh typically the hood gunsmith is the guy with a 10 stack of braincells, who gets an ender and becomes decent enough with it to print a lower, slap a cheap nbs parts kit in it and finish it with an even-cheaper-than-PSA upper, and sell it for $200 to anyone he knows, rinse and repeat. Really makes his money printing switches and DIAS.
Still though, stupid law.
There’s a 3D printer designed to also print itself, right?
That’s kinda-sorta the goal of the RepRap project, yes, but some ancillary parts are still required like motors and control boards and heater blocks and such.
Awful. Literally banning science, because it can be misused.
We’d better go the full mile. Here’s my list of things to be banned, For Our SafetyTM:
- 3/4" and 1" galvanized steel pipe and endcaps
- Cases of matches
- Acetone
- Stump killer
- Milling machines
- Lathes
- Drill presses
- Hydrogen peroxide
- Salt, Sodium Chloride
- Stainless steel bolts
- Benchtop power supplies
- Sulfur
- Carbon
- Water
- Aluminum foil
I’m sure I can think of others if you give me a minute or two.
Can’t you make a pipe bomb out of PVC?
Not a good one, I’d imagine. The casings real purpose afaik is to turn into shrapnel, I don’t think plastic would be as effective. Then again, I believe it’s common to mix screws or similar in with the explosive for more shrapnel, so maybe. Just speculating though
Usually you fill pipe bombs with shrapnal, like BBs
- FOR PURPOSES OF THIS SECTION, “THREE-DIMENSIONAL PRINTER” MEANS A COMPUTER OR COMPUTER-DRIVEN MACHINE OR DEVICE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A THREE-DIMENSIONAL OBJECT FROM A DIGITAL MODEL
Well, that’s a broad definition. I guess to whomever wrote that, a CNC mill is also a 3d printer.
It’s not like inkjets produce 2 dimensional ink. I’d love to see someone argue in court that it’s technically impossible to create a non 3d printer
I’m pretty sure there are actual industrial multicolor 3d printers that use an inkjet design
A CNC mill seems much more capable of manufacturing firearms than some 300 buck printer.
Not really.
There are gun parts that just can’t be printed in plastic (reliably. There are proof of concept “all plastic except the firing pin” guns). But… because of how lobbyists tainted what few gun control laws we have, most of what makes a gun a gun CAN be printed and the rest can be bought as after market parts. That is why an incredibly common “ghost gun” is basically “print this and then go buy this replacement barrel and this baggy of parts to repair a glock”.
Whereas a mill is great for those metal parts and you can theoretically mill an entire gun, it isn’t going to be a gun you “want” to use and, odds are, you are going to need a lot more technical skills. And for stuff like “ghost guns” and the bootleg mods used in stuff like The Troubles? A 3d printer is MUCH more accessible and MUCH easier to make.
The reality is that neither is going to be effective in the case of a militia/uprising scenario (yes, you can print an AR-15 and it isn’t THAT hard to reinforce the plastic to handle intermediate rounds. No, you can’t print a hellfire missile or a predator drone or a tank). And for the purposes of a school shooting? Why print a gun when you can just grab daddy’s glock out of his nightstand or junk drawer?
I’ll also add on the reason why additive manufacturing is so loved by Industry. Milling is subtractive. You get a piece of stock and you cut it until it is the part you want. If you can guarantee said piece of stock is approximately the same dimensions every time, you can automate that. But getting a piece to those dimensions has a significant cost. 3d printing? As long as you clear out the build plate and sort of control the environment, it is the same operations every single time.
So to 3d print a glock? You go to one of the naughty sites, get the STL, make a few tweaks to your slicer, and start it (old Vice actually did a really good video on this). After that you wait until it is done, remove the supports, file the ever loving hell out of it, and you are ready to go blasting.
To mill a glock? You go to one of the naught sites and get the gcode. You then adjust that gcode to fit the dimensions of your piece of stock (or put in the time to make your piece of stock the dimensions the gcode is expecting…). You then do one process, stop it, move and remount the part precisely to expose the correct surfaces, and do the next process. And so forth.
“Not really”
Yes, really. If you print something out of plastic and have to go out and buy a barrel and other hardware to put in it, you might as well just mold it out of paper mache.
A CNC can make a gun from start to finish that you wouldn’t be worried about blowing your fingers off when you pulled the trigger, without adding outside hardware to.
You clearly didn’t read anything I said after that first line but this is just too fun:
A CNC can make a gun from start to finish that you wouldn’t be worried about blowing your fingers off when you pulled the trigger, without adding outside hardware to.
Mostly tells me you have no idea what is inside of a firearm outside of “magic”.
Over simplifying, but modern firearms generally consist of
- A frame: This is usually a mix of plastic and metal for comfort, weight, and heat dissipation reasons. But there is nothing saying you can’t have an all metal frame. Some parts will receive load, some parts are purely cosmetic/ergonomic. This is demonstrably not a problem for either 3d printer or mill.
- Lots of pins and levers: These are the mechanisms that actually make the gun go bang when you pull the trigger. And, depending on how spicy you want to get, continue to go bang while you hold down the trigger. Again, some parts are stressed, some aren’t. There are ways to do all plastic that should last at least a few hundred rounds. The issue is more one of tolerances. Getting a 3d printer to be able to print with that level of precision is more work than people want to put in. Similarly, getting a mill capable of that level of precision is also a mother (Adam Savage of Will Smith’s Tested fame has a lot of videos where he is basically tackling this challenge for different projects). But also? These are the parts that “wear out” and are completely uncontrolled and can be bought online trivially. So why manufacture this yourself in the first place?
- Springs. Good fricking luck milling your own springs with the required properties. Also good fricking luck printing your own springs. That said, I actually watched a REALLY cool video where someone proof of concept made a gun out of 3d printable leaf springs and while the guy doing it was a complete and utter dipshit, it was a work of engineering beauty that you couldn’t pay me enough to hold in my hand… But, again, these are trivially easy to buy online so why bother?
- The last major part in this oversimplified breakdown is the barrel (and how you seal it but I am just going to include that here). These are the parts that experience the most forces and heat when the gun is fired since that is the part where the bang happens. Everything else you can probably get away with some cheap mild steel. That? You need some good stuff otherwise you are going to learn just how weak that cheap stock was. You CAN mill chrome moly and the like but that is a much bigger challenge than cutting through cheap steel like it is butter and amplifies all of the above tolerance issues. I will outright say that you can’t print this in plastic even though I have seen in person demonstrations of proof of concepts of that.
And the cheap steel problem? Go look up pictures of the “custom” guns used in conflicts like The Troubles. A lot have cracked or split barrels and the like because of that exact issue.
Which, like I said in the comment you refused to read, is why you just buy the hard parts online or in cash at your local gun store (… might need to go to a specialty shop instead of a Walmart). Because they are not controlled since they generally need to get replaced eventually anyway.
At which point? Mills and Printers both work great. It is just that the former needs a lot more machinist skill to be done. Whereas the latter is just downloading an STL.
Just because this topic really intrigues the engineer in me:
Even if you are REALLY anti-gun (moreso in the sense of absolutely zero meaningful gun control laws that don’t predominantly target minorities and lower income folk) but can still appreciate an engineering problem:
Vice, back before it was a shithole content farm that talks about how right wing chuds are sticking it to the man, had a REALLY good video where a reporter went to a gathering of 3d printed firearms enthusiasts and even printed their own gun with the help of one of them. There are a lot of uncomfortable parts that kind of felt like fallon tussling the dipshit’s hair back in the day, but it is also one of the very few (easily reached on youtube) videos that show what 3d printing a gun actually is.
inRange TV has a video that doesn’t get too into the making of a 3d printed gun but does show some of the recent advances (and I believe one of the models shown is quite similar to a certain mario brother’s favorite toy…) which is useful from the perspective of how 3d printed parts are coupled to off the shelf parts and so forth.
And while the owner of the channel is a real dipshit and it is explicitly NOT about 3d printed guns (because that would hurt his monetization), Forgotten Weapons did a sponsored video where he turned a common handgun into basically a PDW using a kit. And, in the process of doing that, it really highlights what part of a firearm is the legal and controlled part and what parts can be easily replaced… or purchased in a discount bin. And Forgotten Weapons, in general, is really good at actually disassembling/field stripping firearms to show the inner workings and the engineering. And it is a fun thought process to think through what processes were used to make those parts and what processes could be used to make those parts instead.
I do some amateur gunsmithing. The insides of a bog standard, single-shot 12-gauge blow my mind. As to how the internals work on my S&W Ez? No clue and I wouldn’t dare try a full tear down.
Do you know how many hours I’ve spent hunting springs in my carpet?!
You’ve got it exactly right. If you can print the receiver, you can get every tiny part off eBay.
Pipe guns exist, you can build a device that fires a 12-gauge shell in a decent garage workshop. The fancy bits, like a break action that closes properly or a spring to eject spent shells/cartridges, are where the fiddly springs and such come into play. (Of course you know this, but for the sake of conversation.)
Those homemade submachine guns are properly crazy though.
It’s not like you’re smelting steel at home. Running a CNC machine requires a smidge more infrastructure than a 3D printer.
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At least they’re not defining it as a COMPUTER DRIVEN MACHINE THAT HAS LENGTH, WIDTH, AND DEPTH.
