Loyal Moses has an entire series on this important topic on YouTube. All of those videos are good. Previous videos covered bills in Washington, New York and Colorado. There’s a bill in Minnesota as well. These aren’t just bills that aren’t going anywhere, to curry favor with some donors. Some of these bills have passed out of committee, have passed a floor vote and are moving through the other chamber. Here is the latest video describing a California bill that would require all 3D printers transferred in the state to be approved by the state, and that approval would require a 3D printer that’s nearly impossible to modify to use only one slicer that checks every file being printed against a California approved object database.
Here is my comment under the video:
All of these bills are predicated on the false assumption that it’s illegal for Americans to make our own firearms. That’s never been true. It’s pretty well implied by “keep and bear arms”.
The only way California’s “software control” will work is to maintain a database of pre-approved STLs scraped from online repositories. If this passes, you can print a baby Yoda or other downloaded tchotchkes but your CAD will be useless. No more designing items, which I do almost every day. I’m currently printing a custom ice cube tray shelf for my freezer that some dumb algorithm won’t be able to differentiate from a firearm upper.
The list of Kalifornistan approved 3D printers will work exactly the same as their Certified Handgun Roster. The certification process is so expensive and cumbersome that most manufacturers won’t bother. That’s the intention. Often, the firearms on the approved list can’t compete in the free market so the manufacturers pay for the certification to sell in the decidedly non free market in California. Buyers have little choice, the quality is poor and the cost is high. It’s how they mostly ban products they don’t want tax serfs to own when an outright ban is illegal.
These tyrannical state laws already force me to buy firearms with low capacity 10 round magazines that I don’t use, because manufacturers are economically coerced to force nanny state rules on all of their customers. I don’t want to be forced to buy a California compliant 3D printer that’s useless to me.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this is it obviously has nothing to do with crime or public safety. The same states pushing these bills that criminalize peaceful makers do not punish violent criminals. Legalized shoplifting. No cash bail. Defund the police. They seem to love crime, because it doesn’t impact them in their gated communities but it scares the poors into accepting more infringements on our rights under the guise of protecting us from crime.
These bills are brought to us by our “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” overlords.
I’m going to post a link to this video on the Sovol forum to hopefully gin up some interest but this is a difficult issue to oppose politically. Makers are a tiny constituency that can easily be ignored by weasel politicians.
Proposition 65 Warning: California legislators are known to citizens in free states to cause cancer.
In 2021, the federal infrastructure bill had a clause mostly flying under the radar that required all cars sold in the US to have an automated kill switch by 2025. That didn’t happen because bureaucrats think they can scribble something on a piece of paper and conjure it into reality, but a car that can pass judgment on impaired drivers that isn’t going to shut off a car if Mom is driving erratically while racing her toddler to the emergency room isn’t an easy thing to create. Auto manufacturers are still hard at work on that so it’ll probably happen in a few years.
Apparently, a Spanish company is already claiming to have software that can refuse to 3D print forbidden objects, and not just specific STLs based on a simple hash of the file, but entire categories of shapes. I can’t believe that’s going to work without rejecting a high percentage of non-banned items, but the promise may be all that’s needed for legislators to require the lock down firmware under the premise that it may not be perfect but they can work out the details later. From their perspective, the consequences of infringing on the rights of makers is minor compared to erroneously shutting down a car.
The legislation is an unworkable hot mess that completely misunderstands how open source works, but they certainly tried to foresee such circumstances. The bill would require manufacturers to supply secure 3D printers that can only enable printing after an online verification that the object was allowed, and the manufacturer would be liable if they fail to secure the printer from a skilled effort to circumvent the authentication process.
The bill isn’t workable but I’m concerned that it would either result in crippled printers that are useless for anything other than printing useless decorative trinkets, or 3D printer manufacturers refusing to sell in an increasing number of US states rather than risk the steep fines.
Last year, we saw DJI ceasing sales in the US because of federal regulations prohibiting their drones from being sold in the US, for no decent reason that I could see.
Freedom seems to die in americas. Its still quite good here in eu. Hope you do some big demonstrations to show its not ok. Still it will be really hard to enforce. its to easy to build one your self. Parts will not be made illegal i guess. And a slicer is local. I think it would be easier for them to enforce ban of the sharing of 3d gun models. but if its a will there is a way. it is easy enough to not get caught on piratebay. Or even design a gun yourself.
