Taking this purely as an engineering task, how is this remotely possible? I can barely begin to imagine how restrictions on what can be printed could be set. Am I missing something obvious? Some kind of contextual understanding of the object seems to be necessary… please don’t tell me their proposed solution is AI.
In any case it will never work because 3D printing is so easy for makers to do from scratch, so any solution will fail to prevent printed guns from being made.
Again, this is just the pragmatic engineering angle. Please don’t respond with political arguments.
Just spitballing but you’d have to align the desired shape somehow, perhaps with a singular value decomposition. Once its transform was normalized you could compare its shape, or perhaps its convex hull, with a database of banned shapes.
The problem is this is pretty easy to defeat (by adding extra sprues and spikes to the object, breaking it into two shapes, etc) and the more aggressive you get with the check the more you risk false positives.
An AI training set would involve creating a dataset of all the banned shapes, then generating tens of thousands of permutations of them however you believe people might try to trick it. Ultimately the AI would lock onto some small feature of the shape that scores it as positive, perhaps something trivial. That also leads to weird false positives. This also creates an arms race as people figure out what that feature is subvert it.
This problem is much harder in 3D than in 2D (currency). Since you can also cut, file, and glue shit that comes out of a 3D printer later I don’t think this is a solvable problem. Like most gun control measures in the USA it appears to be aesthetics.
You could also just aggressively go false positive all over the place and say “fuck the users”, with exceptions for cops. This is basically the USA’s approach to drones.
a database of banned shapes
banned shapes
banned
shapes
That would be an even more interesting solution for finding new gun-designs for mass-manufacture. Kalashnikov, Winchester, Glock, and Colt watch out!
Since the best available firmware is open source I don’t see any way of imposing limits on it.
The printer itself doesn’t even know what it’s making since it’s reading directions one by one, so any limits would need to be implemented at a slicer level, which are also basically all open source (at least any worth using).
The only way I could see it working would be mandating that all printers sold in the US come with software checks against it and be non reflashable, but considering a new driver board that would be able to drive 95% of printers is about $25 it is nothing more than screaming into the void.
You can also build a 3d printer from scratch pretty easily. Would need to regulate random electronics and robotics components
I don’t know the answer to the question, but paper printers cannot print bank notes apparently
Somewhat related, the US Gov provides play money that you can print for your kids, which I found helpful to teach my kids about how money works. https://www.uscurrency.gov/sites/default/files/download-materials/en/Printable-Play-Money.pdf
Which is a very easily recognized pattern, color, and size. The entire point of a dollar is that every single one looks identical.
Imagine if every single dollar bill was a different color, shape, size, printing pattern, etc… Now imagine trying to block that. Now consider that as soon as you figure out how to block all of the current versions, anyone in the world can just design a new version in 5 minutes.
True, but nothing else looks like money. Lots of things have a similar shape as the barrel of a gun.
Money is also quite detailed, with a known list of configurations. Any counterfeit would need to match the details in those known configurations extremely well. Finding that match with a high degree of accuracy is a fairly well understood and common engineering task. This is not the same task as identifying anything that could possibly be used to represent money with a high degree of accuracy, which is essentially what would be needed in the gun printing problem.
that’s different, bank notes follow the same pattern/design, the components that could be printed for firearms vary so much in shape and size, even for the same components across different platforms.
Yup, this just sounds impossible without just banning the printers. Guns don’t have to conform to typical gun shapes. You could just print anything that can function as a barrel and some of the other pieces and then just go in the garage and whittle a handle from a piece of wood or something. Make a part that is much larger and then just cut off the piece you want. I mean there are so many ways around this it’s not even funny.
They should put controls on lathes and mills to prevent making guns. Metal guns are a lot more effective than plastic guns anyways. /s
My understanding is that the metal parts are bought. The only part of a gun that is controlled legally is fine in plastic
This is basically how today’s 3d printed guns work, but even still the gun isn’t good for more then a few magazines afaik. So it’s interesting as a way to create a gun that isn’t serialized and the ATF can’t trace, but it’s not durable, and it still requires a good deal of precision engineering/cost, so its not feasible to print a truck-load and sell them for cheap.
How many mass shooters finish more than a few magazines? My guess is very few
Probably the same number that used 3d-printed guns.
The video kind of proves my point. It was janky, he fired <20bullets, and it jammed several times during the demo. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool as hell, but yea not very practical for anything and certainly not durable enough to be a viable alternative to CNC/Milling.
Trying to stop a printer from printing sounds like a tough ask.
The pressure behind a bullet ~14,000psi. The pressure that a 3D resin can handle ~ 200psi. Any questions?
Oh yeah, how do 3D printed guns kill? 1) use non 3d printed parts or 2, hold the bullets in the gun-like case, carry a hammer, if you need to shoot the bullet just get the bullet out between two of your fingers, run like crazy towards the target, then bury that sucker with a real nice hammer thud. If you practice real good, you can hit a good 3 or 4 target spots. If you do it it slow enough you can probably hit one bullet with another bullet! Well, you can always do that. Heck you can put 10 bullets or more in a baggie and they will all hit each other.
I guess if you need a ruzzian war diy survivor gun, just go-to the hardware store and get a pipe. No 3D printed stuff. You can make the handle from wood! That’s literally all a 3D printer is good for in gun making, the handle. But you can carve one out with a router. Are routers illegal yet because you can make a gun … handle…?
There is essentially no way to enforce, or even monitor this, like it’s fundamentally impossible without controlling everything from stl creation, to weapon construction.
Hit the nail right on the head for what they want. Why do you think they are making laws to ban porn? It’s a hide behind think of the children to get your foot in the door to control more
I love technological non-solutions to social problems. They are the only thing the work better then passing more laws that say you can’t murder people with guns.
I built my own 3d printer 👉 👈
3d printing 3d printing machine. infinite money hax O.o?
No infinite money sink. Started by printed some upgrades for my printer, now i suddenly have 3 that can waste plastic at significantly higher speeds.
Maybe the dumbest possible idea here from government regulators. You think you’re going to somehow legislate certain geometry out of existence? “Sorry, you can’t print that ILLEGAL SHAPE with the printer you own!” Same vacant headed assholes that think they can ban encryption. Fuck off, shrivel up and perish, please.
Yeah like that won’t be bypassed in about 3 seconds.
Was there a shooting with a printed firearm recently?
Irrelevant: the goal is not preventing shootings (I mean, they would go for the obvious solution otherwise)
not sure but I heard they recently caught the FGC-9 designer
EDIT found the story: https://news.sky.com/story/jacob-duygu-incel-who-mysteriously-died-unmasked-as-creator-of-worlds-most-popular-3d-printed-gun-12997178
deleted by creator
This isn’t really about safety, it’s about gun manufacturer profits.
Like how machine gun owners don’t support the repeal of the nfa or fopa because it would tank the value of their stamp items.
Boy THAT will work! Good idea government!
Prop guns for cosplay gonna get a lot more difficult for now reason if this passes.
Exactly what I was thinking. It’s really funny if you think about it. There are currently more guns in the US than there are people. I guess they will combat this by limiting 3d printing.
Given my skill with 3d model creation, i’d be more likely to create something that would hurt me than inflicting harm on someone else. Mostly when I take that razor sharp tool to remove anything from the build plate, but also just my awful measurements and tolerances.
wootwoot 3d printing mentioned 😎
Anyone ever try to photocopy currency?
Yeah that was my thoughts too. It’s not like it can’t be bypassed but it’s not “easy.” This is kinda how I see it going for commercial 3D printers. It’s not a bad thing either. I’ve always been a fan of making people earn dangerous knowledge & skills. Even in fictional universes like Star Trek there’s restrictions on using a replicator to make weapons.
So it’s not unreasonable, imho, to put some kind of guard rails up that force people to actively bypass restrictions in making weapons.
The trick will be telling the difference between making a nerf gun, action figure guns, and an actual weapon. That I don’t see being possible at this time. Too many edge cases that don’t neatly fit.
