NY bill would require a criminal history background check for the purchase of a 3D printer::Requires a criminal history background check for the purchase of a three-dimensional printer capable of creating firearms; prohibits sale to a person who would be disqualified on the basis of criminal history from being granted a license to possess a firearm.

192 points

A tube capable of firing a projectile isn’t hard to make though. Maybe they should require a criminal history background check to go to the hardware store too.

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46 points

Sir, do you have a license for that power drill?

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7 points
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Not everybody is the guy who killed Shinzo Abe.

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17 points

Don’t you mean Tetsuya Yamagami?

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12 points

The first of his name,the leading seaman, the destroyer of moonies, Saint Blunderbuss I. Long may his name reign. Long may he live.

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9 points

But the point is that literally anyone could be.

A simple gun is just a tube with one end closed off. You can make a blackpowder musket for about 30 bucks at a hardware store. They even sell the lighters to set off the charge.

3d printers also make shitty guns, for the most part. Unless you’re paying hundreds of dollars for the rest of the firearm, all your making is the part that holds everything together. If you’re not using real firearm parts, a solid plastic gun is largely useless.

Are they going to require background checks to operate a CNC machine too? Cause that’s probably gonna cripple the manufacturing industry.

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-78 points
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Classic pro-gun community, rushing to brigade a gun-related post with pre-prepared talking points.

“Why bother fixing gun laws that clearly fail to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people when you can just 3D print a gun?”

*someone makes a move to stop dangerous people 3D printing guns*

“Why bother preventing dangerous people 3D printing guns when you can just buy a bit of pipe at the hardware store?”

Criminals and domestic terrorists overwhelmingly just go to a store and buy a gun. The pro-gun community is fine with this.

For the minority that can’t, straw purchases, gun show loopholes and poorly secured firearms give them much better access to safer, more reliable guns than 3D printing does. The pro-gun community is fine with this too.

A tiny fraction of crimes involve 3D printed gun parts and I’m not aware of any domestic terrorism to use any. Nevertheless, somebody could in theory print parts for a fully automatic weapon that would potentially be reliable enough for a mass shooting.

So how many crimes are being comitted with a piece of old pipe?

I know self-absorbed, gun-owning, 300lbs men pretending they’d be useful in a militia want to angrily hammer out a comment along the lines of “WHAT ABOUT THAT ASSASSINATION IN JAPAN YOU CUCK”.

But the one example you can cite without googling, from every single country with gun control was clearly dogshit barely worked.

It would be a massive improvement if American criminals were forced to use home made firearms that significantly increased the price, difficulty to obtain and the danger to themselves using it.

But the pro-gun community objects by walking down a list of bullshit excuses because they can’t just say “I’d rather people were shot than I was inconvienced”.

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51 points

It’s crazy how the first thing you did was complain about people with premade talking points rushing to brigade a post, yet you’re in here posting walls of text under everyone who is pointing out the logical inconsistencies of banning unregulated 3d printers but not other hardware related purchases.

Even stranger is, I can’t figure out what you’re upset about. You yourself say that only a tiny fraction of gun violence comes from 3d printed weapons, you say you’re against the bill, so why are you getting hostile and making wild, baseless as hominem attacks against people who think it’s a pointless bill?

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11 points

Even stranger is, I can’t figure out what you’re upset about.

It seems like they latched onto the idea that everyone who comments along the lines of “This is a stupid idea.”, secretly intends to say “This is a stupid idea, which is why there shouldn’t be any gun regulation at all.” instead. Needless to say, that’s an insane take and only results in them constructing these giant straw man arguments against people who are most likely on the same side as them.

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-31 points

It’s crazy how the first thing you did was complain about people with premade talking points rushing to brigade a post, yet you’re in here posting walls of text under everyone who is pointing out the logical inconsistencies of banning unregulated 3d printers but not other hardware related purchases.

I have absolutely no idea what point you’re trying to make here since the things before and after your “yet” have nothing to do with each other.

Are you trying to claim I’m brigading with a single account or somehow manipulating votes?

Even stranger is, I can’t figure out what you’re upset about.

Well that’s on you.

making wild, baseless as hominem attacks

Oh damn I was hoping you didn’t know that you can instantly win any debate by just (almost) saying the names of logical fallacies.

“Ad Hominem” means that someone isn’t inherently wrong just because they’re dogshit. They can both still be wrong and dogshit.

Want to point out exactly where I claimed someone must be wrong because they were a bad person?

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19 points
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I’m not pro-gun, stupid. I’m pro-thinking which you’re clearly not. Nice troll username btw.

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I love when people like the guy you responded to show up, it’s so easy to block them on Lemmy.

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-14 points

You rushed right in with their talking points, so I assumed your goal was to spread them. I don’t want to break your little heart but I respond to the things people say on social media without forming an intimate relationship with them first.

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9 points

Understood. Are you for or against the proposed NY legislation?

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-16 points

I’m against it because I know the pro-gun claim of “fixing deeply flawed gun laws is pointless because people will just 3D print guns” is a lie.

Should it one day come true, I’d reconsider my position.

But it hasn’t come true anywhere else in the world, nor have any other pro-gun promises come true in the last 20 years.

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132 points

That’s incredibly stupid. Good Lord.

What’s next? CNC machines? Silicone/resin casting supplies? Steel pipes?

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34 points

Iron ore and carbon

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8 points

Background checks to buy scrap aluminum or lol… beer?

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12 points

There was a bill at one point to limit mills and lathes

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11 points

Screwdrivers, hammers, and automobiles will need a background check and a 30 Day cooling off period.

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1 point

Lawmakers never cease to amaze me

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102 points
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Is this what the democrats think is important legislation right now?

You can make a firearm in a shitty garage shop way cheaper than the both monetary investment and time investment that comes with using a 3D printer.

People in fuckinh prisons make improvised firearms

This is a waste of time.

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25 points

It’s not about making firearms. It’s about being able to make literally anything else, the ability to do so being something that would liberate individuals, to some extent, from the capitalist system. That’s what they really don’t want.

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13 points

Uh, I’m pretty sure this is about firearms.

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14 points

Yes and voter literacy tests were about making sure people were smart enough to vote. /s

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7 points

Lol

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4 points

If they didn’t want people having firearms, by golly there’s some lower hanging fruit.

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0 points
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This is correct. Although I’m not sure what the actual viability of using a 3d printer for cutting the costs of living in society is. From my understanding you can only kind of recycle proper 3d printer grade PLA plastic and you definitely can’t make 3d printer plastic out of trash. Machine tools on the other hand can accomplish many of the same things and a greater percentage of the stuff that goes with them can be made out of trash or scrap.

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2 points

You can recycle PET bottles, you probably don’t use enough PLA packing to be effectively able to recycle it even if it weren’t degraded.

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1 point

Meh. 3D printer plastic goes for like $24 a pound on Amazon whereas almost everything you buy costs hundreds and is disposable largely because their cheap, shitty plastic frames aren’t repairable. Being able to 3D print your own frames for electronics or tools or machines would save you so much money in the long run.

But the powers that be don’t want that. That’s the real reason why they’ve had it out for 3D printers. Printing guns is just an excuse.

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1 point
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True.

But a milling machine (not even a CNC) costs and weighs more than a car.

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1 point
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-5 points
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Deleted by creator
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8 points

Eh. With how tribalist American politics has become, it’s usually only a matter of throwing shit to the wall to see what sticks.

This may not stick, but if it does you can bet your sweet ass it will be a primary issue for democrats.

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92 points

Are these lawmakers aware of the fact you can 3d print a 3d printer? Or at least, about 80% of its parts, and the remaining parts are indistinguishable from the random stuff youd buy at the hardware store? (Aluminum extrusion mostly, some gears, etc)

The only part they could theoretically hope to control worth a damn would be the printing nozzles, which are so incredibly cheap to buy bulk and nearly impossible to specialize.

Also you could take this to court and point out that you would need to also include CNC machines, Laser Cutters, lathes, and any of the other variations of tools that can be used to manufacture a DIY gun.

This isnt a problem specific to 3d printers, a CNC mill that can cut aluminum is also just as capable of producing the jigs needed to manufacture gun parts.

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71 points

I’d argue a cnc mill makes a hell of a better gun than a 3d printer

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11 points

I’d fire a 3D printed gun with a string from about 20’ away.

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9 points

It would, but it would also require more expense and skill and the “gun control is pointless because people will just make their own guns” lie works best when you can imply there is minimal cost, experience, effort and risk.

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4 points

since a cnc is computer controlled it should be about as hard to learn to use a 3d printer

making the model and instructions for the cnc may be more complicated, but you can share those

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4 points

So the big thing people, including lawmakers, whiff on this is you dont actually 3d print guns. You can 3d print superficial parts like the grip and whatnot, but the actual firing part of the gun is largely not 3d printable.

You can print it, and people have tried, but it usually only lasts 1-2 rounds before it breaks.

However, what you can print that is a huge deal, is the very precise jigs necessary to very easily manufacture the firing mechanisms of the gun, to quite a degree of precision. Then you use a drill or whatever to actually make those metal parts.

Basically, you can easily 3d print a gun maker, and then 3d print all the “extra” parts like grip and whatnot that attach to what you have created, in order to improve it.

Thats the actually serious part, because normally these sorts of jigs need to be extremely precise and are quite difficult to get ahold of. You need a fairly high end CNC machine to make one, or you have to buy it.

But 3d printers, even fairly affordable ones, when fine tuned by hand, do have the necessary precision to print such jigs, which makes them much more accessible for quite cheap… And once you print the jig, it becomes pretty easy to mass produce DIY guns.

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4 points

People have been making paper templates for a long time, I can’t see how plastic would have any real advantage. A plastic guide isn’t going to constrain a metal cutting tool, at best it just shows you where you need to drill the same as a paper template. If you wander outside the lines you’ll just mess up both the part and the jig.

If I were to set up a clandestine gun manufacurer I would try and design a product that could be made using mostly aluminum extrutions and paper jigs. That way it’s easy to compartmentalize each step, harder for one guy to flip on you, and fast/cheap. Plus if you get raided you don’t have a bunch of incriminating files cached on your CNC machine from previous runs.

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4 points

This doesn’t track. You can do way better with a manual mill and, as the other poster mentioned, a 2d paper template with some spray glue will do fine in a pinch. Drilling steel will heat the bit up enough to melt plastic anyway. You could set drill bushings but they won’t be perfect and will drift a bit once they heat up.

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3 points

And once you print the jig, it becomes pretty easy to mass produce DIY guns.

Sure, but you still need to buy the actual firing mechanism parts of real guns in order to manufacture “3d printed guns”.

And you can also make those same jigs and fixtures out of wood or any other raw material.

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18 points

You can make a fireable shotgun out of like 15$ of pipe fittings

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5 points

This is typical of politicians making laws about shit they don’t understand. At all.

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72 points

Silly. Why can’t we just regulated the sale of ammunition and gunpowder?

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47 points

Why? It’s not guns and bullets killing people, it’s 3D printing 🙃

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16 points

We do actually. Just last year new york passed the Concealed Carry Improvement act imposing a background check on ammunition purchases. This bill is completely redundant and unnecessary.

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21 points

Redundant, you say?

How else are corporations going to limit things like “right to repair” and sales, when people can print their own replacement parts or print stuff they would otherwise have to buy?

Think of the profits! /s

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6 points

Also, how else do you expect politicians to score easy points by “cracking down on gun violence” while wasting taxpayer resources and legislative time/effort? Won’t you think of the poor kids going to school in the literal war zone of the public school system?


For the record, common sense gun control laws are important (opinions are what these entail are welcome to vary). The issue is that most of the US already has such laws thoroughly in place yet people and politicians like to act like they don’t exist every time a tragedy occurs. I’m sure there’s exceptions, but the grand majoroty of the time a politician starts blathering about tightening gun control laws a cursory search shows plenty on the books for their jurisdiction.

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14 points
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NY is the shining example of the simple creation of a law being enough to entirely extinguish any criminal activity related to it in the entire jurisdiction. This one is so incredibly powerful, in fact, that the very second it goes into effect, the whole state of NY will be unable to cross state lines to acquire said devil boxes, nor even use a VPN to make such a purchase online. Also, sharks are smooth.

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7 points

That’s actually an excellent point about sharks that many people don’t realize. I’m petting one right now and it feels like the softest silk.

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2 points

No direction is taboo, they’re smoother than vanta is black 🦈

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2 points

I’m all for preventative laws if they are good policy. This isn’t good policy.

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10 points
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Deleted by creator
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2 points

Cool. I didn’t know that.

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5 points

Why can’t we just regulated the sale of ammunition and gunpowder?

Or at least the gun parts needed to make a “3d printed” gun actually function as a firearm.

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8 points

You can make a completely 3D printed gun that will survive at least one shot. I’m sure if you’re using resin or carbon fiber reinforced plastic so you could probably get more than one shot off.

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5 points

Resin is generally more brittle than filament, FYI, and the real question with most 3D-printed firearms is whether the shooter survives “at least one shot”.

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1 point

That may usually survive that one shot.

Or it may fail and cause damage to the person foolish enough to be weilding it.

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5 points

Receivers are already regulated

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2 points

Receivers are usually the main part that’s 3d Printed, that’s the problem.

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1 point

$$

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