I understand the intent, but feel that there are so many other loopholes that put much worse weapons on the street than a printer. Besides, my prints can barely sustain normal use, much less a bullet being fired from them. I would think that this is more of a risk to the person holding the gun than who it’s pointing at.
In other news: virtue signaling politicians are considering banning [scary items that their core voters know nothing about] in order to appear tough on crime, while avoiding doing the logical things experts recommend, because that would look bad in the eyes of the voters. Instead the only consequence is extending the stigma related to excons resulting in greater recidivism
Googling 3d printed gun homicide returns a story from Rhode Island in 2020 (where the police can’t figure out if the gun was actually printed), an attempted murder in Reykjavík in 2022, and this story from 2022 that claims a total of 44 arrests were made related to 3d printed guns… world wide https://3dprint.com/291684/3d-printed-gun-arrests-tripled-in-less-than-two-years-3dprint-com-investigates/amp/
In contrast there were 48117 firearms related deaths in the US during the same period.
Maybe statistics and proportions should be a core part of math from an early age?
These guns are increasingly being found at crime scenes. You may not like NY’s solution, but the problem is growing.
Some things cannot be effectively regulated in this manner. At all.
There is simply no way to stop people from building their own 3D printers. There are too many open source designs, and they can be built with very simple parts that are readily available at the hardware store. Most hobbyist-level 3D printers basically come as a kit that they have to assemble themselves anyways. What happens next? Background checks to buy stepper motors? Background checks to buy a microcontroller?
To me this is like trying to mandate government backdoors in encryption algorithms. There is literally nothing that would stop criminals from just using an open source encryption algorithm that doesn’t have a backdoor, so you end up just making it so all legitimate communications are less secure than they should be.
I have two issues with your comment, and the tldr is this “I don’t think the problem warrants the resources needed” and “I don’t think the proposed bill will solve anything, problem or not”.
Probably, I don’t have a source for that, but I suspect that you’re not wrong. What I would like to know is the proportions of gun grimes involving 3d-printed guns vs gun crimes in total. I suspect what others have said in this post, about the percentage of gun related crimes that involve 3d-printed guns, to be within a rounding error, to also be correct.
It’s not that I don’t like the “solution”. It’s that I don’t accept the proposed ban as being a solution in the first place. I don’t want to come off as being snarky, I just wanted to make sure that my understanding of the word “solution” was correct. English not being my first language, I sometime miss the salient details. So, I took a moment and googled “definition solution”. According to “Oxford Languages” a solution is a means of solving a problem or dealing with a difficult situation.
Can you in all honesty claim, that you believe that limiting acquiring 3d-printing capabilities, in a single state, will reduce the use of 3d-printed parts in gun crimes?
Again, the occurrence of 3d-printed guns or gun parts may be growing, but is it actually a problem big enough that it has to be dealt with? And with the resources necessary to enforce this proposal? Isn’t gun manufacturing already limited? As others have pointed out, why not limit access to other tools you could use to make guns?
As OP pointed out, the intent may be noble, but the attempt is futile.
This is 'murica. we use Webster’s here.
(sorry. couldn’t resist. you are correct. this isn’t a solution.)