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.
Or just buy parts. What are they gonna do? Regulate stepper motors and heater cartridges, and generic microcontrollers?
The cat is already out the bag.
That’s hilarious, assuming they only regulate prebuilts or full kits, all you’d need to do is something like add everything from a voron parts list to your cart to get around it. I wonder if sellers would also be able to offer partial kits to bypass it too (like offering a frame kit, x axis kit, extruder kit, etc and you just add all to cart)
The thing is, if 3D printed guns were a significant problem (and not primarily just an excuse to do nothing about failing gun laws), your situation would still be a massive improvement.
Domestic terrorism is planned. At some point, every mass shooter has thought about how they could kill the most people, with the least effort and lowest chance of failure.
And of course when they can walk into a gun store and buy cheap, semi-automatic weapons on a whim – even with a long history of red flags – that’s exactly what they do.
Sure, maybe they could kill more people with a bomb. But they’d have to learn how to build one, then actually build it without being caught or blowing their hands off. On top of all of that, there’s no for-profit death cult for explosives so many of the most effective tools will bring men in suits to your door.
The reality is if they had to buy, build and tune a Voron, then print a gun, then clean up the spaghetti and print another gun, then test the gun wouldn’t explode in their hands many of them simply would just try and stab people instead (or better yet, just do their suicide without taking innocent people with them).
Means reductions has been proven to reduce suicide rates. Mass shootings are a form of suicide.
This proposal is just an awkward attempt to address an issue early, because they can do so without the gun lobby sicking their lawyers and reactionaries on them, who are the ones pushing "Why bother with gun control when you can just 3D print full auto weapons?“ in the first place.
Just with household items you could already come up with half a dozen options that are better than a gun, kitchen knife, or explosives.
Security is fragile and we are kind of lucky that there aren’t too many intelligent manicas.
If any of those (conspicuously unnamed) household items were used to kill even half as many people as guns, there would absolutely be legislation to reduce the public safety risk.
If that legislation failed as routinely as America’s gun laws do, it would be improved or replaced until it worked.
You just described how guns are regulated.