If they cared more about making our society safer, they'd pay teachers more, build more homes, quintuple minimum wage, make education cheaper or free, actually tax the rich, reign in corpos, reform the police, abolish for profit prisons, make healthcare affordable and accessible, remove money from politics, just to start.

But nah, virtue signaling is way easier and is clearly enough to get them re elected, so let's ban 3D printers baby!

Or even better, just going across the state line and buying one.

While I majorly disagree with this legislation, its not about plastic guns.

They only regulate the part of a gun that has the serial number, not the other parts. For "repairability." Guess what that one part is easily made of? Yup, plastic.

People are printing the easy part, and buying all the rest in metal. Proper control would be to regulate the sale of commercially manufactured replacement parts, not a tool.

The lower receiver of an AR15 is legally considered the firearm. You can buy all other parts straight up, but you have to go through federal background checks on that one. Even with private sales, at least the first buyer would have to have gone through the process.

On its own, it's just a chunk of plastic or metal. It's not pressure bearing and isn't even all that mechanically stressed in typical use. Therefore, you can print that one part off, buy all other parts, bypass all checks, and have a completely unregistered AR15. It's not especially difficult to do, though it does involve a few specialized tools.

In the UK, regulation tends to be around pressure bearing parts, and this is a lot more sensible.

This is the crap your average gun owners have to deal with all the time. And with similar results for crime prevention, which leads to more and more hoops as legislators try more of the same.

All because they genuinely don't understand the subject matter or don't care but want to appeal to people who also don't know. Remember the "this is a ghost gun" speech?

Welcome to the shitshow, I'm truly sorry you're here. I just want to enjoy 3D printed doodads and neat non-printed range toys in peace.

Nearly every law or bill in the last 40 years is crusted with bullshit no matter what the original intent or final result is.

Political posturing, like the fucking straws.

People can produce 3D objects from digital models. It's called, checks notes, sculpting!

What kind of dystopian hellhole do you live in where you can be arrested for clicking on a 3D model of a gun?

don't worry they can just edit the database even if you don't

MacGyver was doing it before it was cool.

depends on the design, as well as the capability of the printer.

DMLS is capable of producing basically anything you can think of in metal. FDM or resin, or whatever... you're printing the frame.

the DEFCAD design, specifically, you're printing the AR lower receiver- which for some stupid reasons is designated as the "firearm" as far as laws and regulations go. So you can print the lower and buy the rest in cash as parts.that said, the only real function the lower serves in an AR is holding the magazine in place, so it's not really subjected to anything that's going to break it.

Incidentally, $40 at a big box store and a lot of TLC with a dremmel can produce a passable SMG. in fact... many of the ww2 era machine guns were designed to be made in factories that used to turn out plumbing parts. (because this reduced the amount of time and materials spent on retooling the production lines.)

Fully 3d printed ones, yes. But you can print all the plastic parts of a Glock, buy a kit of parts that don't require any verification at all and assemble a fully working one that is about as good as a genuine glock.
Or go a bit further with the FGC-9 or countless other similar things. The fewest actual gun parts used in successful firearms are in .22lr pepperboxes which use only barrel liners.

Here in Finland, I couldn't do any of that, because barrels, liners, trigger assemblies, magazines, ammo, they all require a background check and having a license to own a firearm. As would those printed Glock upper/lower parts, if I had access to the kits making them illegal to own.
Instead of, you know, the 3d printer?

What people are doing with "3D printed" guns is printing the receiver or frame components that are otherwise serial numbered and federally regulated, and populating those with metal barrels, slides, upper receivers, trigger assemblies, pins, springs, etc., as appropriate from the genuine item. These can be quite functional and durable, because the majority of the gun is, in fact, still made from "real" gun parts.

Clever individuals have gotten quite far in managing to print most of the required components, but several critical parts simply can't be made with consumer level printing technology. At present it is impossible to fully print a gun out of plastic and actually have it work.

The way federal law works, the ATF has identified and decided what constitutes the minimum identifiable major "gun part" of a given model of firearm, which is the part that must bear the serial number and is the component that cannot be sold without a background check through an FFL. For the Armalite platform, for instance, it is the lower receiver which is a component that can be 3D printed. The upper receiver is not a regulated part. For many polymer framed pistols like Glocks, the grip housing and frame is the FFL component. These can typically be 3D printed as well. But some guns, like the PTR/HK 91 and Sig P250 it's not the frame, it's the trigger assembly that's the FFL item. You can't effectively 3D print one of those -- although you could probably manufacture one with a milling machine pretty easily.

Punched cards making a comeback soon?

I don't really think anyone expects this political theater law to be effective in anything except suppressing the growing 3d printing community in one of the world's largest tech centers.

Shooting themselves in the foot with a good old fashioned normal gun, it seems.