Quote of the Day
As a gun guy for a loooong time, I have bad news for 3D printing guys—the word “gun” is often enough for people to give up their rights out of fear.
People will gladly bend over & let the state have their way with them if it will help with the made up “Gun Problem”.
Guns are the Goldstein Big Brother uses to fuel enough Two Minutes Hate so that people will gladly turn their eyes away from abuses like this because they have been brainwashed into thinking somehow this will keep them safe.
It won’t. And it WILL be used against more than printed guns. It’s a form of control and they will use their fairly successful campaign of making guns out to be the boogeyman to allow them to control more & more of your life.
This is why I’ve fought gun control. It’s MUCH more than just the guns, always has been. But too many people are scared shitless of loud noises & Hollywood portrayals that they honestly fear them enough to allow whatever draconian laws are presented and then call you names & try to have your life ruined if you oppose them.
Robb Allen @ItsRobbAllen
Posted on X, February 9, 2026
This is regarding the restrictions certain politicians are putting on the 3D printers. These restrictions include printer firmware recognizing gun parts and refusing to print them and the printer “calling home” to report restricted items being made.
This is a First Amendment issue as well as a Second Amendment issue.
Of course you can do the job also (and better) with a CNC milling machine, either one optimized for this sort of application, or an ordinary general purpose small milling machine from the likes of Sherline. Or a full size one from any of the usual suspects. If you’re good and patient you don’t need CNC, you can do it with a conventional manual milling machine, plain early 20th century technology, starting from a block of steel or aluminum.
So, this is essentially a First Amendment and Second Amendment violation against uninformed, unskilled, and stupid people, as they always are.
From what I’ve seen, at least some of the 3D printing regulations are broad enough that they don’t much care whether the part is generated additively (3D printing) or through subtraction (CNC milling.)
I’ve done so – milled a few 0% lowers with a manual Jet mill and lathe. It requires some discipline and time, but the results were excellent and built skill. Fortunately both my 3D printers are “pre-ban”. Who’d have thought that there might be a market sometime for presumably obsolete printing technology?
From a more practical point of view, they think a “phone home” system to narc on the user is going to work?
Surprise, MF’er: I control the DNS in my household, and I can adjust the trusted CA list in my printer.
So when I start my print, the narc code tries to phone home to screwthe5A.wa.gov, but my home DNS returns 192.168.30.4, a non-routable IP address inside my home network, and there’s a server sitting there waiting for the call. It says it is screwthe5A.wa.gov, and here’s a certificate issued by the household certificate authority. But but but why does the printer trust that certificate instead of the one issued by secyofstyate.wa.gov’s certificate authority? Because I have physical access to the printer, and I went and added TirnosHomeCA.local to the list of trusted certificate authorities.
Know what that little counterfeit screwthe5A.wa.gov server says when asked if it is OK to print that *whatever it is*? “Sure, dude, whatever.”
Now, that’s just me with complete control over my home network environment because that’s part of my day job and my home network is overspec’ed for a midsize business. What’s the regular home hobbyist to do?
I expect someone will make a little Arduino box with a 10G interface labelled NETWORK and another 10G interface labelled PRINTER, or a Wifi network with a non-broadcast SSID called “Printer Net”, and it’ll automate the man-in-the-middle cutout to keep the printer from talking to The Man. Sell them for $100 at the gun show or maker fair as a “3D printer optimizer”.
None of these schemes are ever for the actually-capable, the -seriously-interested, or the (most especially) the actual criminal.
The emphasis, as ***ALWAYS***, is on “control”, not “gun”.
Of course, that’s the NICE thing to say. The truth is that they actually WANT the criminals to still have weapons (which, of course, they will).
If I might ask an ignorant question?
Why is the printer connected to the internet? If I design-build a part on my computer or receive a file. Then ship it over to my printer.
Why is the printer doing anything but printing?
The only reason for it to record what it’s doing and send that info back out is for spying in the first place. By AI, China, and elites that want to be able to use your ideas for themselves.
There’s no reason your printer should be able to do anything other than what it’s told to. By you.
The second problem is somewhat un-related. But more major.
That is democracy.
We have been brainwashed into thinking it is necessary. And so that’s what we live in. We don’t. And don’t have one by law. But that seems to be totally forgotten in this day and age.
Majorities mean nothing to our rights as humans. We have just been brainwashed to believe we need a crowd to be safe in.
Communists, elitists, and politicians around the world use that same tool of fear to lord over us. But it’s a lie.
The first law of the United State of America (by which all laws must conform to) tells us we do not have to obey this ignorant fear-mongering. It needs to end. First inside ourselves, then in our government.
Cause if we don’t lose it. We will certainly die by it.
“Majorities mean nothing to our rights as humans. We have just been brainwashed to believe we need a crowd to be safe in.”
Some form of democratic control is the least-bad way we’ve yet found to implement changes to what are considered “rights” and other, lesser issues.
It isn’t all that good, but unless you think we have arrived, that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (to quote some crappy community organizer), that perfection has been achieved, then there must be SOME mechanism for change.
Feel free to propose ones that sucks less.
That’s easy.
Tell everyone to read/live the 10 commandments and the 10 amendments and leave me to F-alone.
Or I will shoot your ass.
But that’s far too simple for humans to live with.
They just can’t abide simplicity.
And since we are “fallen man” it seems doubtful we going to come up with anything better, any time soon.
What we do know is that democracy works as well as communism. (NYC, here we come!)
So, plan accordingly.
The legislation is requiring new 3d printers to communicate with the internet. If it isn’t communicating, the printer won’t work.
Well, nobody said communists are sane.
But I’m convinced if we were sane also, there would be a bounty on them.
Very true! Y printers aren’t connected to my network at all. I dump the STL to a USB drive and sneaker net it to thre printer.
Either they go full stupid and require a background check to buy steel and files or this flops. Luty’s famous SMG design used a,piece of square tubing as a receiver and could be made as a smooth bore. If you can fabricate a mandrel you could even electrochemically machine rifling.
It seems to me this moral panic does more to restrict citizens from making parts for cars and appliances, which a lot of wealthy and powerful interests want shut down. Either way it’s unconstitutional and won’t stop the bad guys, including the Antifa collectivos from getting guns
Curious to see how this interacts with the digital ID proposals. Over here the entry point for the wedge is to keep kids away from porn. But to do that everyone has to show ID and presumably turn on their camera so a comparison can be made. You may think you can avoid this if you don’t do porn but guess again. In Europe, it is required for Spotify. Spotify is a music site which doesn’t do porn but it now includes podcasts. Can’t let the proles get unapproved thoughts. It’s pretty much child’s play to add new subject matter to an existing regime especially if you don’t care about the BoR. So to Tirno, how you going to wire around this. Assume criminal penalties.
Anything you have physical control over, you can adjust. They want to do digital ID? Fine, I’m going to rig a man-in-the-middle, analyze the traffic through a full-proxy while doing mundane prints, then configure a counterfeit that the printer can talk to. It asks for permission, it gets permission. Nothing leaves the house. I have some greymarket networking gear with glowing red balls on the right side that I’m not currently using approximately four feet from me that I can use to ensure that the only packets that move are the packets I want to move. SSL/TLS Forward Proxy is all part of the day job.
“Anything you have physical control over, you can adjust.”
Quoted for truth.
Short of them running end-to-end encryption on the hardware they sell you and requiring it to never fail or your hardware is bricked (good luck with THAT), you are correct.
But again, that’s only going to help the enthusiasts/seriously-committed/criminal types.
An effort doomed to failure before it’s even begun.
There are far, far too many Open Source printer plans out there, as well as operating systems that can run on a Pi, and slicing software.
Not to mention that the legality of home made firearms has long been established.
Will the usual suspects try to get this pushed through?
Of course.
Will it be enacted in some of the Blue states?
Possibly.
Will it survive SCOTUS?
Never.
After a decade of fiddle farting around.
I had one up and running within a couple of days, and I’m a Gen X monkey with a mouse, not a programmer. I don’t even know how to use CAD, I just download STL files and run them through a slicer. And they won’t be able to keep STL files ofline with any greater success than they have other materials.
It’s expanding already. Colorado is preparing legislation that would include CNC and other progranable systems used in private firearms production in their prohibition.
This whole thing is so amazingly stupid. Or evil. Or both.
The Brits made functional SMGs from pipe and vehicle springs in WWII, no CNC required.
Heck, firearms were originally MADE without any such (or course), including very, very good ones.
And you can make several quality barrels from one short length of pipe (short by “I’m doing any amount of plumbing at all” standards). One can literally make an AK pattern rifle FROM A SHOVEL (seen the pics of the guy doing it myself, and he was piss-drunk while he did it).
We have recovered fully functional SMGs FROM PRISONS, as in *made in the prison*.
So unless you want to live in a literal prison-level police state (AND EVEN THEN), there will be guns available, and the criminals will have them.
The safety of the public from criminals is not what this is about, and never has been. Not once. Ever.
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Where this whole thing will run aground is the “right to repair” movement; farmers are up in arms about spending $400K on a (software-controlled) tractor then being absolutely required to use only the manufacturer’s parts, software and approved technicians to repair it, all in the face of support delays in conflict with unchangeable weather time demands for planting, fertilizing and harvesting.
When that finally blows up far enough to get killed off it will, simply by proximity, also kill off this BS.
Unfortunately, that day is still quite a way off.
Closer to home for most people, the “right to repair” a $1,200 smartphone by opening the case and replacing the screen or battery, rather than having to send it back to the factory or take it to an “authorized repair shop.”
Urban-dwellers don’t often sympathize with the plights of farmers, but most of them have — or know someone who has — dealt with a broken phone screen that they couldn’t fix/replace themselves — despite the actual process being pretty straightforward — without either sending it in (and being without a phone for a week or more) or buying a new $1,200 phone.
Or having a car (at any price point) that’s effectively not serviceable by the owner or a mom-and-pop mechanic, and must go back to the dealer for anything.