I'm not someone who is generally impressed with new technology. Oh, some of it is cool, but most of it really just feels like an update on what we already had, and while I appreciate it, I'm not blown away by it.
3D printing is something else, so leave it to the left to try and screw the whole industry over because of their own paranoia.
See, one of the "problems" is that 3D printers will print just about anything you want. There's a learning curve, but you can make almost anything you can imagine, and so someone figured out how to make guns. You can build them entirely with the printer, or just make components like the lower receiver--legally, it's the gun, but it still needs other parts to function.
And because the left seems to lose its collective mind over firearms, they're trying to stop this from happening.
They're trying to stop it, Soviet style.
The old Soviet Union strictly controlled photocopiers, because they empowered individuals to share ideas that challenged state control. The restrictions ultimately broke down under the weight of mass defiance as people took advantage of every opportunity to distribute that which was forbidden by the government. Now, politicians in several states are channeling totalitarian policies of the past, this time with their eyes on 3D printers that can manufacture gun parts. Their intrusive rules are likely to suffer the same humiliating fate.
Making Your Printer an Agent of the State
"A new bill proposed in the California State Assembly could potentially require the makers of 3D printers to confirm that they are using algorithms or other technologies to prevent the printing of firearms," Bruno Ferreira reported last week for Tom's Hardware. "As with the Washington and New York bills, circumvention of these measures would be made illegal."
3D-printed guns have been a bugaboo of many politicians ever since Cody Wilson printed the first single-shot Liberator pistol in 2013. Wilson now sells the Ghost Gunner CNC (computer-controlled) milling machine that can produce gun parts—or anything else users want to make. And 3D-printed gun designs have moved on to semi- and full-automatic designs like the FGC-9 and Urutau that combine printed parts with components readily available from hardware stores anywhere on the planet. Among other uses, Myanmar rebels have deployed 3D-printed firearms to fight that country's authoritarian government.
Writing in The New York Times in 2024, Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff claimed that 3D-printed firearms are bringing the "American brand of libertarianism" to the whole world—that is, 3D printers (and CNC machines like the Ghost Gunner) empower individuals to challenge the state with the tools of self-defense just as photocopiers did with the printed word.
Copying Failed Soviet-Era Controls
"Since their introduction into the Soviet Union, photocopiers have been kept behind locked doors. Documents are carefully screened, copies closely counted and logs dutifully and routinely kept," the Deseret News noted in 1989 as that creaky totalitarian system entered its final days. But the story reported a failure of restrictions, not a success, as "Moscow officials recently conceded that controlling the reproduction of information has simply outstripped government resources."
The problem isn't that criminals can make guns. They want you to think that, but it's not.
In a report at the anti-gun newsroom, The Trace, they reported on a study that was, by and large, stupid, except for one tidbit. While looking at so-called ghost guns and tying them to suicides, the study's authors found no link between an increased number of these guns and an increase in homicides. In other words, criminals aren't getting hold of these because there are no other options for them. They're just getting these instead of more traditionally made guns.
They're simply making a choice, rather than having no other options but the 3D-printed gun.
What bothers them, for all their pontificating about gun tracing and background checks, is simply the fact that if the technology is allowed to exist without controls, then society can exist without their controls.
We don't need their permission in order to be free men and women. We can take freedom for ourselves, and that scares the crap out of people like Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and the rest of the Democratic Panic Squad.
They're copying Soviet-era controls because they're communists who see how the Soviets did things not as a warning, but a guidebook. They make Orwell look like an optimist.
And honestly, they're never going to actually do what they think they will.
Someone will jailbreak the printer in no time flat. Others will develop designs that will bypass the filters. Hell, most will just get one from another state and bring it home.
They'll never have the control they want, but it'll never stop them from trying.
