this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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This is the problem when lawmakers write technical bills without speaking to technical people. They're going to publish standards for evaluating if your gcode is a firearm or firearm part? THAT'S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
It's not even that, building a firearm.....is legal...this shit going after printers makes no sense at all, it's fucking legal to print firearm parts.
BANNED
That's the point. This is just a foot in the door to block your access to print things that might be trademarked copyrighted or affiliated with your corporate overlords.
And a foot in the door to start blocking your right to repair your own things.
Guaranteed.
Fun time to introduce/remind people of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
Same thing goes for laws and lawmakers. It's almost as if selecting our "leaders" from a narrow band of society who, for the most part, don't know shit about anything, does not lead to enlightened laws.
Lol I was just talking to my wife about that yesterday and how it's exactly like AI.
If you read something in the newspaper about your job, you're like "these fucking idiots got this all backwards." If you see AI output of an attempt at your job, it's the same thing.
But if you read an article about someone else's job, you think "that makes sense." Same about seeing AI trying to do someone else's job.
In most cases, absolutely. There are a few jobs I can see an LLM performing as well or better. Though, then those people would be roaming the streets and do you really want your insurance claim denied while you're out walking your dog or someone yelling about paradigm shifts to align synergies when you're just having a nice day at the park?
I bet they end up using a fucking llm
Yes that's probably how you would do this. Get a bunch of data of gcode of 3d printed gun parts and not-gun parts, for different slicers and printers. Then train some transformer as a classifier. Based on how good object recognition is, i would say its possible that you would get reasonably good accuracy and precision. And because you are scanning for code the architecture will likely be similar to an llm.
Then five minutes later, someone figures out how to make a 3d printable gun that bypasses the gun detector on the 3d printer. It's not like you're printing a whole gun; you're printing parts, most of which look nothing like a gun. How hard would it be to design an algorithm that takes a gun part cad file and then adds a bunch of extraneous pieces to it that can be easily removed? Just keep adding extra crap until the system no longer detects it as a gun part.
Yes that would probably work. There could be some essential features of weapon parts that an algorithm might still be able to learn, and a printer could also keep track of previously printed parts for the classification. I think its unlikely that there are essential features of gun parts that are specific to gun parts so there would probably be a lot of false positives.
Yeah I'm thinking of an automated version of greebling. Except you design the extraneous bits so that they're only attached to the intended print like print supports - something in a non-critical location, easily torn away.
just rotate the piece at different angles on the plate, which would change the positions of vertexes and generate an unrecognizable set of printer head instructions. No extra pieces necessary; and even if there were, there's no need for them to be printed attached to the main part.
Isleepinahammocks idea would probably work. But rotation and translation would not. Thats something you can easily take care of in your training data, by reusing the same training data in multiple random positions and random angles.
are you familiar with 3d printing? The print head's instructions will be completely different if you rotate the model. Unrecognizably different.
Cosplayers are going to be pissed.
That's a whole section on OnlyFans
Yes they have no idea what they are asking. Stl is just gcode how do you look for a gun out of coordinates.
Kinda, render a few images from the gcode, use a CV algorithm to identify the object.
On device it'll be slow or expensive.
Define gun is a lot harder then you think. For example
or
I know, but they want a solution implemented, that's a solution.
Ah yes. Another passive asshole that codes this type of thing and goes home without even batting an eye because I got mine before someone else did.
Big assumptions
Its just either completly ineffective, or effectively bans 3d printing. Then you are going to run into enforcement, and legal challenges. Oh and even if all that is done guns will still be present at a ratio above 1:1 in the states.
Anyone who has a highschool level of metal shop can also make a firearm, 3d printing is not even well suited for the task. Just look at Japan, one of if not the most restricted nation for firearms, and someone shot a leader with a homemade firearm.
Your faith in this mystery algorithm is stronger than mine. Here's a diagram of the parts in an AR-15:
So we need an algorithm that renders the gcode I'm printing, then compares it to... something?
Look, I was just saying, it could be done, train it on current real and 3d printable gun parts and there, you did your best to create algorithmic gun filtering. I wasn't saying that it would be good or accurate.
The algos don't need to deny any or every part of a gun, but the most critical part must not be printable and it'll already be effective.
I'm neither very experienced with firearms nor printing, maybe such a thing doesn't exist for a gun, but I suspect there's a few very important pieces that need to be printed a certain way or the firearm falls apart or is at least a lot less useful.
All that said, I'm generally against such limiting mechanism in any printer or compiler. Try close sourcing all compilers so they can't create malware? Forget it.
3D printed gun designs these days don’t even use plastic for most of the critical parts. The goal is to print a frame, which you can then assemble into a full gun using durable off-the-shelf parts that are available from any hardware store. No need to 3D print a bolt (and deal with all of the manufacturing issues that entails) when you can just buy a bolt for 5¢ at any hardware store. Especially when that bolt will be more precise and durable than the plastic bolt you would have printed.
It’s the old carpentry idea that if you can’t get precision by hand, you can borrow it from something else. Need to cut a bunch of identical boards, with precision in 64ths of an inch? A #8-32 bolt will have 32 threads per inch. So a half turn on the bolt will advance or retract the bolt 1/64 inches, accurate down to whatever the bolt manufacturer’s clearance is. Probably a few thousands of an inch. Build a jig to hold your boards at the saw, and thread a bolt into the jig to act as the board stop. Now you can turn the bolt to adjust your clearance as needed, and you’ll be accurate down to 1/64 by only making half turns each time.
And 3D printed guns use the same concept. You don’t print a plastic barrel that will explode after two or three shots, you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe to fit into the frame. The pipe will be more durable and more precise than anything you could feasibly print. You don’t need to 3D print a firing pin that will blunt/shatter/jam after a few uses, when you can just use a steel nail that will have better durability and avoid jamming. And all of the parts you need can be bought at a hardware store without raising any suspicions. That’s part of what makes this so dumb. They’re not just requiring printers to scan for potential gun parts. They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts. And that is a much broader spectrum than simply scanning for the shapes of the parts directly.
It's worth explicitly noting that this effectively bans 3D printing entirely. The whole point of this law is to be able to charge owners of 3D printers with a crime. Real useful if they find out some anti-zionist protestor has a 3d printer in their garage. Can't get ya on the free speech thing, but they can get you on the owning a non-compliant 3d printer thing.
For the rightoids out there, replace anti-zionist protest with anti-abortion protest. Or any other speech the government doesn't like. This exists for the sole purpose of punishing innocent people.
So you're saying the answer is to scan for voids! Thanks for your technical input
That makes a lot of sense. If the print just holds the critical parts, forget it.
Unfortunately that's the crux of the issue. The people who have written and signed this bill aren't either - and they weren't as big of a person as you to recognize that.
At the end of the day, 3D printing gcode is telling your printer to spit out a shape. And you simply cannot ban shapes. Am I printing a firing pin or a part for my shoe rack? There's no way to tell. Any politician that's telling you there is is either ignorant or lying to you.
Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and "draw" the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.
And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as "gun parts"... The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.
You're gonna hate this, but... AI can literally do it, and for the large models it's terrifying how accurate they are. You will argue that your little ESP32 powered reprap or klipper or whatever printer can't handle it, to which regulators will go ok then, either the printer has to call out to a service with an http request to upload the gcode every time it wants to print anything, or your slicer has to do it (and we dont care that it's open source, it's illegal to operate if it doesnt make the call and you're getting fines or jail time if you get caught).
This is what AI was built for 😟
EDIT:
In case it isn't abundantly clear, I am not in favor of what I just described. I know that it is possible though and know how to architect exactly these mechanisms. If I can build them, so can they. (I won't, of course, that goes against everything I stand for).
Those cheap printers that don't have onboard hardware to do this also generally don't have any networking either. You're lucky if you can get them to connect to a computer with USB - most of the print jobs exclusively get sent via a physical SD card.
The slicer is in a better position to do this draconian business, but they aren't aiming this bill (from what I have found) at slicers at all (probably because they are all open source and, unless the law gets passed world-wide, they would just get forked and hosted by someone else in a place where they are still legal to be "dumb"). They are aiming at hardware. It is effectively a complete ban on cheap 3d printers, and turns the models "legal" to sell to a white-list style of control. The manufacturers that play ball get to continue business in the state, others do not.
All of this to stop a very tiny and difficult avenue for someone to get a gun, when there are much easier and more reliable options available and being used orders of magnitude more often. This has nothing to do with gun control, or guns. This is absolutely a play against 3d printing, at home manufacturing, and right to repair in general. The end goal is DMCA on 3d printing.
To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of what I suggested. I am vehemently against it. But I have worked with the technology enough in a professional setting to know what it is capable of and how it can (and I have) used it. I am afraid of what I am seeing as a possible (probable?) future.
Even AI can't do this. It is an impossibility. AI might be able to make the shape, but it will NEVER be able to interpret the intent of that shape. It will never know if a cylinder is meant for a gun or for a rolling pin. It will never know if I'm making a trigger for a gun or a replacement trigger for my hot glue gun.
But it CAN force your printer not to print that replacement hot glue gun trigger. After all, there's nothing in the law that says that this software has to allow non-gun related 3D printing. The simplest way to be in compliance with this law is to simply prevent all print jobs
Yeah exactly. They're effectively banning 3d printing.
You understand that this makes it impossible to implement right? It's to vauge and will damage profitability of large companies, meaning courts will gut or kill this shit.
If an AI can tell what's in a picture (which is a series of pixel data), it can certainly reconstruct gcode into an "image." Ive used it at work for similar tasks.
Cylinders obviously are too generic, but there are parts that are a lot more specific and could be fingerprinted.
AI cannot be made to recognize whether a piece of gcode is intended to produce a piece of plastic that is intended to be used as part of a gun. It would need to simulate the machine that that gcode is made to run on, and then simulate the gcode running on that machine, and then analyze the simulated output of that simulated 3D print.
At best, it can arbitrarily decide to decline print jobs. Which is of course the whole point, because anyone with a printer would need to bypass this filter, and bypassing this filter would be against the law.
They have banned numbers, I mean hell go around shouting 13-12 and see how long it takes for you to get a fine/get arrested. I wouldn't say that banning shapes is far off
Printer: “not a hot dog”
Theres countless gcode use in the world, much of it is offline
Doesn't matter. Has nothing to do with online.
You can run OpenCV on an RPi, it's just super slow, and you could probably use a cheap GPU chip to do it faster. You store the pretrained model on the device.
You may even get away with an asic designed for the model, though with that one I'm talking out my ass.
That would makes printers more expensive and my guess is that they'll prefer to force online connectivity
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