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Thursday, February 12, 2026
Adafruit Warns New Ghost Gun Laws Could Have Unintended Consequences for 3D Printers
gizmodo.com: In a series of blog posts, the open-source hardware company Adafruit criticized the recently introduced legislation in Washington state and New York, calling the measures misguided, overly broad, and potentially harmful to the open manufacturing industry.
4 comments:
DogBlog
said...
I definitely have some concerns with this proposed law on ghost guns and requiring that 3D printers have software that blocks the ability to 3D print ghost guns. I am someone who is very pro gun control and believes that the United States is currently in a crisis of gun violence, however I see a lot of flaws with the current proposed law. I think a big one for me is that I don't think it would actually do anything. As someone who's gotten to help my friend make his own 3D printer with its own custom software, I really realized how easy it is to manipulate and personalize 3D printers and I would worry that this law would stifle new software that people are making to better use their 3D printers. I also think it would give a false sense of security. Technology is so easy to manipulate if you have the right information and I'd be worried that the only thing this law would do is make it so that ghost guns aren't considered when evaluating what weapons are used in a crime. I do think we need regulation, I'm just not sure this is the right way to go about it.
I find it a little annoying that the only sort of gun regulation that the government seems intent on following through on is the possibility of someone 3D printing a gun, instead of, you know, just creating actual legislation around firearms that could actually save lives. I understand why this is being put into effect, the idea that someone can just print a gun is scary, but as this article points out, trying to distinguish between a part meant for a firearm and a part for some random unrelated side project is next to impossible and just makes this technology inaccessible to people who want to use it. This just seems like a weird bandaid approach to the actual problem with guns in this country. A bandaid that seems to be doing nothing to actually stop people who are dedicated enough to try a 3d print gun, and only harms bystanders trying to use 3D printers.
While I can empathize with the idea of putting an end to gun violence I don't think that this is the way to do it. For now let's focus on the idea of false positives as I feel that that applies most directly to theatre. Some might argue that this is akin to requiring traditional printers to prevent printing money but the complexity of gun parts makes this not so apt of a comparison. Money relies on looking like money so a printer can simply check if what it's printing looks like money (intentional oversimplification). Not all gun parts can be reliably identified as only possibly being a gun part. Not to mention, even if there were an algorithm that could reliable tell if something being printed is being used to build a known type of gun with 100% accuracy and no false positives, there would be nothing preventing people from simply changing the design. This would inevitably lead to a regulatory game of cat and mouse and not actually prevent anything.
Gun regulations often are never addressed in the United States, but this doesn’t really seem like a really effective way to address most of the gun violence that is plaguing our nation. Something is better than nothing, but this seems to really miss the mark. I just am not sure if I am comfortable with the government having such close access to every single 3D printer in a state or in the entire nation if this was adopted at a national scale. Technologically speaking, how would they even be able to enforce this? Every computer would have to check every single STL or GCODE file, further increasing the already somewhat intense physical demands of 3D modeling objects or mechanisms. And if something is a false positive, what happens then? Does the 3D printer just refuse to work? And even if something like this was implemented, people would inevitably find a way around the software.
4 comments:
I definitely have some concerns with this proposed law on ghost guns and requiring that 3D printers have software that blocks the ability to 3D print ghost guns. I am someone who is very pro gun control and believes that the United States is currently in a crisis of gun violence, however I see a lot of flaws with the current proposed law. I think a big one for me is that I don't think it would actually do anything. As someone who's gotten to help my friend make his own 3D printer with its own custom software, I really realized how easy it is to manipulate and personalize 3D printers and I would worry that this law would stifle new software that people are making to better use their 3D printers. I also think it would give a false sense of security. Technology is so easy to manipulate if you have the right information and I'd be worried that the only thing this law would do is make it so that ghost guns aren't considered when evaluating what weapons are used in a crime. I do think we need regulation, I'm just not sure this is the right way to go about it.
I find it a little annoying that the only sort of gun regulation that the government seems intent on following through on is the possibility of someone 3D printing a gun, instead of, you know, just creating actual legislation around firearms that could actually save lives. I understand why this is being put into effect, the idea that someone can just print a gun is scary, but as this article points out, trying to distinguish between a part meant for a firearm and a part for some random unrelated side project is next to impossible and just makes this technology inaccessible to people who want to use it. This just seems like a weird bandaid approach to the actual problem with guns in this country. A bandaid that seems to be doing nothing to actually stop people who are dedicated enough to try a 3d print gun, and only harms bystanders trying to use 3D printers.
While I can empathize with the idea of putting an end to gun violence I don't think that this is the way to do it. For now let's focus on the idea of false positives as I feel that that applies most directly to theatre. Some might argue that this is akin to requiring traditional printers to prevent printing money but the complexity of gun parts makes this not so apt of a comparison. Money relies on looking like money so a printer can simply check if what it's printing looks like money (intentional oversimplification). Not all gun parts can be reliably identified as only possibly being a gun part. Not to mention, even if there were an algorithm that could reliable tell if something being printed is being used to build a known type of gun with 100% accuracy and no false positives, there would be nothing preventing people from simply changing the design. This would inevitably lead to a regulatory game of cat and mouse and not actually prevent anything.
Gun regulations often are never addressed in the United States, but this doesn’t really seem like a really effective way to address most of the gun violence that is plaguing our nation. Something is better than nothing, but this seems to really miss the mark. I just am not sure if I am comfortable with the government having such close access to every single 3D printer in a state or in the entire nation if this was adopted at a national scale. Technologically speaking, how would they even be able to enforce this? Every computer would have to check every single STL or GCODE file, further increasing the already somewhat intense physical demands of 3D modeling objects or mechanisms. And if something is a false positive, what happens then? Does the 3D printer just refuse to work? And even if something like this was implemented, people would inevitably find a way around the software.
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