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NY bill would require a criminal history background check for the purchase of a 3D printer
(www.nysenate.gov)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Here's a fun fact, hobby machinists have been making guns in their garages for as long as machining has been a career.
You can, right now, buy a drill press for a few hundred bucks and finish 80% lowers in an apartment if you want. If you have a lot of money to spend you could buy a mini mill and make the job a lot easier.
These are completely unregulated and arguably much more dangerous.
Have fun with that knowledge.
Hell, you can make a basic pipe shotgun with a $5 hacksaw and some steel pipe. Not only that, but you can pretty convert tons of guns to full auto with basically no effort. Sometimes literally a piece of coat hanger bent with pliers. The Lightning Link, which can convert a majority of modern ARs to full auto has been around for decades and can be made with about $1 worth of steel, a piece of paper with the design printed on it, and that hacksaw you used earlier. Even some guy in his garage could easily make hundreds a year without a single power tool.
All of this is to say, you know what we don't see? Millions of illegal full-auto firearms being used to re-enact the minigun scene from Terminator 2. Much to the shock of our government, the vast majority of citizens are law-abiding, and stupid shit like this once again only harms normal people while criminals will just continue to break the law as usual.
There is a decent community of 3d printed firearms, but they're not printing pressure chambers or barrels. These things can be and frequently are regulated. These guys are printing crazy looking guns for fun. They still have to go buy the important bits and even then they still fail pretty regularly.
This is some real brain dead legislation
Oh, I'm well aware and I'm part of that community, which is what makes this so hilarious. US gun legislation hasn't ever really been based on reality, and always amazes me that in a country where guns are such an integral part of its history and culture, we have people who seemingly know less than nothing about anything firearms related effectively making legislation based on something they saw in a movie that one time.
And I can't even remember the last time a crime was committed with a made-at-home gun. We're really going after the people that commit all the violence. 🙄
It's such an easy window into the fact that it's about cutting the access to weapons of the population who might use them to fight back against government action. They dgaf if we murder each other, they just don't want us murdering them.
I think it's stupider than that. They have no idea how a handmade gun could be built without a 3d printer. They probably have zero clue what a 3d printer actually can and cannot do, and I'd bet most politicians have never seen one or bothered to understand it before regulating it. Their sole exposure is a few loud people who also do not understand anything about guns or 3d printers, and confuse that lack of understanding with definitive proof that it is evil and should be banned.
Same principle applies to the frequent attempts to ban semi-auto rifles, when rifles account for 3% or less of all homicides annually.
Those kind of weapons are effective for defending / attacking a moderate sized area, unlike pistols and bolt-action rifles. Pistols are short range and bolt-action rifles are slow. It's obviously about the power that they don't want the people to have.