Comment by mikestorrent
Comment by mikestorrent 3 days ago
How would it know what is a firearm and what isn't? Seems trivial to defeat for someone who knows CAD, no?
Comment by mikestorrent 3 days ago
How would it know what is a firearm and what isn't? Seems trivial to defeat for someone who knows CAD, no?
I doubt it's actually achievable without either either a massive false positive rate or massive false negative rate.
Last I looked, the vast, vast majority of 3D printed firearms were basically just printing the receiver (the part that the government considers "the gun") which is more cosmetic than functional. It holds parts, but isn't pressure-bearing, the firing pin isn't attached to it, etc, etc. Like [1] is the part of a Glock that gets stamped, and you could trivially change every part of that except where the mag goes. You could move the mag button, you could add the slide for the upper afterwards (and would want to anyways, so it can be metal). You could also print snap-off plates over the holes so it looks solid.
I would wager humans would struggle with this given that the people designing the models are actively trying to hide what it is. This is a dedicated community, not really the casual "I'll do it if it's easy" crowd, because it's currently not super simple and easy.
1. https://shop.evosports.com/glock-g1718-lower-receiver-receiv...
That’s the tricky part of this whole mess. Online servers would have to mesh and volume your model and determine if it matches a likeness of any known models. So much for printing NERF.
I don’t think this will pass as is but it shows you where lawmakers heads are. They would rather brick your capability than do actual policing.
What gets me is this doesn’t even seem to be the most effective way to regulate this. 3D printed guns require a lot of non 3D printed gun parts. You can’t 3D print bullets for example.
The is really just a US specific issue where 90% what you need for a gun can be purchased easily, but the non functional handle requires registration, etc.
They could just make buying gun parts as strict as buying a whole gun
It requires only two non-3d printed parts (minus hardware). The barrel and the slide.
They'll just run it through BigBrotherGPT, a CAD aware multimodal censorship bot specially trained to recognize Bad Things that must not be printed. And while this is sarcastic, it also occurs to me that it's also really, really achievable. OpenAI could probably whip one up in a weekend office hackathon.