General Bill by Stewart (CO-SPONSORS) Rodriguez; BermanThree-dimensional Printed Firearms: Prohibiting a person from printing, transferring, importing into this state, distributing, selling, possessing, or giving to another person certain 3D-printed firearms as of a specified date; providing criminal penalties; requiring persons in possession of such firearms to relinquish them to a law enforcement agency or to the Department of Law Enforcement or to destroy them before the prohibition takes effect, etc.Effective Date: 07/01/2020Last Event: 10/15/19 S Referred to Infrastructure and Security; Judiciary; Rules on Tuesday, October 15, 2019 9:04 AM
Outright ban and confiscation of 3D printed guns. They were smart enough not to prohibit the possession of the digital plans or risk a court challenge on First Amendment grounds.
Who cares? Those things aren’t safe to shoot anyway!
The principle of attempting to ban all software-driven gun making. This would be the nose of the camel under the tent…
Oldawg, that depends. The ones made by low cost hobbyist plastic printers, no, those aren’t safe any more than any other plastic gun would be. But when made with suitably strong materials in somewhat more expensive printers, they certainly can be.
You can make jet engine parts in 3d printers, so there is no reason to doubt that gun parts could be made the same way.
The nutty thing of this bill is that it makes a particular object illegal solely based on the manner in which it was manufactured. A “3d printer or additive manufacturing process” is banned; a CNC milling machine (like the Ghost Gunner) is perfectly ok. That is, unless “or a similar device or process” is used to cover such machines. It’s hard to see how that would work. If I feed a string of G-codes into a Bridgeport or Tormach CNC machine, to turn a block of steel into a receiver, how can you ban that?
I keep wondering if a Markforged Mark 2 (https://markforged.com/mark-two/) which can produce Kevlar reinforced parts (or carbon fiber ones, for that matter) would be suitable for making receivers. That would be a “plastic” gun that may be strong enough.