San Diego County jumped into California’s sprawling ghost gun fight this week, suing a 3-D printing filament manufacturer it says hocks material for homespun firearms in violation of state law.
Working with the Giffords Law Center, the county counsel sued manufacturer Polymaker, alleging the company made a “strategic business choice” to market and sell 3-D printer filament to Californians for the express purpose of building illegal weapons. The polymer filament is sold in spools that feed into 3-D printers, allowing the devices to form designs created by their owners.
Don’t tell them about pipes.
I believe they’ll eventually come for those too.
IMO the real end goal of these laws isn’t to ban ghost guns, it’s to ban plebs from being able to build or create anything at all. 3D printing a plastic piece to fix a broken tab in some gizmo cuts into corporate profits so a manufactured moral panic about ghost guns appears. I’m sure they’ll eventually get to a pipe rifle moral panic at some point to lock down DIY plumbing.
" Oi, you got a licence for that sewage mate? "
I am skeptical about that, though the visual is funny.
So they’ll make black iron pipe illegal and require it to be replaced with plastic flex hose.
This will get tossed. But here’s why it’s actually happening:
Gatalog and Polymaker both market through a network of influencers “specializing in 3D printed ghost gun content, as well as companies and individuals that illegally distribute [digital firearm manufacturing codes],” according to the suits.
Both also directly target state residents: Gatalog advertises a “California Compliant Glock 19-based Carbine kit,” while Polymakers’ website features Proposition 65 warnings and state-specific privacy opt-out features.
I mean yea, advertise your filament with YouTubers making guns, and you put yourself in the…oof.
Yeah people too easy to judge instead of reading the actual article. Despite the article being click baity, seems a pretty reasonable reason to sue polymaker. They should do little bit of research on who they choose to sponsor.
Next they’ll be looking at the violent motherfucker that invented 3d printing. Plus fishing supply companies that produce a different kind of, but still a, filament. /s
Might as well go after the smelters for making the metal that goes into knives and guns.
This is getting a bit fucking ridiculous. They’re suing filament manufacturers now.
A video I posted a few months ago about this bullshit: https://youtu.be/E1B2cWEaWDw
Polymaker is a Chinese supplier, selling to California residents, while also running ad campaigns through ghost gun content creators aimed at California residents, defining themselves explicitly as a ghost gun ingredient.
If they didn’t want to get caught up in this, they shouldn’t have gotten involved in the illicit arms business. But they wanted to be known as the plastic supplier that is cool with you making ghost guns, and that isn’t going to fly in California.
Plastic suppliers that don’t advertise themselves explicitly as being part of the ghost gun supply chain will be fine.
So polymaker actually choose the individual channels their ads (not about ghost guns) were put on…or was that an algorithm (AdSense)?
I don’t remember seeing them do any specific sponsored content, though they may and probably have, but that have a very open affiliate program that every 3d printer youtuber I’ve seen is in. They also give out codes for streaming channels to give away filament.
All this I’m saying is I don’t think they’re “choosing” these channels but I doubt they care what the content in on any channel.
Well, doesn’t that just show how useless that ban is?
Will be fine, for now.
Sue the steel mills for guns too while you’re at it.
Hol up, those guns are made by corporations. What are you thinking?
Anyone with machining knowledge can turn a block of metal into a working gun part
As an old toolmaker, that’s not as true as you think. It requires a lot of other knowledge besides running a lathe or mill. I speak from experience, having had to learn how to make repair parts for antique and collectable firearms at times.
So education is destroyed and all machines sold to China.
Americans can order guns to their doors, but the 3d printers are the issues you choose to tackle…
No, they can’t. Guns can only be legally shipped to a federally licensed gun dealer. The dealer cannot transfer it to the buyer without the mandated background check.
The gun laws are already fucked up enough. You don’t have to make shit up.
You can have long guns purchased through the Civilian Marksmanship Program shipped directly to your door. Those are a drop in the bucket compared to most firearm purchases in the US, though.
CMP can’t do that in states like California or any of the other states with decent gun laws.
Trump is trying to pass that law right now, a bit of hyperbole in my statement, but it reinforces my point
This also didn’t solve anything, if you look at the statistics.
The specifics revolve around a 3d-printed-gun advocate named Sean Aranda, whose youtube channel focuses on the subject. According to him, when youtube demonetized the channel in 2023 Polymaker approached him with a sponsorship offer. A couple months later Polymaker announced Aranda was a new member of its marketing team.
So regardless of where you stand on the Calif anti-3d-gun law, this isn’t a simple case of going after egg farmers because of illegal omelets.
You’ve got some point there, but doesn’t demonstrate the uselessness of the law? Unless of course they are going after every producer of technical filaments, which is like going after anyone with a lathe or a CNC machine.
No I think this is an example of the opposite - it’s not an action against the filament industry or the 3d printing community in general, it’s against an individual company for allegedly marketing filament specifically to print guns, not just because filament could or might be used to print guns. Whether the law itself is right or wrong is a different issue.
Which makes the law useless. People with nefarious plans don’t need ads. There really are just two possibilities, either it is repressive and overreaching or it is useless.
Ok whatever. I won’t try to argue over the validity of your definition of “useless” since you clearly think it’s absolute.
It is not absolute, you are free to argue in which way it is useful, in practical terms. Have you done so?
Do you think any follower of mentioned channel has difficulties finding functional FDM filaments without ads on the channel? If not, whats the point of the law’s application in this example?
I’m not a gun guy but from my understanding of ghost guns you pretty much buy the whole gun online in parts, and you just 3d print a handle.
So I don’t understand why people are so afraid of 3d printing when it really has minimal to do with the final product. From what I can tell you can’t just 3d print a gun from start to finish like its a llm. You still have to buy the actual gun parts from the manufacturer. To me this sounds completely unrelated and like a issue with regulating gun parts.
You can carve a handle out of soap, wood, or buy a solid chunk of plastic and its the same result.
The problem is that, legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. So you can buy all the other parts online with no background check etc.
A person with a machine shop and knowledge on how to use it could also do this
My biggest problem with all these attacks on 3d printing is that what you are talking about is completely legal as far as I am aware. There are tons of places online that sell partial receiver blanks that require the buyer to do the last few bits of machining and turn a “block of metal” into a “gun”, legally speaking. It is currently completely legal for an individual in the US to build a gun without telling anyone about it for personal use so long as the final result does not run afoul of ant NFA rules (like automatic fire, length of shotgun, caliber size, etc.). They don’t start doing anything illegal until they sell them, or even give them away (again, assuming they meet all of the NFA rules - obviously someone making themselves a gun has a high risk of running foul of the myriad of rules here, but the end result has to be evaluated to determine if they broke the law or not).
So all of these are just using gun terror as an attack vector against 3d printing in general. Just like the “think of the children” campaigns all over the world that are really just about stripping us of privacy and security. The guns aren’t the real problem and neither are the kids. A free, private, and secure populace is the problem.
I am not advocating that people build their own guns. I am not a lawyer. I advise anyone go learn your local laws and discuss with actual legal counsel before choosing to attempt anything that could be against federal firearm law. kthx
They used to make guns out of umbrella parts.
One of the best guns of all time (the .45 1911) was made by a typewriter offshoot of Remington.
You can print all sorts of gun parts though, like suppressors and modifications to allow a gun to shoot faster than normal.
With that being said, trying to ban 3d printing or sue filament manufacturers is monumentally stupid.
I don’t know how impactful those are, and I think a person with access to a decent metal shop could pose more danger.
What is it just the access that’s scary then? As a guy that doesn’t know guns, you often hear things like a potato or a water bottle can be made into a makeshift surpressor or turning a single fire into a sensative rapid fire trigger is trival. So I’m just not understanding why 3d printers are almost entirely linked to making guns in everyone’s minds. When I first got a elgoo that was the first thing people would jokingly ask if I was going to make one.
Like maybe I can understand the argument that access is so low anyone can do it, but even then you can’t just download a gun. The person who is doing this already bought gun parts and knows how to assemble them. This is not going to stop that kind of person from building a gun in any form. The gun is still the metal parts you buy online. A silencer, a trigger mod, whatever is useless until you handle ghost guns.
Yeah going after printing and/or filament is dumb. I’m I guess what some would call a “gun guy”. 3D printing in this space is less practical and more just for fun.
You can use a metal coat hanger to full auto an AR. A printed suppressor is going to be so weak it’ll probably break on first use. Oil filters work tho. If you want to illegal things the better way to do most often doesnt involve printing.
Ive alwaya assumed 3D printers were new enough that Genie could be put back in the bottle
Who is Jeannie?
Pfffffff hahahaha, are you also going to go after weed walker too?
The USA is a joke
Is this filament specifically designed for guns?
It’s like saying steel is specifically designed for guns. For plastics, stronger is a nice property for many applications.
huh. who knew the answer to gun violence in the US was to regulate 3D printers!
Jfc these people are out of their minds
i hope.polymaker fights this. this law ia wrong and should be challenged in court
you mean polymaker
yeah, typo
maybe we should be printing these