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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It would require 3D printers sold in New York to include technology that blocks the unlicensed production of firearms and gun parts. It would also make it a crime to possess, sell or distribute digital blueprints for printing illegal guns.

    This is an attack on my property rights as a 3D printer owner, never mind the Second Amendment (or First Amendment, for that matter). In practice, this would essentially require all 3D printers to have closed-source, DRM’d firmware and almost certainly spy on you. It is way, way more authoritarian than people only thinking in terms of “gun violence” likely give it credit for.

    Also never mind that “is this 3D model a gun?” is an absurd thing to have a computer try to figure out, even with the recent advances in machine learning. That goes double if you care about things like distinguishing a gun that would actually shoot bullets from a water gun, nerf gun, or other vaguely gun-shaped nonfunctional object (which any frothing-at-the-mouth jackbooted thug who would stoop to supporting this clearly wouldn’t). And even then, guns are fundamentally simple devices made from multiple parts – is it going to SWAT you for printing a cylinder because it might be a gun barrel?!

    This proposal is dangerously insane in every conceivable way, and probably several other ways I haven’t even thought of yet.