this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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From who are these awful ideas in California governing coming from
The lobbying power of tech companies that profit from proprietary technology and feel threatened by open source. The same people who are behind DRM on everything from ebooks and music to printer inks, and legal restrictions on repairing the devices you own.
This but it's not just tech companies, it's all companies and a feature of our lovely system 🙃
The tech bros.
Who are owned by private equity for sovereign wealth funds pushing for nothing but returns. Hence they don't care if they sign on the line with Goebbels or enshittify their product into uselessness.
Anti-gun/gun control lobby would be my first guess. You can basically print all the serialized parts (the part required for registration) for most any gun then get the rest of the parts and assemble it yourself. The gun parts don't necessarily even need to be based on an actual manufactured gun, there are designs for completely homemade guns down to the barrel using parts you can easily pick up at any hardware store. Then there are also people who are printing parts that can turn some semi-automatic guns into selectable fully automatic.
Problem is the plans are already in the wild for printing gun parts and for open source printers. I don't know what good would accomplish to deter people from printing when the person targeted is already motivated enough to print one to begin with.
Making a gun is already illegal in California and Washington. This stupid law won't make any difference. If someone is willing to break the law to make a gun, they probably are not going to follow this law either. 3D printed guns are rarely used to commit crimes anyways. It takes a lot of time and effort to get one to work well.
This is probably about companies like Bamboo Labs wanting an excuse to lock down printers even more. It will also make it difficult or impossible for smaller companies to sell 3D printers in California to get rid of competition.
Yeah, kinda reminds me of when Sony music put a rootkit virus on their music CDs except this time it's going through the state governments to encrypted things. This also feels as dumb as making math illegal in terms of outlawing encryption or making some numbers illegal because when arranged in a certain way they are an .stl file for a copyrighted character or an .mp3 file for a song.
This is just making something that is already illegal more illegal and opening a massive hole for government and corpo spying.
And probably an attempt to get licensing fees from printing STL file, so you can't print any Disney figurine without paying them.
Unlike laws against making guns, this law applies to printer sellers, not to their users.
Nope. This is actually an anti right to repair bill. The gun narrative is just the trojan horse, just like they're doing with ID verification.
I just remember the earliest opposition to 3D printing becoming readily available to the mass public at cheap prices was the gun control lobby. They're an "old" enemy to the hobby. I think this is more of an anti-privacy issue than anti-ownership/right to repair, but it is certainly both.
The problem with 3D printers is people are repairing things with parts made on them. We can't have that.
Could you also just make these same parts out steel or aluminum? Seems like a weird arbitrary line to essentially say what material you can make them out of and what equipment you can use. Or are benchtop CNCs gonna be banned next?
Not sure about the California bill, but the similar shit out of Washington state does have language for subtractive manufacturing as well as additive. They basically are targeting any computer controlled manufacturing.
It all feels so obviously stupid when there are people on the internet selling partially complete metal parts with instructions for how to finish them completely unrestricted. They obviously aren't worried about stopping the "ghost gun problem", they are worried about people having the means of production and the right to repair things they own.
Ok so aluminum casting is still OK.
This is the sad state of the US I guess.
Two States, California and Washington, are not "The US" any more than France and Germany are the European Union. They are important no doubt but they do not themselves represent the entire entity.
I see this constantly on the internet. "Some backwater Podunk state puts the 10 commandments in classrooms" becomes "The US puts the 10 commandments in classrooms". It's like people don't understand how this country is architected.
Yep it's tiring but comment aged link milk because the very next day a bill was introduced to Congress.
Yes to your entire comment
Washington State. They have a identical (or at least similar) bill I heard about last month.