The irony isn't lost on me that it's the USA, the country with some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns - or is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby?
Politically the US is very much not a monolith on this topic and many states and localities have passed laws that were later struck down as unconstitutional. This is a bill in California, which does have about the strictest laws that the federation allows them to have, and they would place even stronger restrictions on guns if they could. This is not really ironic as much as it is pushing the envelope for gun control as far as they legally can.
But also, California regulators likely see the regulatory landscape as the reason this law is needed rather than in spite of it.
Gun manufacturers are likely against these types of regulations because many of them would affect manufacturers and the tools they use too.
> strictest laws that the federation allows them to have
Note that "the federation" allowed states to have stricter gun laws until recently when we got a new partisan supreme court that is out of step with the previous 200 years of jurispudence.
It was confirmed for the previous ~130 or so, at least, since United States v. Cruikshank... although I certainly wouldn't want to go back to those days before the Bill of Rights were incorporated against state/local governments... Basically it was a blank check for racists to suppress minorities.
The result of United States v. Cruikshank was that southern states were allowed to to prohibit black individuals from owning firearms to defend themselves from the KKK. Not exactly a great example of gun control.
What's also crazy it is that it is also relatively recently that the first amendment was incorporated against states and localities as well.
The gun manufacturer's trade association has consistently said that 3D-printed "ghost guns" are more fantasy than reality, and that legal designs don't cause any more trouble than other legal guns: https://www.nssf.org/articles/3d-printers-cannot-produce-und... .
> is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby
Definitely not, it's pressure from the anti-gun lobby that keeps pushing "one more bill that this time will actually change violent crime statistics, we promise!"
These bills are being introduced in the states that already have the most restrictive gun control already, yet to nobody's surprise, hasn't done much to curb violent crime. But the lobby groups and candidates campaign and fundraise on the issue so they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure.
I have three guns. One I inherited, two I bought right before California turned up gun restrictions. Possibly the greatest time for gun makers was when Hilary Clinton had a clear lead in the race for president.
A democratic governor/president is the greatest salesman for the gun industry. When a Dem is in office, the right wing comes out with all of the "they're coming for your guns" which is followed by a spike in gun sales.
The latter doesn't make the former untrue. There are plenty of people that want to eliminate all private gun ownership altogether, even if their public speech is more moderate.
I bought my three when I saw videos of the ATF under Biden start random "knock and talk" sessions for those who recently bought more than one firearm. They're all in a friend's gun safe as I have had bouts of depression, so I won't keep it in my home... I know it kind of defeats the purpose... but I'm very much a supporter of all of my civil rights, including and especially 2A.
No conspiracy required. There's a lot of money to be made lobbying against guns - in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year - regardless of efficacy.
There are dumb arguments on both sides of this debate, but "one more bill that this time will actually change violent crime statistics, we promise!" is definitely one of the weaker arguments... pretty much all state-level gun control is worthless when there is no border control at state lines.
> states that already have the most restrictive gun control already, yet to nobody's surprise, hasn't done much to curb violent crime
The "most restrictive gun control" states in the US would still be generally by far the least restrictive gun control states in the rest of the developed world (you know, where gun-related deaths are a small fraction of here?).
Your answer smacks of "well, they tried and surprise surprise it doesn't work so why are we doing it?", i.e. "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".
It is hard to police guns when there is free travel between the US states, yet only individual states can be relied upon to pass any reform. A broken federal government means guns are easily exported from red states with practically zero gun laws to blue states where they are used to commit crimes. States are often forced to recognize rights granted by other states because such an interstate jurisdictional question naturally bubbles up to the aforementioned dysfunctional federal system.
Similarly to how many (most?) guns used criminally in Mexico actually come from the United States.
Edit: I'm not surprised by the downvotes, but I am amused. These are objective facts. Any basic research will yield many studies (including from the American government) showing that the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico are traced back to the States. Americans love the boogeyman of dangerous Mexican cartels so much they never seem to ask themselves where these guns come from in the first place. Hint: look in the mirror.
The characterization of the federal government as "broken" (at least in this capacity) and "dysfunctional" is a normative judgment you're making based on your own subjective value preferences.
Some -- perhaps most -- Americans regard the federal constitution's ability to restrain states from enacting policies that transgress against generally accepted individual rights as desirable, and working as intended.
That wasn't the objective fact in question, and I think you know that. A humorous one to contest anyway, given it is well known most Americans take a dim view of federal politics, especially when their favored party is out of power. This is a country where national elections are routinely decided by roughly a percentage point.
Are you willing to concede most guns used by criminals in Mexico come from the United States? That would be a question of fact, not characterization. And that, if it is easy enough to smuggle guns from red states into Mexico to commit crimes, it stands to reason it is even easier for red states to do the same to blue states? Or are you going to invent some other strawman to attack in your defense of your "individual rights"?
> Are you willing to concede most guns used by criminals in Mexico come from the United States?
No -- nor am I willing to assert the opposite, because I have no knowledge of the topic. I will ask, though: why is the place of manufacturer of guns used by criminals is Mexico something worth worrying about?
> And that, if it is easy enough to smuggle guns from red states into Mexico to commit crimes, it stands to reason it is even easier for red states to do the same to blue states?
Well, yes, of course. But I assume that this will be the case regardless of any attempted policy at any level of government, because I do not believe suppressing the movement of firearms is an attainable goal at any scale in the first place.
> A broken federal government means guns are easily exported from red states with practically zero gun laws to blue states where they are used to commit crimes
So why are the crime rates in most of these "red states" you are referring to often so much lower?
> Any basic research will yield many studies (including from the American government) showing that the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico are traced back to the States
I couldn't give less of a fuck if this were true "research" or not: this isn't my problem, nor is it a valid reason to restrict my rights.
Also, please: a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise can't build or buy a machine shop and enslave or hire some machinists? They can build submarines and drones, but just couldn't possibly operate without US firearms? What reality do you live in?
The 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2024 were: Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, Maryland.
Not seeing this so much lower crime rate in red states here.
Until knife killings start to rise (UK). Beyond this, I've seen several interventions of armed citizens stopping a crime in progress, when the police are still in route. When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
My dad was ex-army, retired PD (detective, undercover) and a heavy 2A advocate. I grew up with guns around so it wasn't some weird, scary thing to see. I have many friends who also are heavy 2A who also grew up with guns in the home. It's first a matter of familiarity and second a matter of civil defense. I'm not a fan of "must flea" laws, and not a fan of restricting gun rights at all.
And yeah, if you can afford a tank and the ammo for it, as far as I'm concerned, you should be able to own and operate it. I would draw the line at nuclear weapons and materials.
It is, in fact, legal (but very expensive) to own a tank ( https://www.drivetanks.com/ , yes, that's a company, but a rich enough motivated person could fill out the same paperwork). Apparently each exploding shell is a NFA taxed destructive device ( https://youtu.be/GW2U0qORdLE ).
Who do you think makes the tanks? It's typically corporations, but could just as easily be a person... It isn't a socialist/communist company doing the work.
It's pretty much already the case that people can have access to these weapons, I'm just being explicit.
I won't try to make as strong a claim as the person you are responding to, but unfortunately, the politicized nature of the topic makes research on gun violence, especially as it relates to gun laws in the US, extremely fraught. The vast majority of research articles are plagued with issues. One should not just blanket trust the research (in either direction, and there are definitely peer reviewed journal articles pointing in different directions).
The claim you responded to was too strong, but for similar reasons, yours is also far far too confident.
Same thing with anything in regards to drug use in the United States. Dr Carl Hart talks about how hard it is to get anything that doesn't show harm published https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hart
I'm responding to someone making assertions with zero cites, and I cite a source. If anyone has a cite showing that loose gun policies results in lower rates of gun deaths, they're free to present that.
I'm impugning the entire field of research, why would I then provide an opposing citation? My own claim should lead you to not trust it. I'm also not making any particular directional claim that would require such a citation.
I'm arguing that your statement, citation supported or otherwise, was stronger than I believe is warranted. You (correctly) criticized the original comment for making a stronger claim than they were able to support. You then technically did a better job in supporting your own claim (in the sense that you made any attempt to support it at all), but, in my opinion, you still made the same mistake of making a claim that was much stronger than warranted.
I would dispute your source just by look at my own state, which has incredibly open gun laws, including free open carry and having had these laws since before anyone here was born, and a massive hunting population, and yet is claimed to be in the top half of strong gun laws. It is ranked significantly above Texas, and yet I know for a fact that my state has way more permissible gun laws than Texas, both historically and currently.
So I already know they are fudging the numbers, presumably because my state usually votes democrat and they want us to look good.
Hell its got Vermont as #17, but it has some of the highest gun ownership rates and most permissive gun laws in the nation.
They do get included by anti-gun people who want to pump up the numbers. You can't trust anything but the government statistics broken out by type of death.
“Common sense” is a red flag for me. Obama (who I voted for twice, don’t come at me) pitched revoking second amendment rights for people on the Do Not Fly list as “common sense”. My common sense says we shouldn’t use a secret, extrajudicial government watch list with documented problems with false positives to revoke constitutional rights.
Yet another lie by ommision. Violent deaths by guns have no relation to strength of gun laws. What your link measures is the number of accidental deaths by guns. If gun owners want to kill themselves it's not my job to keep them safe.
> Suicidal people aren't a valid reason for my rights to be restricted, sorry.
You also have a right to travel around the country, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to drink and drive. There are plenty of valid, constitutional reasons for firearm ownership to be restricted to qualified individuals. When these restrictions are in place, many fewer people die. It is what it is.
On the other hand, no one from the pro-gun camp is involved with or wants to involve themselves with drafting common-sense gun regulations to reduce the impact of mass shootings while respecting Constitutional rights. Everything from that side seems to revolve around arming schoolteachers and permitting more guns in more spaces.
So of course you're going to have wildly-overreaching proposals making it through committees and put to the vote, because no one from the other side is there to compromise with. Americans prefer to debate on the news circuit instead of the committee floor.
If somebody has a really stupid proposal -- such as "make all 3D printers refuse to print guns" -- I don't see why I have any obligation to "compromise" with them. Or to talk with them at all. Other than, perhaps, explain that they ought to learn about the things they want to regulate before they start making proposals. The fact that they have an incredibly long track record of bad proposals, and many strongly-held opinions based mostly in ignorance, is just entertaining.
You don't cooperate with abolitionists using compromise. You will never come to an agreement that satisfies both parties. By definition it is impossible.
Interests are also not always clear, any movement that wants to restrict activities using the law, is going to attract opportunistic power-seeking individuals. There's always crazy carve out exceptions in these proposals that allow the wealthy and the powerful to use and possess firearms that regular people cannot reasonably expect to have. It's laws to protect the powerful from the everyone else. Billionaires are creating armed doomsday compounds in countries like New Zealand, while supporting legislation that makes it harder to own a gun for self defense.
Also mass shootings are statistically the least likely cause of a gun related death. They are in the news because they are novel, not because they are likely to happen to most people.
I have an inalienable right to not be shot in public. So do my kids. The right to live should be paramount, far and above any excuses one might make about billionaires controlling all the guns.
Maybe we should enshrine that right in the Constitution as the Zeroth Amendment, because it is seriously being trampled as of late.
Unfortunately the constitution has never been the reason or means for protecting our rights. It is only an after the fact acknowledgement of them. It doesn't secure them, we do.
Define "common-sense gun regulations", because every time someone tries explaining what that means it is almost always the exact opposite of common sense. Is restricting suppressors common sense? Because some of the nations with the most restrictive gun laws advocate for the usage of suppressors. Or bans on the scary AR-15, which is less powerful than most 60 year rifles which nobody cares about, especially when the vast majority of gun crime is committed with handguns. How about bans on gun accessories like types of stocks, slings, or bayonet lugs? How about sawed off shotguns which are less powerful than many "pistols" that shoot rifle rounds? Or shotgun/rifle combinations which were once a popular hunting combination for small game.
Either we should be allowed whatever semi-auto gun, or we should be allowed zero. Everything in between is a complete waste of time and effort and just leads to fucking over poor people for judicial profit because they can't afford $10,000+ lawyer that gets everybody with any money off of such charges.
Calling anything about gun control laws "common sense" is disingenuous at best. I'm coming at this from the "you go left enough and you get your guns back" side of the whole debate, but it's extremely difficult to solve a problem that consists of "tool used for its intended purpose, but in the wrong context".
Guns kill things. That's their primary purpose, it's why they exist. The people who aren't interested in guns for that purpose are easy to please: they don't really care about gun laws except in so much as they stop them from buying fun toys. They'd probably be fine with wildly invasive processes (being put on lists, biometric safeties, whatever), so long as they were given something in return. Something like, "You can have machine guns, but they need to be kept locked up at a licensed gun range".
People who just want guns for hunting are likewise easy to please. I'm not aware of any gun laws that have seriously effected the people who just want to shoot deer, because the tool you use to shoot an animal that isn't even aware you're there is pretty fundamentally different than those you to shoot someone who doesn't want to be shot.
The problem is people who want guns because of their utility against people, whether that means self defense, community defense, or national defense, fundamentally need the same things ( a need that is very expressly protected by the second amendment) as the person who wants to shoot a bunch of innocents. The militia folk might be fine with restrictions on handguns, but handguns are bar none the best choice for the self defense folk. The self defense folk might be fine with the existing machine gun ban, or other restrictions on long guns, but the militia folk need those for their purposes. The self dense folk are probably fine with being put on a list, but the militia folk who are concerned about the holders of that list are rightfully opposed to that.
IMO, the most effective gun law that isn't a complete non-starter to any legitimate groups of gun owners is the waiting period. It's an effective policy that substantially reduces suicide. That's a good thing. Requiring sellers to not sell to people under 18, or those who are obviously a threat to themselves and others is also largely unobjectionable. Punishing parents who fail to secure their weapons from their children, also a good thing.
No one's in favor of mass shootings, but it's not anywhere as simple as saying "common sense gun regulations".
Regarding your statement about the guns used against animals being different than the ones used against people is just wrong. The AR-15 is about the perfect choice against wolves or wild boar, just as a single example.
As far as the waiting period, there's a perfectly valid reason against that as well... if you are under eminent threat of violence from someone and want to be able to defend yourself/family/home today... it stops you from being able to do so.
I am okay with the (relatively quick) background check... when I bought my first guns a few years ago, I had to wait about an hour in the store for the results to come back (Phoenix). Even then, I'm not okay with secondary offense restrictions (weed, etc) as a restriction.
> IMO, the most effective gun law that isn't a complete non-starter to any legitimate groups of gun owners is the waiting period. It's an effective policy that substantially reduces suicide
If I own many firearms already, what exactly does a waiting period do besides infringe upon my rights?
If you own many firearms already, how is a 30 day wait preventing you from bearing them?
But yeah, the benefit does mostly arise for first time gun buyers. But that would require a master list of all gun owners. I'd prefer the wait per gun.
Would you be okay with a 30 day waiting period for posing a news article, that included strict penalties for misinformation/disinformation? Since you have to wait to publish, you have less reason to get things wrong.
> I'm not aware of any gun laws that have seriously effected the people who just want to shoot deer, because the tool you use to shoot an animal that isn't even aware you're there is pretty fundamentally different than those you to shoot someone who doesn't want to be shot.
If you talk to hunters, they'll give you a long list of annoying laws.
California requires a background check to buy ammunition and prohibits state residents from importing ammunition. If you are a non-resident, you can bring ammunition in, but you cannot give it to your hunting buddies and you cannot buy ammunition in California. This is such a common problem that many hunting organizations have guides explaining the issue.[1] When I lived in California, I was unable to buy ammunition despite legally buying several firearms. Around 1 in 6 legal gun owners in California are incorrectly denied when purchasing ammunition.
California (along with several other states) bans civilian ownership of silencers. Hunters need to be able to hear when searching for game, and they rarely have time to don hearing protection before taking a shot. So the net effect of this restriction is to give hunters hearing damage and create more noise pollution. It's also a problem for anyone in rural areas who wants to dispatch pests, as gunshots annoy neighbors and can even result in the police being called.
California requires that long guns be unloaded when transported, but the definition of "unloaded" states that ammunition be stored separately. If ammunition is readily available near the firearm, California counts that as loaded, and you are committing a crime. If you have cartridge holder loops on your rifle's stock, they must be empty during transport even if the firearm is in a locked case.
California requires that hunters use lead-free ammunition. Lead-free ammo is more expensive and less available than typical lead ammunition, especially if you're not hunting with a common caliber. Many hunters zero their rifle using leaded practice ammo, and are generally less experienced with their hunting ammo. This makes hunters more likely to miss an animal's vitals, prolonging its suffering. Lead-free birdshot makes sense, but considering how few rifle rounds are expended while hunting, and how it's legal to use leaded ammo for target shooting in the wilderness, the lead restriction on rifle ammo serves no useful purpose.
It's been years since I lived in California, so I'm probably forgetting some other laws that annoy hunters. But believe me: hunters are not happy with the current laws.
> The irony isn't lost on me that it's the USA, the country with some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns - or is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby?
It's like saying "I am baffled by Europe, look at what Hungary is doing ..."
For example, some states don't need any permit to open or conceal carry, some have no minimum age requirements to buy guns, and the majority don't have any mention of 3D printed guns.
Federal law applies then about untraceable guns and or arms that cannot be detected by metal detectors. But those predate 3D printers as we know them today.
It's not the most "permissive gun laws in the world". In Norway you can buy a suppressor off the shelf with little to no paperwork.
If you live in CA and don't want to experience permanent hearing damage from shooting, you'll catch a Felony for simply possessing one. It's a big middle finger like the rest of California's gun laws.
I'm pretty much a gun control maximalist, but I would be more than happy to barter suppressor restrictions for pretty much anything else, since I agree with you that there's a good non-shooting-other-people reason to want to have them and I doubt they're actually that relevant to murder stats.
I think the current government of California would significantly regulate firearms if they could. It’s prevented from passing more restrictive laws due to the US constitution and a Supreme Court which takes an extremely broad interpretation of the rights derived from the second amendment.
^ This. The Feds are so utterly gridlocked in culture war nonsense and whatever dumb bullshit Trump is up to that they cannot effectively govern. States and activists groups are trying to address actual problems the country has, instead of just playing political games on Twitter.
To be fair, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group was murdered with a 3D-printed handgun. He made $10 million in 2023, or about 100 times the median salary of a UnitedHealth employee.
This bill is performative legislature not because of pipes and nails, but because professionally manufactured guns are widespread in the US. Criminals in the US overwhelmingly choose this option.
Criminals have tons of options, including straw purchasing a CA compliant gun, straw purchasing a non-CA-compliant gun from Nevada, or just throwing a brick through the window of the nearest pickup truck with a Glock sticker on it.
I know no such thing. The number one type of gun death is by far, suicide. When a gun owner takes a gun home (or in this case, prints one) statistically speaking they are more likely to use it to end their own lives or harm themselves more than anything else.
You could make a similar case for this as was made for the banning of highly toxic coal gas in the UK in the 1960's. Most suicides are acts of distressed individuals who have quick, easy access to means of ending their own lives. The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC478945/
I don't think 3d printed guns have been around long enough to really provide meaningful data on whether this law will be effective, and on the whole, I'm not thrilled about it. But again, as was originally commented: this is an issue where states are, perhaps ineffectively and ineptly, attempting to solve what they see as problems, under a federal government that has shown itself incredibly resistant to common sense gun regulation that virtually everyone, including the gun owning community, thinks is a good idea.
It’s pressure from the anti gun obsessed nonprofits on the left like Everytown. Bloomberg has nowhere else to waste money and there are legislators willing to present bills authored by Everytown blindly. But in many cases gun control bills are known to be unconstitutional and pushed through anyways. It takes years for laws to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and even if they are, states like Washington or California or Oregon will just pass the next Everytown authored unconstitutional bill with a slight variation.
The real fix is that we need to get rid of immunity for legislators. When they violate the civil rights of the constitutional rights of citizens through their actions, they must be held personally liable and must go to jail.
If by "the left" you mean the DNC, then sure. Otherwise, Marxists, Socialists, and other far left groups are perfectly fine with guns. Hell Vermont has some of the highest gun ownership rates and most permissive gun laws in the nation, while having Bernie Sanders as a senator.
> The real fix is that we need to get rid of immunity for legislators. When they violate the civil rights of the constitutional rights of citizens through their actions, they must be held personally liable and must go to jail.
It's the anti-gun lobby. Bloomberg's band of morons who believe a government monopoly on force is good.
These bans are almost exclusively in states with already extremely strict (high rated by the gifford's law people) gun laws.
So far, there is zero evidence in the last 30 years more strict gun laws have curbed crime. The states with the strictest laws conveniently have the highest proportion of gun crime. The same people writing these laws don't understand what "per capita " means. Nor are they willing to confront the reality of what the data shows. The calculus for these petty tyrants has changed from banning guns wholesale to lawfare. Make owning and purchasing firearms so burdensome the market dies, and with it, the rights. This is just another play in that strategem.
Fun fact: More people died last year putting foreign objects in their rears than by AR-15s. That is how insane the anti-gun lobby has become. They are literally barking at their own shadow these days.
No amount of FBI stats about how often "assault" rifles are used will change people's minds. They don't like them and so want to take them away.
I don't know how to square the same people saying we're living under a tyrannical government also pushing legislation that makes sure said tyrannical government is the only one with guns.
I can't square people who think owning a gun will stop or prevent a tyrannical government. Especially when the tyrannical government just leverages its supporters as a vigilante force.
An armed populace creates a huge risk for a federal paramilitary force descending on a municipality with the intent to terrorize the citizens. They're not rolling in with tomahawks and tanks, they're coming in with assault rifles and window breakers.
It won't "stop" them but having to treat everyone like they might shoot back and show up with a 10:1 manpower advantage and armed to the teeth every time you wanna subject someone to state violence really puts a damper on your ability to do tyrannical government things.
Not at all true. I haven't yet witnessed armed resistance to ICE, but it's in the cards, if the government wants to push. Given the number of veterans and folks that actually have skill with guns in the civilian populace, and the hiring standards of ICE, I think the civilian population, properly mobilized, would be incredibly effective at putting a damper on their illegal behavior.
It kind of is in that they're picking the easy targets. They're not being sloppy in places where wrong address has an unacceptably high (but still small) chance of having them confused for the DEA and shot back at by someone who isn't going to prison one way or another.
The problem with that thinking is that you have to have the will to act to stop tyranny, and no amount of armament will give you the will or the foresight to see it.
> So far, there is zero evidence in the last 30 years more strict gun laws have curbed crime. The states with the strictest laws conveniently have the highest proportion of gun crime. The same people writing these laws don't understand what "per capita " means. Nor are they willing to confront the reality of what the data shows.
I’ve seen this claim from a few people in this thread but everytime I look up gun deaths per capita Massachusetts and California are low on the list and both have strict gun laws compared to red states
Long gun homicides (justified and unjustified, "assault weapons" and grandpa's 30-06 combined) are typically sub-500 per year, see: FBI crime stats for the last N decades.
Pick whatever demise: falling off of ladders, roofs, etc. - it's not hard to exceed this number in any given year.
> In 2023, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 53% of the 13,529 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 4% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (42%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”
Interesting findings:
Most gun deaths are suicides with handguns.
Assault weapons are used in less than 5% of deaths.
So basically the comparison to foreign body objects (of any type) to a single type of gun- which represents a tiny fraction of all gun deaths- is not a convincing comparison.
The point was that all the regulation on assault weapons doesn't have a meaningful effect. At best, you could reduce gun violence by 4%.
I wouldn't over-rotate on the comparison to foreign body objects: the point is, if you rely purely on the media to inform you about gun violence, you're going to get a funhouse mirror version of reality. It's way more exciting to write about the 40 school children killed in the last two years in mass shootings than the 16,000 depressed dads that blew their heads off in their garage with a handgun in the last 12 months (spitballing a bit, but 40,000 deaths, 50% of which are suicides, 80% of those are men).
I disagree- this subthread was not about assault weapons, it was about gun-control laws. But yes, if you limit yourself to assault weapons (itself a somewhat nebulous term that just muddies the discussion IMHO), then yes, you're not going to have a huge impact.
No argument that the media produces inaccurate representations about guns. I spend a fair amount of time reading articles and also spend a lot of time reading into the facts that they report.
It's mostly the same Karens that want to outlaw guns altogether so come up with burdensome rules to inhibit gun ownership. I've always been pretty libertarian on 1A and 2A myself.
It is pressure from the gun control lobby. Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, is the brains behind it. The states moving this legislation (California, Washington) are very hostile to gun ownership, and already have bans on assault rifles and printed guns. This is just another step in tightening the noose.
It's important to note that the USA also has some of the fiercest opponents of private gun ownership in the world.
The most important thing to note here is that a majority of the support for gun control in America is cultural. Even the loud-and-proud pro-gun people got extremely shy about their own principles once the Black Panthers started packing heat. On the flipside, it's also not hard to find gun control supporting Democrats that happen to own firearms in their house. There's a related cultural argument over "assault weapons", or "black guns" - i.e. the ones that look like military weapons rather than hunting tools.
The result of all this confusion - and, for that matter, any culture war fight - is a lot of stupid lawmaking designed specifically to work around the edges of 2A while ignoring how guns actually work or how gun laws are normally written. Like, a while back there were bans on purely cosmetic features of guns. Things like rail attachments, that do not meaningfully increase the lethality of the weapon, but happen to be preferred by a certain crowd of masculinity-challenged right-wingers. In other words, a ban on scary-looking guns.
What's going on here is that someone figured out how to make a 3D printed gun that will not immediately explode in your hand on first firing. In the US it's legal to manufacture your own guns, and there's no requirement to serial-number such a gun, which makes it more difficult to trace if that gun is used to commit a crime. You can't really stop someone from making such a "ghost gun" (practically, not legally), so they want to take a page out of the DMCA 1201 playbook and just ban all the tools used to make such a thing possible.
Personally, I don't think that will pass constitutional muster - but that also relies heavily on existing culture-war brained nonsense that happens to be standing constitutional principle. 2A itself can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. The original interpretation was "no interfering with state-run slave catching militias", and then later that turned into "everyone has the right to own firearms". Nothing stops it from changing again.
I'm a strong believer in 2a rights. However I think every type of weapon might require a license. So if you 3d print a gun that you would be allowed to own if you had already completed your background check, then you're gold.
If you end up 3d printing a nuclear bomb, the licensing requirements for that would be a billion times harder. (secure facilities, 24/7 guards, blood oath to the United States etc...)
But also, California regulators likely see the regulatory landscape as the reason this law is needed rather than in spite of it.
Gun manufacturers are likely against these types of regulations because many of them would affect manufacturers and the tools they use too.