[ToucanLoucan]

^ 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.

[nostromo]

Ah yes, the actual problem facing America right now... unsanctioned 3d printers.

Thank you California for acting on this, our top national priority.

[tadfisher]

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.

[c22]

More people have been murdered with sharpened sticks. I'm eagerly awaiting the anti-whittling laws.

[tadfisher]

Yes, but this murdered person was important, you see.

[ThrowawayTestr]

You can make a gun with a piece of pipe and a nail. It's performative legislature.

[kube-system]

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.

[ToucanLoucan]

The actual problem is gun violence which you absolutely, 100% know.

[nostromo]

Which this bill will do nothing to solve, which you absolutely 100% know.

[ToucanLoucan]

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.

[philsnow]

> The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done.

The mechanism of that reduction very well could be reducing the level of depression in the populace and thus suicidal ideation, rather than just making the means less handy (or of course, some combination). Coal gas, like any other gas used for combustion, doesn't burn perfectly and UK homes likely had persistent amounts of carbon monoxide roughly all the time since heat gets used not-quite-year-round.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning#Chro... :

> Chronic exposure to relatively low levels of carbon monoxide may cause persistent headaches, [...], depression [...].

[15155]

> statistically speaking they are more likely to use it to end their own lives

What historical precedent is there for infringement of Constitutionally-enumerated rights of others based on suicides?

Why is this somehow a "gotcha" that would justify these infringements, in your mind?

[ToucanLoucan]

> What historical precedent is there for infringement of Constitutionally-enumerated rights of others based on suicides?

There is no requirement that a precedent exist for limiting personal freedoms for the sake of safety. We infringe personal rights in the name of public safety all the time, not the least of which is current, existing gun regulations, all the way down to far more benign shit like speed limits, and not letting people scream "fire" in a theater. The 2nd Amendment was itself a modification to the constitution, ratified some time after the constitution itself. Hence the "amendment" part.

And as numerous gun activists have pointed out before me: The individual ownership interpretation goes only back to the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, and is not itself law, merely judicial precedent. The right for every single American to own a gun is not enshrined in any law, merely an interpretation of a law, and the law itself was written in an era of single‑shot, muzzle‑loading firearms, not modern semiautomatic rifles, and further, it was written to promote the creation of, and I quote, "well-regulated Militas," not "Ted up the street who owns the gas station."

Further, even if it was spelled out, in the 2nd Amendment, in clear words, that every single American had the innate right to buy and use an AR15, that does not make it unimpeachable or forever carved in stone: We can change that. We can amend the amendment, hell, we could reverse it entirely. The problem of gun violence is a hard nut to crack, and the culture of American gun ownership is long standing and on the whole I myself quite like guns. That said, I think they're far too easy to get right now, and I am far from alone in that opinion.

[caconym_]

The fact that the federal government is unwilling to restrict guns and other real causes of ongoing public health crises (such as massive passenger cars and trucks) even as the deaths pile up does not mean that any level of government should be piling onerous regulations onto other things that demonstrably cause essentially zero harm at the macro scale, such as 3D printers, non-commercial/non-military UAVs, and so on.

If the number of people killing themselves with 3D printed guns is not literally zero or vanishingly small at most, I would be very surprised.