Elegoo printers can be offline - you can run everything from the machine itself, as long as you have your model/s on a thumb drive. Or is that not what you mean?
These people are so ridiculous. It'll fail on 1A and 2A grounds, not to mention challenges implicit from 4A and 5A considerations. They can't ban arbitrary information, even dangerous information, and there's a presumption of regularity - you're presumed innocent of wrongdoing absent evidence, so they can't legislate the assumption of criminality by default. They can't ban private creation of firearms and weapons, so long as other aspects of the law are being followed. They can't assert control over private property and mandate being online, this is equivalent to a warrantless search of private home activity. Arbitrary compliance costs and increased prices can amount to violations of 5A takings clause, and you can't bake in a violation of your right to refuse to incriminate yourself, especially with the vague, subjective nature of the proposed legislation. There's also 5A due process concerns, with the legislation being overbroad and arbitrary. 14A presents equal protections and lays the basis for discrimination between hobbyists and manufacturers and interstate commerce concerns.
The whole notion is about as anti-American and authoritarian as laws get, I don't see it as anything more than political grandstanding, and even if Washington passes it with statewide, unanimous endorsement, it won't last a year before 9th circuit court strikes it down on purely 2A grounds.
Washington state lawmakers, led by Democrats, have introduced bills like HB 2320 and HB 2321. HB 2320 is sponsored solely by Rep. Osman Salahuddin (D-48th District), focusing on prohibiting 3D printers and CNC machines for untraceable firearms. HB 2321, pushing printer DRM requirements, similarly lacks Republican co-sponsors based on available details. In Washington where this is going on in the state House Democrats hold 59 seats, Republicans hold 39 seats and in the state Senate Democrats hold 30 seats, Republicans hold 19 seats. These Democrat-sponsored bills passed initial House committees along party lines, with no Republican co-sponsors or primary support
Virginia Democrats are advancing multiple gun ban bills in the 2026 session, including assault weapon sales bans and magazine capacity limits, primarily through Democrat-controlled committees. Virginia's General Assembly has a slim Democratic majority sponsoring and pushing these measures without Republican support.
Bills like house SB 217 (assault weapon ban) and HB 271 (semi-auto ban) were approved in the Democrat-led Senate Courts of Justice Committee strictly along party lines. Sponsors such as Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim (D) lead these efforts, facing opposition from Republicans like Del. Terry Kilgore (R). They await full Assembly votes and signature from Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
In NY State, Democrats, holding supermajorities in the Assembly (103-47) and Senate (42-20), champion Governor Hochul's 2026 State of the State proposals. These include criminalizing unlicensed possession/sale of CAD files for 3D-printed guns (via Penal Law amendments), mandating 3D printer safety standards to block firearm production, and requiring recovery reports to state police. Key bills like S.227A (Sen. Hoylman-Sigal, active in 2025 session) target 3D-printed ghost guns/silencers as felonies; related A2228 pushes printer background checks.
Republicans offer no sponsorship or support, labeling Hochul's agenda and bills like S.227A "anti-gun, anti-speech" infringements on Second Amendment rights and innovation for non-gun printing. NRA-ILA criticizes them as futile against criminals while burdening hobbyists
In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen. There is a separate fully frontal assault on personal liberties impacting normal American citizens happening right now and it is happening while all the attention is on Minneapolis!
At the same time it's neat to live in a separated reality from the people thinking that "In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen."
The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
That doesn't seem like a "distraction"... that seems like -the literal thing that you're worrying about- happening in a highly obvious and direct way.
As a left-wing gun owner, a pretty common conversation is about how limited the right wing gun owners understandings are, because this is, like, literally the thing they have been fantasizing about all along.
Wild times for sure.
I hope the world many of us live in never actually enters yours and you can keep enjoying your fantasy of government oppression while some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state.
> The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
He was shot after disobeying lawful orders and the man who disarmed him possibly negligently discharged the victim's firearm while the other officers were wrestling him and the other officers didn't have the information that he was disarmed. This wasn't intentional, this was an accident. There is also another angle showing him kicking an ICE vehicle and breaking its tail light the week before. This is no bystander. It is delusional to believe that it is possible to deport millions of convicted criminal illegal aliens without an incident while thousands interfere with police operations as they deport criminals. The bills being passed are far more relevant to Americans' civil liberties because they make the average American who is NOT currently a criminal into one for possession and manufacture of plastic and metal parts. This is an untenable position.
> some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state
Yeah, I'm not belligerently protesting the deportation of illegal aliens.
He was shot while being dog piled by 6 officers dude. There was no way for him to defend himself when they already had taken his weapon. It was murder. Was he intentionally out there protesting? Yeah, he probably was. Was he filming ICE and giving them verbal hell? Absolutely he was. Was he interfering? He absolutely wasn’t. They just let him get under their skin because they aren’t professional. They murdered him because they got scared that he had a gun. One of the officers was on video saying “I got the gun…” sighing as he stood up.
So yeah, tensions are high. Minnesotans feel violated. ICE sees a battleground, not a state. That’s an issue.
”There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people” - Admiral Adama
Same video, two movies. Presentation, pace, timing, narrative all designed to reinforce your existing biases, even if you aren't aware of them. You look and think you've seen. You're nudged and put into a bubble with people offering up comments that validate and verify what you think, and what you know, and what you believe.
Anything outside your bubble is framed as a conspiracy theory or the ramblings of deluded, even evil people on "the other side".
The media streams you watch end up being a rorschach test - carefully crafted and deployed to different bubbles, A/B tested, cynically manipulative and deliberately framed and intended to evoke specific reactions. The language is carefully used so two people can watch the exact same clip or newscast or soundbite and hear what sounds like a reasonable reinforcement of what they already believe. Sometimes things will even technically be 100% factual, but it'll be just as manipulative and as much of a "lie" as if they'd made it up entirely.
I don't think bubbles is the right paradigm, anymore - these are deep, deep pits, and every piece of media that reinforces your model, where that model is the one intended for you to have by some of the big influences, brings you another shovelful deeper, and you've got to put that much more effort in to dig your way out.
Trying to talk to anyone who hasn't worked their own way out of digging out of a media pit ends up being a team sport or a tribalistic conflict - the facts and the stories don't mesh, and if you're 100% certain of your facts, and your "opposition" concedes to the facts, then you're going to think your story is the right one. The cognitive dissonance and the effort required to update your model to match reality - to recognize the manipulative, malignant influences deploying these conflicting storylines, and to figure out how to identify what actual reality is - is too much for most people, and way too much for any casual online interactions.
Not sure how you fix that without forbidding some actors from doing what they do at a legislative level, and that gets into hairy freedom of speech territory.
You saw a video that might have been murder. It might have been an accident. We know the gun he carried was notorious for unintended discharge. It might have been dropped and gone off, it might have fired accidentally in the agent's hand after being taken away, prompting the trained, legitimate response of law enforcement. It could have been a cold, deliberate execution if one of the CBP agents knew Pretti from previous conflicts and was antagonistic towards him. It could have been a heated, spur of the moment killing way outside the bounds of the law.
You certainly don't know - none of us have all the facts, and the investigation into it will reveal it. It's that both sides present the same facts, the same video, and tell two starkly different narratives, either of which are reasonable conclusions based on the facts that can be proven from the available evidence. What doesn't get talked about is that even with multiple videos, from multiple angles, nobody has sufficient evidence to definitively prove what actually happened.
What I do know is that it's extraordinarily stupid to get into a heated conflict with any sort of law enforcement, especially when armed, because any sort of accident or exceptional circumstance or misinterpretation of events is not going to go your way, legally and sometimes with regards to you losing your life. Pretti was in the wrong - you cannot physically interfere with and antagonize federal law enforcement. We have legal remedies to hold officers to account for overstepping or violations. He was well within his rights to record and then report the mistreatment of the woman he was stepping in to "protect", and the proper place and time to remedy that wrong is in court. If the officer was in the wrong, he'd have been held to account. Getting physical and up in the officers face and space was either stupid and ignorant, or a deliberate act intended to elicit additional violence. There's protest "training" out there that teaches people to do that sort of thing, with the intent of escalating violence deliberately, specifically for agitprop and convenient political narrative purposes.
The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence, for better or worse, and if you intrude on that in the slightest, you will lose.
They want the nebulous, uncertain, rorschach test incidents where they can spin an event to tell the story they want to tell, regardless of whether that story is actually true. That doesn't mean the CBP agents were in the right, nor that Pretti was responsible or did it on purpose, or that anyone involved in the whole series of events had ulterior motives. The only thing we know, until an investigation is finalized, and due process is enacted, is that we lack critical information that explains the full context and nuance of the incident. There are a metric shit ton of ways the actual story might have gone, ranging from schizophrenic break (by an agent, or Pretti) to suicide by cop, to tragic accident caused by a notoriously flawed weapon, to some other asshat, currently unknown, throwing a firecracker after the officer announced "gun", and so on. We don't even have enough information to know what's a "likely" outcome and make some reasonable Bayesian projections.
The videos we saw aren't proof of anything. They're evidence of dozens of different possible scenarios, with a wide range of likely possibilities, and dozens more we don't even know to consider without having the information that investigation will bring to bear.
Hoss, you can rashomon yourself into any position.
That tactic is almost always an excuse to not realize some hard truth about the world.
Most of us look at your position and understanding you're literally just trying to gaslight yourself.
The kind of radical moral relativism indicated by your position was appealing to me when I was a sophomore philosophy student, in the same way that I found solipsism to be an interesting idea to entertain.
For instance, you know for a fact that "The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence" is a) not true, and as the gov becomes ever more violent it's not even "legitimate", which is the word you've gaslighted yourself into forgetting in your thinking here.
But I'm an adult now, and I have spent enough time questioning my beliefs. I have been around enough folks who think they are rational but who haven't done the "work" that I can smell it when I do it, and I can smell it when other folks do it.
They are just stupid. The WA state has a problem with a growing number of shootings, so the reps need to show that they are "doing something".
Meanwhile, the legal system in WA requires 5 (five) arrests for juveniles to be given _any_ jail time for gun crimes. And the laws regarding the unlawful possession of a weapon are almost completely unenforced.
Sigh. I'm pretty pro-gun-regulation, but I just can't stand our legislators' furious virtue signaling.
This reminds me of William Gibson's "The Peripheral" in which the protagonist runs a rural 3D print shop where everything has to be licensed and government approved. We live in the near future.
Bleh, just wire into the steppers and extruder directly, not that hard.
To be clear I have no desire to print firearms but I do not want my tools online and getting bricked when the company who made it goes out of business.
I don’t think a company should have a say in what you do with their product after you have purchased it. Whether you intend to print firearms or not. The acts of the few should not withhold liberty of the many.
They'll just run it through BigBrotherGPT, a CAD aware multimodal censorship bot specially trained to recognize Bad Things that must not be printed. And while this is sarcastic, it also occurs to me that it's also really, really achievable. OpenAI could probably whip one up in a weekend office hackathon.
I doubt it's actually achievable without either either a massive false positive rate or massive false negative rate.
Last I looked, the vast, vast majority of 3D printed firearms were basically just printing the receiver (the part that the government considers "the gun") which is more cosmetic than functional. It holds parts, but isn't pressure-bearing, the firing pin isn't attached to it, etc, etc. Like [1] is the part of a Glock that gets stamped, and you could trivially change every part of that except where the mag goes. You could move the mag button, you could add the slide for the upper afterwards (and would want to anyways, so it can be metal). You could also print snap-off plates over the holes so it looks solid.
I would wager humans would struggle with this given that the people designing the models are actively trying to hide what it is. This is a dedicated community, not really the casual "I'll do it if it's easy" crowd, because it's currently not super simple and easy.
That’s the tricky part of this whole mess. Online servers would have to mesh and volume your model and determine if it matches a likeness of any known models. So much for printing NERF.
I don’t think this will pass as is but it shows you where lawmakers heads are. They would rather brick your capability than do actual policing.
What gets me is this doesn’t even seem to be the most effective way to regulate this. 3D printed guns require a lot of non 3D printed gun parts. You can’t 3D print bullets for example.
The is really just a US specific issue where 90% what you need for a gun can be purchased easily, but the non functional handle requires registration, etc.
They could just make buying gun parts as strict as buying a whole gun
And work really well until you have more than 20 files or so after which it becomes impossible to manage the SD. Your best bet here is to have a stack of SDs of what you'd normally put in folders. Really nice, especially given how easy it is to write on the outside of a micro-sd what the contents are.
