(The Center Square) – Legislators in California are hearing a bill to restrict the files that 3-dimensional printer hardware can use to print firearms components.
Support is mixed, and the bill is being amended.
“We did outlaw the printing of ghost guns,” California Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, said in June when she was presenting her Assembly Bill 2047. “We’ve seen across the state that they continue to be printed. It’s a hard thing to stop … These are printed in people’s homes, and we are not able to track them. And so we know they continue to be printed.”
Bauer-Kahan’s bill, titled Firearms: 3-Dimensional Printing Blocking Technology, was last amended Monday.
Critics say the amended bill is beginning to “collapse” under its own weight.
The National Association for Gun Rights said in a social media post that the state would now keep checking to see “whether the magical non-existent technology needed to block the printing of three gun parts actually exists.”
NAGR went on to say that if California regulators don’t have the industry standards published by July 1, 2029, the requirement is effectively “DOA,” or dead on arrival.
Tuesday, Bauer-Kahan’s measure was read for a second time and ordered to third reading.
Before this week’s amendment, Bauer-Kahan said in June that her bill works to make it more difficult for 3-D printers to accept certain schematics.
“New York passed this recently, and it allows for us to put technology on the front end that stops the components from being printed and allows us to prevent it,” she said. “I don’t know that it will be foolproof in preventing all printing, but we are going far in making sure that we can stop as many ghost guns from being printed as possible, and I think that’s critically important.”
Support for the measure was mixed.
Krystal LoPilato, a policy advocate for Everytown for Gun Safety, said she sides with other gun control groups, like Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense and Students Demand Action. She said 3-D gun printing threatens laws the Legislature has already put in place.
“All those laws are upended when teenagers, extremists and people with violent criminal histories can easily print guns in their basements and bedrooms,” LoPilato told legislators in June. “To be clear, there is so much positive creativity and innovation happening as 3-D printing becomes more accessible and affordable.”
The opposition had multiple different perspectives for saying the bill shouldn’t advance.
A CEO of a 3-D makers marketplace told legislators they support effective gun legislation, but said AB-2047 raises serious technical, privacy and economic concerns by requiring manufacturers to build monitoring systems into general fabrication tools, something that would be tenuous.
Others opposed the measure on the principles of making certain objects illegal when legislators should be looking at the motive behind somebody using an object for ill intent. David Tobin said what the bill aims to address is already illegal in California.
“And according to the Department of Justice, the crimes of this bill are down 31% statewide, 50% in Los Angeles. You can’t make it illegal-er,” Tobin said. “And that same Department of Justice put this bill, when it was in Assembly, through, it went in suspense because they said the technology’s not possible. And they’re very concerned about the First Amendment violations like prior restraint and compelled speech. Because we’re talking about a shape. We’re talking about an object here. The object doesn’t commit the crime.”
Tobin also warned legislators of taking as truth different statistics used to support the perception of just how much 3-D guns have proliferated.
“And we’re not trying to scare you with weird stats like a thousand percent and the other things that they say about all these gun parts everywhere. No one’s actually described that. It’s been 30 parts found here,” he said. “Firearm parts? No. 3-D printed parts. They’re not saying whether they’re firearms, their components or anything like that. It’s being used to gaslight people.”
