San Diego County jumped into California’s sprawling ghost gun fight this week, suing a 3-D printing filament manufacturer it says hocks material for homespun firearms in violation of state law.
Working with the Giffords Law Center, the county counsel sued manufacturer Polymaker, alleging the company made a “strategic business choice” to market and sell 3-D printer filament to Californians for the express purpose of building illegal weapons. The polymer filament is sold in spools that feed into 3-D printers, allowing the devices to form designs created by their owners.
The specifics revolve around a 3d-printed-gun advocate named Sean Aranda, whose youtube channel focuses on the subject. According to him, when youtube demonetized the channel in 2023 Polymaker approached him with a sponsorship offer. A couple months later Polymaker announced Aranda was a new member of its marketing team.
So regardless of where you stand on the Calif anti-3d-gun law, this isn’t a simple case of going after egg farmers because of illegal omelets.
You’ve got some point there, but doesn’t demonstrate the uselessness of the law? Unless of course they are going after every producer of technical filaments, which is like going after anyone with a lathe or a CNC machine.
No I think this is an example of the opposite - it’s not an action against the filament industry or the 3d printing community in general, it’s against an individual company for allegedly marketing filament specifically to print guns, not just because filament could or might be used to print guns. Whether the law itself is right or wrong is a different issue.
Which makes the law useless. People with nefarious plans don’t need ads. There really are just two possibilities, either it is repressive and overreaching or it is useless.
Ok whatever. I won’t try to argue over the validity of your definition of “useless” since you clearly think it’s absolute.
It is not absolute, you are free to argue in which way it is useful, in practical terms. Have you done so?
Do you think any follower of mentioned channel has difficulties finding functional FDM filaments without ads on the channel? If not, whats the point of the law’s application in this example?