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 problem is that, legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. So you can buy all the other parts online with no background check etc.
A person with a machine shop and knowledge on how to use it could also do this
Makes you wonder if there’s a more sensible way to classify things legally… Probably not.
My biggest problem with all these attacks on 3d printing is that what you are talking about is completely legal as far as I am aware. There are tons of places online that sell partial receiver blanks that require the buyer to do the last few bits of machining and turn a “block of metal” into a “gun”, legally speaking. It is currently completely legal for an individual in the US to build a gun without telling anyone about it for personal use so long as the final result does not run afoul of ant NFA rules (like automatic fire, length of shotgun, caliber size, etc.). They don’t start doing anything illegal until they sell them, or even give them away (again, assuming they meet all of the NFA rules - obviously someone making themselves a gun has a high risk of running foul of the myriad of rules here, but the end result has to be evaluated to determine if they broke the law or not).
So all of these are just using gun terror as an attack vector against 3d printing in general. Just like the “think of the children” campaigns all over the world that are really just about stripping us of privacy and security. The guns aren’t the real problem and neither are the kids. A free, private, and secure populace is the problem.
I am not advocating that people build their own guns. I am not a lawyer. I advise anyone go learn your local laws and discuss with actual legal counsel before choosing to attempt anything that could be against federal firearm law. kthx
To me this is so weird.
On one hand you have the gun nuts blocking any meaningful reform to gun control that would prevent mass shootings, school shootings, and general gun crime. Nationally, 98-99% of these are committed with regular firearms.
Ghost guns on the other hand are involved in 1-2% of all violent crimes. You’d think otherwise because the RECOVERY rate is 40-50% of all guns, meaning whenever the police recover a firearm from a crime scene, about half of those are ghost guns. But that doesn’t mean the guns were used to commit the crime itself, often it’s more like “we caught this guy dealing weed, he was on probation, and had a ghost gun in his car”. The actual violent crime statistics for ghost guns is the above 1-2% - that’s where the firearm used was a ghost gun.
But of course you can have more than one mass shootings a day (365 shootings as of 30 Sept in 2026, with 361 dead, 1553 injured), and not lift a finger. But one CEO gets offed with a ghost gun, and suddenly the 1-2% of gun crime gets more focus and crackdown than the other 98%+…