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.
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%+…