In US President Biden’s new executive order to combat emerging firearms threats issued last Thursday, the word gun appears 44 times. The words “3D print” are a close second, appearing 30 times. It’s the strongest statement yet from the current American administration linking the growing threat of gun violence to 3D printers.
Biden’s order establishes an interagency Emerging Firearms Threats Task Force that, within 90 days, will submit to the President, a risk assessment and strategy to stop the proliferation of machine gun conversion devices, with a particular emphasis on the devices used to convert a standard, semiautomatic firearm to a machine gun. This task force does not include any representatives of the additive manufacturing industry.
The assessment report is to include data on several fronts of the gun issue. The task force will report on the “software or technology used for 3D printing machinegun conversion devices” and will also include an “assessment of the technological and legal feasibility of 3D printing companies designing 3D printers that block the functional capacities of software that can 3D print machine gun conversion devices.”
Another chunk of the report addresses 3D printed firearms themselves. The task force is charged with gathering all the available information on “the usage, recovery, origins, and distribution channels of 3D printed unserialized firearms and 3D printed undetectable firearms, including the software or technology used for 3D printing unserialized firearms or undetectable firearms.”
Again, in this section of the order, the idea is floated that 3D printer makers and software developers can technically — and could be compelled to by law — develop mechanisms to prevent a 3D printer from printing a specific object. The order reads: “The risk assessment and strategy shall include … an assessment of the technological feasibility of 3D printers proactively blocking the functional capacities of software used to 3D print undetectable firearms.”
All3DP has reached out to slicer software makers Prusa Research and UltiMaker, the developer of Cura slicing software, for comment on the technical feasibility of this idea.
Prusa told us that at the slicer level, any “protections” or limitations built into the software can easily be disabled, recompiled, and legally shared online because PrusaSlicer and Cura, are open-source, making it hard to enforce restrictions.
“At the printer firmware level, it’s technically possible (though, again, many 3D printer firmwares are open-source),” Prusa told All3DP, “but it would be a highly demanding task to detect every possible geometry related to firearms. Implementing this on the processing units commonly found in modern 3D printers would be extremely difficult.”
Read more news:
License: The text of "Can Your 3D Printer Refuse to Print a Gun?" by All3DP Pro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.