They just like banning stuff. Guns, child porn, whatever is just a pretense to restrict your freedoms. That's what governments, any and all governments, do.

The perceived problem may have more to do with the mass production of arms, rather than lone incidents.

I think the designs have advanced a lot since the first but what hasn't changed is that printed guns are mostly for hobbyists while criminals mostly use normal guns.

Currently, building a ghost gun is merely a matter of loading the right files into the appropriate software, purchasing the necessary materials, and beginning the printing process. The assembly instructions are as straightforward as building a Lego set.

Do we really want that?

Every day, people are actually murdered with these guns.

While they may not be more dangerous than a 1911 made in the jungles of the Philippines, acquiring a traditional firearm requires engaging with real people, which gives law enforcement a better chance to intercept someone before they can commit acts of violence with an illegal firearm.

What this bill does is not make it impossible to build a firearm with the available technology, instead, it raises the entry point beyond what the average American can navigate.

Let's be honest. Many of the individuals printing guns aren't doing it out of curiosity but to use them criminally. These individuals typically have a 30-second TikTok attention span, minimal resilience to failure, and little to no physical skills. Most of them have likely already been incarcerated and are therefore prohibited from legally purchasing firearms.

By creating a database of unique hashes for the publicly accessible printing files, we would deny about 95% of those individuals access to easily obtainable illegal firearms.

This list can be updated by authorities whenever someone modifies a public file needed to print a firearm, and with online access, similar to many normal printers, it could even alert law enforcement when someone tries to print these files.

This approach enhances safety for everyone, as guns, legal or not, shouldn't be in the hands of irresponsible individuals. Regardless of your views on firearm possession, I believe we can all agree on that point.

If you possess the skills to modify those files to make them printable, you must be smart enough to recognize that printing a gun, unless it’s purely as a project to build and then destroy for the sake of personal achievement, is inherently a foolish idea.

Additionally, the Liberator design had a singular purpose, it was inspired by French resistance fighters who needed just one bullet to take out Nazis and then acquire their well-functioning, fully loaded submachine guns.

This allowed them to kill more Nazis and obtain more weapons for their resistance efforts.

The U.S. is not currently under Nazi occupation, and law enforcement already faces significant challenges. They shouldn't have to worry about every individual they encounter potentially possessing an untraceable firearm, which may even resist fingerprint identification.

Society owes it to those risking their lives daily to keep the community safe. A world in which anyone can press a button and create their own unregulated, untraceable firearm is not safe for any of us.

Why not a more reasonable bit of legislation?

Felons, or persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse who are barred by statute from owning or touching firearms are required to have an approval mechanism in place on their 3D printers and other CNC machines where before any part is made, their parole officer must review and then approve it for manufacture. In the absence of such a mechanism, they are not allowed to own such devices.