From bulletproof backpacks to banning file downloads: why our fight against 3D printed guns keeps missing the point—and what policy leaders should really be asking.
The Register recently reported about the attempts by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other US officials to stop the proliferation of homemade untraceable 3D printed guns. Most of that article is about two things that Mr. Bragg did to tackle this issue, namely:
- He got an online 3D printing library to remove downloadable gun designs.
- He asked a 3D printer manufacturer to ensure its products could detect gun designs and refuse to produce them.
Now, it might be because of my decadent European blood, but I’m weird. Real weird. So weird, I think that things like…
- bulletproof backpacks for children.;
- suggesting guns for teachers (guess who said that?, but he’s not alone) so stressed that they may fire them at parents, rather than school shooters;
- being killed for knocking at the wrong door
…aren’t a way to live. So, since I’m such a nutcase, you may be justified to assume I’d support what Mr. Bragg is doing. Gun control everywhere, 3D-printing included! But you would be wrong.
The Register says that those two strategies are “unlikely to slow the proliferation of 3D printed weapons.” Me, I say that while gun control is good, those strategies are unfeasible and dangerous at the same time, and they aren’t even new.
What Mr. Bragg is trying to do in 2025 has been exhaustively researched by me and others, with conclusions that are pretty clear. I studied this topic in 2015, in the context of an EU-financed research on Digital DIY, and the only change I’ve seen in this landscape since then is the addition of explosive-carrying, equally untraceable DIY drones to the list of weapons we should worry about.
If the history of the internet teaches us anything, it’s that attempts to completely remove downloadable gun designs will work exactly like previous attempts to remove porn or illegal copies of music and movies. I’m not saying that certain bans should never be done, but nobody should expect them to have any meaningful positive impacts, and everybody should be seriously worried about the doors they may open. To see what I mean, consider questions like:
- If mere possession of the designs of a 3D-printable firearm is bad, then why should making or storing a digital or paper copy of the web pages returned by a simple web search for 3D-printable guns be any different?
- Why stop at 3D printing, or at the internet? Why not movies? John Malkovich showed how to build an untraceable pistol to millions of people 32 years ago; should we ban “In the Line of Fire”?
- Even the machines to produce firearms, ammunition, deadly drones, and untraceable 3D printers that can produce all those things are available off the shelf or as open source hardware designs. Should those too be banned? Again, where should we stop?
The second strategy — requiring 3D printers to detect and block gun designs — has the same problems, even in different formats. Copy machines can refuse to duplicate banknotes because there are only a few hundred banknote designs; we know exactly what each looks like; and we only care about copies that are so perfect that humans might not spot them as fake. Therefore, telling copy machines that they must “never print anything that looks exactly like this” was relatively trivial.
But making 3D printers that will never print anything that may be any part of any weapon that people may ever invent, including other 3D printers — which is what should happen to make Mr. Bragg happy — is as smart as asking for “smart weapons” equipped with “ethical AI” that refuses to fire at innocent targets. Before you ask: yes, someone had the gall to seriously propose weapons like that — one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen in years.
At a purely technical level, 3D printers that won’t print weapon parts — or devices to make such parts — are impossible to make, with or without the glorified parrots some call “AI”. Actually, it’s worse than that. In order to give people the illusion that they can’t print weapons, both the printers and their connected computers would need to be so limited as to be worthless (not to mention dangerous for real innovation and democracy). Why on Earth should anybody buy a 3D printer that can only print a small predefined list of objects, or a computer that cannot produce or store “dangerous” files?
Assuming they could ever be successfully made, 3D printers crippled in the way Mr. Bragg wants would be just like Tivoization or mandatory “age verification schemes” (instead of simply never giving smartphones to children). All of these are just different faces of the war on general-purpose computing that Cory Doctorow described in 2011.
There are much better ways to protect people from untraceable 3D-printed guns. These range from developing social policies that would make more people stop wanting to kill others, to exercising more control over the materials needed to make guns at home. Mr. Bragg is late to the discussion, but this gives him a big advantage if he chooses to use it to build on previous research — while ignoring false solutions with no positive effects.
To get a full view of the real dangers of 3D-printed guns, of the wrong ways to control them, and of some concrete solutions, I invite Mr. Bragg and everybody else to check out these posts and papers from the DiDIY project (2015/2017):
- The End of Gun Control
- The Threats of Dangerous Information
- Digitally manufactured weapons: can they be controlled?
- The “DiDIY and gun control” part of the report on Digital DIY risks, synergies and education
Or this 2018 summary by me of the same topics.
Marco Fioretti is an aspiring polymath and idealist without illusions based in Rome, Italy. Marco met Linux, Free as in Freedom Software, and the Web pre-1.0 back in the ’90s while working as an ASIC/FPGA designer in Italy, Sweden, and Silicon Valley. This led to tech writing, including but not limited to hundreds of Free/Open Source tutorials. Over time, this odd combination of experiences has made Marco think way too much about the intersection of tech, ethics, and common sense, turning him into an independent scholar of “Human/digital studies” who yearns for a world with less, but much better, much more open and much more sensible tech than we have today.
Be First to Comment