Everytown Wants to Keep the Future from Happening By Banning Sales of 3D Printers That Can Turn Out Guns

Lawmakers can take aggressive action to spur change in this area and help prevent the printing of 3DPFs. The most comprehensive solutions would apply nationwide, and Congress should work immediately to pass the innovative laws described here. But even without federal action, state policymakers can take meaningful action to curtail 3DPFs. Existing state interventions like the ones described in Section II provide a useful start—and we also need new policy innovations to tackle this problem comprehensively.

Some of the core protections already in place in many states simply make it a crime to print guns at home. These laws, which bar unlicensed gunmaking and require background checks and serialization for all firearms, have a strong deterrent effect for people who typically follow the law. Policymakers should make a concerted effort at enforcement, especially because so much of this dangerous behavior happens behind closed doors—and because bad actors will keep working to make it easier to skirt the law. On the other hand, many traffickers and other criminals remain eager to seize any avenue to arm themselves.

Another policy tool is prohibiting the distribution of 3DPF blueprints, an approach that merely seeks to limit their availability. Although these laws will make it harder to find the necessary ingredients for making 3DPFs, they are difficult to enforce universally, and dedicated lawbreakers will continue to track down copies of blueprints and manufacture their own weapons. In states with these prohibitions, law enforcement must dedicate resources to scan for and take down online 3DPF blueprints and consider action against sites that host them, but ultimately may find that they cannot eliminate online traffic altogether.

That’s why the single most effective step policymakers can take would be to make it impossible to print 3DPFs by targeting the 3D-printing process itself. To date, the emerging technologies described in Section IV, which intervene in the actual material production to block printers from making DIY guns, have been installed in printers only on a voluntary basis. No printer company has acted to install any of these technologies directly into their products upon manufacture, at the slicer phase, as part of the printer firmware, or by any other means.

Lawmakers, executives, and advocates can press printer companies to install these technologies at the time of manufacture, either by educating them about the dangers of 3DPFs and asking them to protect public safety, or via corporate pressure campaigns. But as a practical matter, many companies are active in the nascent 3D-printing industry, and it may prove difficult to achieve industry-wide reform. Legislation may be necessary to ensure that there are no printers on the market that can be utilized to produce DIY guns.

The strongest state law would bar any company from selling a 3D printer capable of producing a 3DPF—that is, requiring that all printers manufactured or sold in the state must be equipped with technology that can detect digital gun blueprints and refuse to complete those printing jobs. Any such legislation should be carefully drafted to meet the reality of existing technology, so that printing companies can properly comply with the law by incorporating commercially available tools—at the slicer stage, as part of firmware, or otherwise. And the best legislation would be written to adapt to future innovation, meaning that as the technology inevitably becomes better able to detect and block 3DPF blueprints, the laws should require the industry to employ state-of-the-art interventions.

Lawmakers may want to empower regulators to monitor industry changes in real time and regularly update corporate requirements accordingly. It is also important to consider the existing stock of printers and how to require companies to install this technology on those machines—perhaps as part of routine firmware updates, through cloud- or service provider-based firewalls, or via other prohibited-use detection protocols. With this type of law in place, authorities can then monitor compliance by printer companies across brands and models to ensure that their technology truly works to block the production of DIY guns and is not easily defeated. They should also develop best practices for enforcement that can serve as a model as new states take up and pass similar laws.

These legislative ideas and enforcement act together as a suite—making underlying DIY activity illegal, outlawing the dissemination of blueprints, and requiring companies to block their printers from making guns.

— Everytown for Gun Safety in Printing Violence: Urgent Policy Actions Are Needed to Combat 3D-Printed Guns