When it comes to the controversy surrounding ghost guns, there’s been a lot of talk about 3D printers. And it seems the solution is making 3D printers spy on you. But is that even possible? And if it’s not, how will a ban like this effect STEAM and STEM education? And is the term “3D printed gun” even accurate?
I wanted, as much as I could, to approach this topic from an educational perspective with the assumption that anyone who would want to regulate 3D printers is only doing so because (1) they want to do the right thing. And (2) they don’t understand what 3D printers can and, more importantly, can’t do. Nor do they seem to understand what computers can do. So I tried to make this video so that it would education any right thinking individual of the error of trying to regulate 3D printers. Hopefully now that this is out anyone who persists in perusing or supporting legislation to regulate 3D printing will be exposed as a fraud.
Trying to make a program that can detect firearms and firearms parts being 3D printed is a type of problem known in software circles as “non-trivial”. In other words no one has managed to solve it yet. And putting legislation on a non-trivial problem is a bit like making a law that says “Police detectives must be able to read people’s minds.”
A statistically accurate solution to the problem.
The impact I predict this will have on STEM and STEAM can not be understated. Education has a hard enough time keeping up with the times as is. To do this will set them back 25 years. Might as well make teaching cursive a law.
The thing that really bugs me is the tech companies that keep saying this is possible without having proved the technology. Take a look at Thangs, which boasts the most advanced 3D model similarity detection software to date. Their suggestions, the models they think are similar, are laughable. Applied to firearms and firearm parts, this would would flag a banana as a gun.
When I first 3D printed the liberator you see in the video the trigger wasn’t broken and the spring sprang. That’s how long I’ve been working on this video. When Flashforge made their social faux-pas I recorded and edited the first draft of this video. But then New York actually proposes regulating 3D printers and I had to change a few things and reedit this video. But I wanted, as much as possible, for this video to remain evergreen, so I didn’t mention the specific legislation or the FlashForge incident in this video. I suspect any future attempts at legislating 3D printers will be fairly well covered by this video as-is. Unfortunatly I don’t foresee this being the last time this discussion will be had. But hopefully it won’t mean interrupting the cool things I would rather be working on.
