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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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"Uhoh, can't 3d print a gun. Guess I'll just go to Walmart."
More like "Guess I'll just print this file labeled 'hyper realistic movie prop lazer blaster'."
Me when I walk 30 feet to the east and buy a gun under the table with no paperwork for less than the cost of a 3d printer
I doubt you can do that in California
No, but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts, then you can buy an AR-15 out of the trunk of the car of a dude who was selling it on Facebook.
Completely legal resale so long as you both sign off on the ownership paperwork.
Californian here. They're not. Lol. I mean you can do a private party sale and the guy is welcome to store the rifle in his trunk on his way to the meet, but all firearm sales or transfers have to be done at an FFL (basically a registered gun store) and require a 10 day waiting period, meaning you'd meet with the person at the store, do a shit ton of paperwork, pay a fee to the FFL and the DOJ, go home without the gun. Then come back 10 days (specifically 240 hours) later to meet up again, do some more paperwork, pay the person, and you're now the proud owner of a gun that cost you 15-25% more and infinitely longer to acquire than if you lived 200 miles to the East.
Thankfully, making guns so much more expensive and tedious to acquire than damn near everywhere else in the country has rendered it physically impossible for criminals to steal guns or otherwise obtain them illegally. Now, if someone goes on a killing spree in a shopping mall, they may face legal repressions if the paperwork doesn't come back clean.
Paperwork?
Similar to selling your car privately. There are some forms involved to recognize that you no longer own nor are responsible for the gun in question. It's probably a little more strict and polished now (maybe not), but it wasn't that long ago that you kept a copy in case the cops came knocking looking for the gun and a copy got filed away in a drawer somewhere for basically the same reason. I can't remember if gun stores were in charge of the records for private sales (which wouldn't make sense) or if they were filed with the town/state, but it was all physical paper in a drawer somewhere regardless. There wasn't like a system actively tracking ownership - so long as both parties had a LTC, they were okay and third party sales could be done anywhere.
State by state for sure. Florida has no paperwork of any kind for guns unless its an NFA item, and thats federal paperwork.
MA is probably not a good example, because you also have to have an LTC, and the AR has to be legally owned in state on 8/1/26, and you have to register the transaction, and probably other restrictions I don't remember off the top of me head.
True, but it's the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.
Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There's still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would've been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.
Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they've improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I'm aware of is in Myanmar, where they're using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can't get any actual firearms. You're much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.
But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it's much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that's buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don't work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they're not being bought right in the city/state, they're being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.
Guess I'll go to Nevada.
Jokes aside it's to prevent having one that's not registered
Not all legal firearms are registered anyway already. Not to mention it is completely legal to build your own gun in the US. So long as you aren't building something NFA regulated (full auto, over .50 caliber, short barrel shotgun, silencer, etc.) and you are not distributing them to anyone, you are allowed to just build a gun. There are places online that sell "receiver blanks" with plans for how to finish them with very basic machining, and then you can buy all the rest of the parts off the shelf at any gun store without any registration at all because only the receivers are regulated even a little bit.
This has nothing to do with gun control. The entire concept of "ghost guns" has been a scare tactic to get enough public on-side to pass draconian surveillance and manufacturing control laws like this. The goal of this is to monitor "at-home manufacturing" (of anything, nothing to do with guns anymore than it has to do with warhammer compatible miniatures) and restrict the practice.
also the real gun companies are salivating over this, they dont want thier bottom line to be reduced if people are just making thier own.
For reference of just how easy this is, most AR-15s that I've seen have been units built from individual parts, my own included. That's kinda the AR-15's whole schtick, is that it's super modular and customizable, so much that a lotta people joke that it's "LEGOs for adults." It makes good sense, if company A makes a good upper, but Company B makes good triggers, so why not mix and match for the best of both worlds?