This is how you do it. You create clear and direct laws that specify what isn’t okay. New Hampshire banned all billboards. I believe Vietnam recently banned all ads longer than 15 seconds online. These make it absolutely clear what is and isn’t okay, and leave no wiggle room for companies to try to circumvent the laws on technicalities.
They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.
In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.
It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.
Cyberpunk is a genre first and foremost. A critique of capitalism set in a corporate dystopia with transhumanist themes.
A lot of the aesthetic is rooted in the culture of the time period that it was created in (the 80s). The cultural fear, more specifically. A time where American corporations, and by extension the US government and population, were afraid of the Japanese economic boom and saw a future where the dollar was replaced by the yen and Japanese supplanted English as the lingua franca of the world, Japanese culture was exported the way American culture is, and Americans started eating their meals with chopsticks instead of forks.
Didn’t they do this with an AI vending machine already and it started selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss?
Wrong, the purpose is to prevent people from not buying from a corporation - guns and otherwise. You can buy polymer guns right from the store.
Print the parts for a new printer on a cheap one, buy the hardware at a local hardware store or electronics store (or even strip the cheap one for most of the parts), and start printing in your favorite flavor of open source software. Or buy the printed pieces from someone or online and then buy and assemble the rest. That’s what they do with guns to circumvent some of the gun laws, because the not quite finished pieces are not legally considered a gun.
All this would do is make people buy printers the way that they buy guns, ironically. And it still won’t do anything about the so-called “ghost guns” anyway, because those are either legally bought guns with the serial number shaved off, or they’re garage guns like the one used to assassinate Shinzo Abe.
Except for the fact that this doesn’t put any pressure on anyone who wants a gun (those are still really easy to get in California, just not as easy as most other states). But those who benefit the most from this law are gun manufacturers, and not long after when this bill is extended to printing replacement parts for anything, all companies that charge inflated prices for repair parts or design their products to be unrepairable entirely.
What people who print “guns” are actually printing is gun furniture. Custom grips and the like, either for comfort/aesthetics or so they can take cheaper gun parts and use them to build a clone of a similar gun from a company that charges more. They still use legally purchased gun internals.
The gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was a Glock, legally purchased and one of the most ubiquitous pistols in the world, with a 3d printed grip on it. Every other part of that gun came from the manufacturer.
The gun used to kill Shinzo Abe, however, was made entirely out of simple materials readily available at any hardware store and is completely legal in all 50 states. Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel. But 3d printed gun parts don’t fall under the same regulations and those who stand to lose the most from people 3d printing are those who charge unreasonable prices.
You know who else would benefit from this law? Games Workshop, who sells many miniature figures for $40+ each, and a few for over one thousand dollars.
Money. Israeli money is in every piece of American politics from the military industrial complex to the media. Hell, look at all the colleges that get funding from Israeli connections from the student protests the other year.
Don’t worry, you’re not pissing in my Cheerios or anything, I just always end up in one of those “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” rants whenever they pull the “ghost gun” nonsense.
It’s like how it’s illegal in Mass to own a suppressor unless you’re a cop or military, then you can buy as many as you want. Like…it reduces recoil a little and reduces the noise from permanent hearing loss to temporary hearing damage, it’s not gonna make a gun silent. Movie magic quiet is only possible with very particular sub-sonic rounds of a specific caliber. You want silent? You put a suppressor on an air rifle. Dead silent and completely legal to put a suppressor on in all 50 states because it’s not a gun, despite being just as dangerous at close ranges.
Edit: Also, these laws are often supported by firearms manufacturers because it benefits them to prevent people from being able to go elsewhere, like making aftermarket car parts illegal or forcing people to get their service done at a car dealership.