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I think that the 3d printing thing is a stupid moral panic.
First, 3d printing is not a favorable technique to produce guns from the scratch. Nor would I even want a 3d-printed modification device to turn a reliable semiautomatic AR-15 into a burst-capable AR-15 of dubious reliability.
The fact that a competent craftsman with a machine shop can build a decent firearm has been true for as long as the US has been around. Today, I guess you can partly replace the technical expertise by just using a CNC milling machine. (Of course, it helps tremendously that semi firearms are legal. If I tried to mill my own AK-47 in Europe, the hard part would be building a rifled barrel. In the US, I could just buy one.)
I do not see hordes of 15yo school shooters using the CNCs they got for their birthdays to build automatic weapons. Probably because CNCs are well outside the birthday present price range for most Americans, and getting from them to a working gun is still a long process, while semi firearms are easily sourced from the glove compartments of cars.
If I was running a criminal gang, I might well decide that automatic firearms are not worth the trouble. Routinely carrying them will just give the state the license to imprison you for long times whenever they catch you, which seems a bad trade-off. If I decided that I needed auto guns for gang warfare or the like, I would certainly procure them (or conversion kits) through trusted criminal channels instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Nevertheless, if I ever felt the need to download some 3d files related to firearms I plan to commit crimes with, I would be sure to use Tor over some public Wifi instead of going to myillegalfirearms dot com or whatever, which will be monitored by the feds.
I also think that LLMs might just render what little point the DAs might have had here moot.
A technical drawing of the parts of an assault rifle seems pretty clearly protected speech, it is instructions aimed at a human. Possibly, the US patent office is hosting such drawings (though they might not be in sufficient detail). Soon, any idiot will just be able to take such technical drawings and ask an LLM to turn it into a 3d file suitable for milling. And the guardrails will only work on models which have them, sooner or later I will be able to download a DeepSeek model capable of working with 3d files which lacks them.
I was under the impression that to avoid a default judgement in a civil matter, it was sufficient to have an authorized lawyer show up to the court date to represent your side. This is how legal persons like corporations can survive.
The practical failure of these laws to actually block bad people from getting guns is a little overdetermined. There's even been pretty major advances on those lines: benchtop CNC machines are obviously more available, but electrochemical machining has also made manufacturing accurate rifle barrels susprisingly accessible. There's no real serious way to claw back the files themselves, universally.
But I think the purpose of these laws is more social. It's given carte blanch to push this stuff off the open internet, and make it such that even in fairly pro-gun communities there's a ton of bad or old information going around. Cody Wilson's original bet was not just that he'd make gun control obsolete, but that he'd demonstrate that it was doomed, or that it would require massive and invasive censorship to still end up doomed. For all he won the former bet, the latter is what actually drives public policy and what he expected to drive public policy, and it's been a very unpleasant wakeup call.
Yes, there's a bunch of downstream epicycles around depositions, so on. It may be navigable; it may be navigable until a sufficiently malicious plaintiff/prosecutor and mendacious judge work together.
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Depends on location.
In North America, Middle East and similar parts of the world filled with guns up the wazoo, yes, in these cases it would be desperate attempt of closing doors of barn that went empty long time ago.
In heavily gun controlled regions of the world, if you want the plebs stay disarmed, you should be very very worried about this new development.
The fact that machine shop is big and noisy, while 3D printer is shoebox sized device you can run in your bedroom without even people in the next room knowing anything makes lots of difference.
Not any more, look for electrochemical machining. It is slow, but needs only bucket and is completely silent and discrete.
I would have imagined that the problems are not "our citizens are armed and can now overthrow us" but rather "some idiot 3D printed a gun and blew his hand off when he tried to shoot it, now we're looking at a bunch of hysterical screaming on social media about 'why didn't the government prevent this' and some opportunist lawyer persuading the family to sue us for zillions".
Or worse, "some idiot 3D printed a gun then went on a shooting spree in town, now there is hysterical screaming online about 'why didn't the government prevent this'".
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