The House of Representatives is looking to vote on the new Undetectable Firearms Act bill, proposed by Rep. Steve Israel, which would re-implement and expand the previous incarnation. Not only would the new bill ban 3D printed firearms, but it would ban “any major component of which, when subjected to inspection by the types of x-ray machines commonly used at airports, does not generate an image that accurately depicts the shape of the component.” What that means exactly is up to the interpretation of the Attourney General, Eric Holder, who is not exactly a friend of gun rights. So those polymer AR-15 receivers might soon be illegal if they don’t meet with holder’s approval. The bill also extends the ban to include plastic magazines that are printed in the home . . .
From the bill:
(C) any ammunition magazine, manufactured by a person who is not a licensed manufacturer—
(i) that, after removal of the spring and follower, is not as detectable as the Magazine Security Exemplar, by walk-through metal detectors calibrated and operated to detect the Magazine Security Exemplar; or
(ii) which, when subjected to inspection by the types of x-ray machines commonly used at airports, does not generate an image that accurately depicts the shape of the magazine.
So, unless you are licensed to manufacture magazines, you can’t make plastic ones. And since there is currently no licensing process for magazines, Magpul would be out of business.
The bill is an over-reaching knee jerk reaction to 3D printed guns, and has the potential to make it a felony to print any firearms part in your own home or if you don’t have a license. It won’t stop criminals, but it will make them out of those who own 3D printers.
The bill could be up for a vote as early as this afternoon, and we will keep you in the loop. For those wanting to make their voices heard the GOA has a website where you can write your congressional representatives.
Lets hit the phones people!
This is OUR GOVERNMENT!
Put down the coffee, step away from the reloading bench, and call your congresscritters office.We need to make it clear that ANY gun related regulation is an automatic NO vote.
Rest assured-Suzy Gungrabber is calling HER rep.You should be too!
ST, this comment:
This is OUR GOVERNMENT!
You cannot be naive enough to believe this government is “OURS”. Since when? Here’s the answer, never. Politicians and bureaucrats have NEVER, EVER, in the history of mankind, been “FOR” the people.
So, make your phone calls, write your Congressman. Fat lot of good that will do you. They will vote they way that keeps them in office, or puts money in their pocket.
Feel sorry for you that you are so jaded. This IS our government, we still have the power of the vote to put these people in office. As dirty and shameful as the job most of them do, it’s our responsibility to remove them or let them know we will not vote for them again. I guess pro 2A Colorado residents should have just done nothing after the legislation passed. It takes time, but it can be turned around.
So, who did you vote for last time? The big government loving, socialized medicine promoting yankee who had signed gun bans or Obama?
If voting made any difference they would not allow us to do it.
Sad but true.
@Chris Mallory,
My statement makes you ask who I voted for? Really?
You must separate the corrupt politician from the system. The system still works, the people can vote these corrupt politicians out. Just curious, why bother coming to this site, read about a bill that clearly violates our 2A rights and think we can’t do anything about it? Why take the energy to even comment? Remember the pending legislation last spring? Remember Obama’s Executive Actions? Do you remember how millions of 2A supporters stopped that?
How far down the river of denial does one have to believe that ‘voting them out’ will change anything?
The next group of statists will rubberstamp in the same horrid bunch of laws as the last bunch. There was no uprising when Patriot was passed, and even more disturbingly when it was re-authorized with extra-jackbooting.
Billy, we live in the Age of Vote Fraud now. Your view of elections, while admirable, is misguided. Now the Power Elite select their candidates – like the whover-he-is in the White House, when they are boys, and who they back, WINS.
There is, sadly, no quick and easy fix for this. Some states have re-instituted the paper ballot, and I voted that way, in NM.
But let’s face the music: until the Power Elite are overthrown, and exiled or executed, voting in America is an expensive charade. Who they want, wins.
I agree somewhat Chris but, If votes mean nothing then why would Democrats be so adament about immigration reform? They what more Mexicans for a larger voting base. So in many cases I have believed our votes mean nothing but, things like immigration reform make me wonder.
The voting issue is secondary. The primary reason for all the illegal aliens, BY FAR, is to put continued downpressure on wages. Cheap wages enrich the offshore banksters, the bosses of the politicians.
Eventually, the Mexicans will demand better wages and better working conditions. When that happens, they’ll find themselves replaced by Salvadoreans, Haitians, Somalis, whatever ones will work the cheapest and be the most manipulatable.
Some Colorado recalls tell me it’s not always as bad as it looks…
It’s almost always as bad as it looks. Sometimes it’s worse than it looks.
This is likely one of those that’s even worse than it looks.
Jpd:
Baloney. Democracy works, but only if you get in the game.
Remember the CO recalls were started by a plumber in Colorado Springs.
Remember the Tea Party, and Sen Cruz.
Talk the talk or walk the walk. Its up to you.
We don’t live in a Democracy, never have. We live in a Constitutional Republic. God DAMN Democracy to hell!
Two things to note – 1) I live in Tacoma and our Congressjerk is and has been Democrat since at least 1975. I fear the only thing a call or letter from me on this topic would accomplish is a lot of fist bumps and back-slapping and “Yeah! We pissed off another bitter clinger!” 2) This legislation has little or nothing to do with “gun control” and is all about violating the First Amendment freedom of the press. The fact tat they are slipping this turd into a supposed non-detectable firearms bill does NOT change the fact that they are attempting to ban citizens from using printers to make a political statement.
How is this different from banning a standard printing press from making newspapers because what is written could convince an arsonist to roll them up later and use them to start a fire?
On an historical note, this may be the first time in the history of this country that Congress has attempted to violate two Constitutional amendments with ONE piece of legislation.
My god politicians are idiots
They get their way, you get screwed. Who’s the idiot here?
Ok, aside from the inane prospect of making something illegal that I can easily do in my home undetected the real chilling prospect is the term “Licensed Manufacturer”
That’s right, you aren’t allowed to make something yourself. What kind of country do you think this is that you can just go make STUFF!
This isn’t just a shot at gun rights, but sets up a chilling precedent that gives more protection to big business. It’s just bad all around.
How exactly would they know I printed a magazine? Or a gun part?
They are grasping at straws here. There is no way to stop 3D printing. 5 years from now there will be millions of 3D printers in the US and there is absolutely no way they can stop any of this.
Criminal laws don’t prevent anything, nor do they intend to. They provide for punishment of certain conduct. So laws that prohibit 3D printing of guns won’t stop 3D printing of guns any more than laws against murder stop murder. But god help you if you get caught after breaking the law.
Exactly. Laws are enacted for two reasons only. #1 Ways to put money in the pockets of government (read that as the politicians and bureaucrats that feed at the public’s expense). #2: As a means of controlling the mindless zombies (us), who are stupid enough to believe ANYTHING the say or do.
“How exactly would they know I printed a magazine? Or a gun part?”
When they find you in possession of it.
Did you read the proposed law? Possession is not illegal. The proposed law refers to manufacturing. What does possession have to do with it???????? They have to prove manufacturing. maybe I found it on the beach after a horrible boating accident?
I’d love to think they need to prove manufacturing. However, possession of more than an ounce of weed in many states is “proof” that you “manufactured” it, and they’ll send you to prison on just that amount of “proof”: THE LAW SAYS SO.
I think the GOA form letter is way too wordy… no politician will ever read past the first paragraph…
I still sent a copy but they need to bang out 2 or 3 key points that takes 5-10 seconds to read.
Agree – no one would read these LONG emails. I use the forms for the sending mechanism & change the content to reflect my own version of my pertinent objections.
Agreed. I deleted all the boiler plate and made mine personal, and asked the staffer reading it to call me when it came time to walk the district, and raise money in 2014.
Ummmm. what about serialed all-polymer AR lowers like the one from New Frontier Armory?
The stripped lowers have a serial number and are produced by a licensed firearm manufacturer. Also a lower is a gun part yes, but it has metal internal parts, and of course the upper and barrel etc are metal. This is much like the whole GLOCK uproar. Sure it is a polymer lower, but….
The rest of it shows up just fine in a metal detector, and honestly an xray machine should show a nice outline on the lower as well as polymer magazines.
Polymer 80% receivers. Illegal if this passes? Seems like it.
By definition, an 80% lower is not a firearm until you mill it out. Therefore unclear if this proposal would apply.
80% receivers aren’t firearms. You mill them out and make a firearm. If its polymer you just made a major gun part that’s undetectable by a metal detector. If you let your mind wander a bit it gets crazy what this bill affects. Wood grips/stocks, magazine rebuild kits, sights, safeties, and no mention of grandfathering. Manufacturers can make these things but not us? Bullshit. This is my line. No more.
Zay are ven vee zay zay are. Zhou veel comply…
Even a stripped polymer lower? (Which is still a “firearm” by regulation)
I wouldn’t count on the House to not pass it.
I also wouldn’t count on them listening to us.
We don’t have the purchasing power to buy their ears. We never really did, truthfully. Not like the billionaire hoplophobes and their emotionally retarded sycophants do, anyway.
But, maybe miracles can and still do happen after all. I’ll be watching this space.
On a side note, based on the snip-it from the proposed bill:
“(C) any ammunition magazine, manufactured by a person who is not a licensed manufacturer—”
If you buy a legal parts kit, and build it, i.e. put all the parts together. That is considered manufacturing. Even if you plan to block it to ten rounds to be CA legal, it is still considered manufacturing and at least from CA standard gun companies here have to now get their magazines made out of state. And many, like Franklin Armory have moved much of their operations out of state.
It says ANY ammunition magazine, not just all plastic magazines. Thus even if you disassemble your magazine to parts, clean refurbish and reassemble, you are manufacturing. At least under CA law you are, and I would also assume federal law would also interpret this in the same manner.
Let’s ponder this a moment shall we?
Emails sent. Thanks, Nick for the 411.
If the Gov’t desires to pick up my plastic mags they are more then welcome to them, just as long as I can empty them first, after all I wouldn’t want them to get more then what they have coming to them…………… O:-)
So if SCOTUS says firearms (and parts) must be in ‘common usage,’ how can new products come to market if they can’t be prototyped, or completely build by polymer build-up? And if a new entrepreneur can start small, how can they ever become ‘common usage?’ See the Catch-22to stop R&D to what’s currently out there? The common usage language of Heller will be a chokehold on the firearms development from here on out if we aren’t careful. We must shut things like this down, NOW!
So making toy guns (or toys that might look like a gun part), or parts that might be construed as a gun part (i.e. fixing a home appliance, for example), or non-functional models of firearms, would be a crime?
With the above, let your congress rep know your thoughts! they pay more attention to email/phone/letters than to any post on a blog out there.
Breaking!!! — Congress passes “Undetectable IQ Act” and immediately disappears off the face of the Earth. No film at eleven.
Major components? Would this ban polymer pistol frames or wooden rifle stocks?
It will ban whatever Holder wants it to ban, its that fucking vague. I think I’m just about done.
Part of Obamacare was delayed by one month next year, from Oct to Nov 2014, to avoid angry citizens voting at the same time they would be receiving their insurance cancellation notices.
A similar thing is happening here, with Sen. Schumer wanting only a one year extension (vs the past 5 and 20 year extensions) to get endangered democrat senators past this years election. So that next year they can re-visit the issue, and put even more restrictions in place.
So yea, lets renew the original bill for another 5 years, till just before the next election cycle. 🙂
How do they expect to detect these “non-detectable firearms”? Isn’t it like “can God make a rock so big even he can’t lift it?”
Sooner or later you’ll run into one of TSA’s goon squad VIPR teams. 8800 unannounced checkpoints 2013, more money and more thugs 2014. A warrantless search of your person and/or vehicle just might do it.
If not, the 3D printer you bought will be probable cause for a no-knock dog (and potentially everyone home) execution at 3AM.
Simple, Make a printer instead on buying one. Lots of plans out there already. Or buy one with cash. And I don’t believe the proposed law prohibits possession. Just manufacturing. Let TSA confiscate them. We will just make more. Once everyone has 3D printers, .GOV will not be able to stop this.
Timbo, I agree completely in theory. I built my own thermoplastic long ago, and I’m fine tuning my home built (full disclosure: my home has “some” tools) SLS these days.
Had someone been properly educated in HS and read Sun Tzu’s Art of War we would be having this discussion 3 years from now when 3D printing was more ubiquitous and people would be a bit more level headed about it all. Sadly, media darling Cody didn’t get the proper education about how to fight battles, so now we have this ill-timed disaster, brought to you 100% by a foolish child’s need for undeserved attention and the tactical moronity of his little show pony, Defense Distributed. Speshul Snoflake indeed.
Had this been allowed to gel further, we would have wide enough penetration that would have obviated any attempt to reign in 3D printing. But now that Wilson did his world tour of effete weenie-waving, the antis are all ginned up, and I can see having an unlicensed 3D printer being a felony in the very near future. You don’t really think they’re just going to confiscate them do you? You’re going to the big rape house after the legal fees wipe your finances.
Here’s how 3D will pan out over the next 10ish years. It will grow underground for the next 3-5, though thermoplastic is becoming techie/maker mainstream even now. As the hobbyist SLS groups move into the more public sphere, that will take off too. 5-8 years out The Corporations will realize that anyone with a FARO Arm and some powdered metal can dupe their stuff and that’s when the real restrictions start. All printers will be required to be licensed, big fines/jailtime for unlicensed. All software will be in the cloud and the gov will validate every single thing that you want to print is “approved” and not violating any IP or whatever they deem to matter. The computing and bandwidth already exist for this, they’ll just have the mathies write the algos.
There is no bright and shining future. It’s a mixture of Blade Runner, Gattaca, and 1984. With some more depressing stuff added for good measure.
16V how did you make an SLS metal printer? I’ve got a thermoplastic one and it is a pain in the ass… sometimes I think that the best defense against all this nonsense is that criminals are too stupid to figure it all out.
Generally, the criminals ARE the ones who figure it out, or find somebody who will. Criminals are often highly-motivated, at least the ones about the petty level are.
Hardly anyone is stupid enough to say “crime doesn’t pay” – that’s old Dick Tracy and Joe Friday shit.
Obviously, there’s so much crime because crime DOES pay!
Aaron, Start with the thermoplastic platform, and substitute a laser for the melted plastic squirter. Yes, it’s a bit more involved because you have to add a material roller and determine the pulse time/rate for your laser, which ‘natch varies by material. Lotsa digging up rather obscure white papers, plenty of trial with errors. I’m not trying to minimize the effort.
Child’s play? Not really. Impossible for a mechanically oriented person? Also not really.
My (and others) method of solution was to view the laser as the squirter, and then mod the code so that it produced the desired results. The material roller was another issue that was already partially solved by thermoplastic/UV hardened tech. You just have to think about the differences and build a (rather simple) mechanical solution. Drop the bed, add the next layer of powder at a consistent compression and distribution, then lase in what you want connected.
It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible either. If you’re really serious, dig around and work your way into the community of folks doing this stuff. It’s been around for quite a while, but the tech is now so cheap that truly anyone who is motivated can do it.
Everything has been done before, sort of. The question is always how to evolve the tech…
Let’s not skip out on subparagraph B either. You can buy a polymer “80% lower” that requires milling to complete. Milling out the lower constitutes “manufacturing” (and which is why the AF has shut down “build parties” where a member of the group supplies pre-programmed CNC machines for milling aluminum receivers, on the basis they are illegally manufacturers). Now the lower is not a “firearm” until it is milled, but once it is a complete stripped lower it would be illegal to possess under this law.
Guess you’ve gotta assemble as you go, so its never a stripped receiver. ☺
I didn’t think “manufacturing” came into play unless you were building for sale. No license needed for personal use, which is why the 80% receivers are legal (but perhaps quasi-legal for the folks who sell them, along with the “bring it to my shop and mill it yourself on my CNC mill” service).
Of course, this isn’t the first time that different branches of the government – or even different divisions of the same branch – interpret the same thing in different ways…
Ah, that’s the beauty of weasel-worded laws, they mean whatever the powers-that-be want them to mean.
Message sent. I have hopes for Sen. Levin and Rep. Kildee, not so much for Stabenow.
Fine name. “Stab now”.
Woh! How am I just hearing about this vote, please tell me it didn’t happen yet!
Still in committee, not a full house vote from what I read.
At least we are free, unlike those poor slobs in Iran.
😉
I bought a SCAR25 lower for my SCAR. The lower was redesigned and improved and was then printed out with a 3D printer to see if the improvements worked. After the prototype was made they found out they had to alter their design to improve its ergonomic’s. By doing this they saved a lot of time and money. This bill will make doing that illegal costing everyone a lot of money.
Suppose the next generation of 3D printers uses an ‘ink’ that contains enough xray reflectors so that it is no longer undetectable but still easily made at home, would they still soil their shorts over that?
Yes, because you’re still aquiring a gun without their “permission”.
Yeah, their concern is all about control.
Sent my Congressman a letter asking him to please not support this law. My Senators that is hopeless, as my Senators are Schumer and Gillibrand. I may give a phone call to my Congressman tomorrow if the vote still hasn’t occurred.
Plastic guns still require ammo. Last I checked, 99% of ammo has plenty of metal that is detectable. Even plastic cased ammo has a metal bullet, primer, and probably a rim.
Lets look at the math
Detectable = metal detectors.
Metal detectors = gun free zone
Person w/ gun + Gunfree Zone = Criminal
Since we are talking criminals. I am sure passing another gun law will keep a criminal from breaking said law. Criminals don’t break laws? Do they?
Banning any gun that can not be seen on an X-ray or medal detector is unconstitutional. We have free speech over radios and the internet which post-date the constitution. Criminals will still use pressure cookers, plastic knifes and eventually make plastic rocket launchers. These laws are made to stop law abiding citizens from a tyrannical government.
Whenever you get the chance, thank a New Englander for the violation of your rights.
I REFUSE TO AND WILL NEVER DO BUSINESS IN ANY DEMOCRAT STATE. ITS TIME WE MAKE ALL THE ANTI AMERICAN STATES PAY A PRICE. YOU WANT TO WAKE THEM UP, MAKE THEM PAY…
DON’T ANSWER A PHONE CALL FROM NORTH EAST STATES, DON’T GO TO COLLEGE IN THE NORTH EAST, DON’T BY ANYTHING ONLINE FROM A STORE BASED IN THE NORTH EAST. YOU GET THE PICTURE, ITS TIME THEY START FEEDING OFF OF THEMSELVES…
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