Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is just the loudest voice out there calling for not just restrictions on 3D printed guns, but on the printers themselves and their capability to print firearms.
Over and over again, they keep trying a combination of legislation and social pressure to make companies start working to inhibit people from performing an operation that is lawful in most of the country, all because they have to get their knickers in a twist over someone somewhere doing something they don't approve of.
But there are many paths to building your own gun, and even if they could convince the companies to play along, it wouldn't really solve the problem, and there are a number of reasons for that.
The stated aim is to stop 3D-printed ghost guns. But in doing so, legislators are trying to solve a crime problem by redesigning a general-purpose manufacturing tool. “What they’re talking about doing is banning certain kinds of shapes,” says Kyle Wiens of iFixit, an outspoken opponent of the proposals. “We are starting to really dangerously undermine a lot of assumptions that go into how we make and use technology,” says Wiens, who describes it as “a little bit of an imaginary problem.”
He’s not alone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, has made clear its opposition to print blocking. It calls the idea “wishful thinking” that wouldn’t deter people from printing firearms or their parts, and instead would make it far more difficult for law-abiding users to take advantage of a growing technology. Today, 3D printing is widely used not just by hobbyists but for parts prototyping, small-batch manufacturing, and in medicine for anatomical structures, surgical templates, and implants. Around one million 3D printers were sold worldwide in the first three months of 2025.
These are fair.
However, there's another reason to consider, and this one goes to the heart of the entire argument about 3D-printed firearms.
It's that they're just not the problem they're being made out to be.
Just 325 3D-printed guns were recovered at crime scenes in 2024, out of roughly 350,000 firearms used in crimes across more than 50 U.S. cities between 2020 and 2024, according to the gun control advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety. That disparity, says Michel Weinberg, executive director of New York University’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, means any action will be “incredibly small, if existent at all” in addressing the use of 3D printing for gun manufacture.
It really would be non-existent.
Recently, a study tried to connect suicides with increases in "ghost gun" recoveries. They saw a correlation of more recoveries to more suicides. That's not a slam dunk because correlation isn't causation. However, the interesting part of the study, at least to me, was that they found absolutely no statistical difference in the homicide rate. Why? Because criminals aren't disarmed without 3D printed firearms. They just get one that's traditionally manufactured instead.
Plus, when you look at the tens of thousands of guns recovered in 2024, the fact that just 325 were recovered is staggering.
Over the span mentioned above, there were fewer than 1,000 3D-printed guns recovered. That's right, about one in 350, at most.
This isn't the problem, so going after 3D printers themselves won't solve it, even without the fact that someone will figure out how to jailbreak the printers in about five minutes, thus rendering the whole push irrelevant.
If criminals were to somehow find out that 3D-printed guns were no longer a thing, they'd just move on. After all, most of them didn't know they were a thing until anti-gunners and the media, but I repeat myself, started telling the whole world about this terrible scourge of "ghost guns." Breathless news reports about these scary firearms filtered through the airwaves and the internet until, one by one, criminals learned there was another potential source for firearms.
And yeah, the whole "untraceable" thing looked attractive, probably because most people really don't know what the hell gun tracing actually looks like in reality.
This jihad is stupid. It's always been stupid.
More than that, it's a deflection from the real problem, which is criminals who want guns despite the laws that are meant to keep them disarmed. Undermine that, and nothing else is needed.
That just looks too much like work for the anti-gun crowd.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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