Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming semi-automatic weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America.
Archived version: https://archive.is/FzBzV
Good luck with that, it’s basically impossible. The best they could hope to do is have commercial printing services watch for and refuse to print the devices. Anyone can look up the patent for a Glock switch and design and print one themselves. It can’t be blocked on the printer level because that would require the printer to be a lot smarter than they currently are, and any such blocking could be bypassed by building a printer from scratch (not easy, but totally doable).
And it would require all printers to be closed-source, else people would just patch out the “is this a glock switch?” check.
The anti-counterfeiting EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) works because most printers are made by a handful of established companies. 3D printers, on the other hand, are made by dozens of tiny companies, many of whom are Chinese companies buying similar source parts and adding their own touches, and those companies don’t give a shit about American law beyond the bare minimum to make a sale.