Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and a spate of progressive prosecutors have sent a letter to the heads of 3D printer makers, including one operating inside the People’s Republic of China, urging the companies to “expeditiously work on a printer-based solution to identifying and blocking the manufacture of all 3D printed firearm parts.”
A “printer-based” solution means coming up with an algorithm that would block 3D printers from making any object that could be used to craft a firearm. A new bill that became part of New York’s budget establishes a task force that’s supposed to decide whether that technology is feasible. If so, the state would prohibit the sale of any 3D printer unless it comes equipped with the ability to block the printing of gun parts.
In their letter to Wenjian Pei, Founder and Chairman of Zhejiang Flashforge 3D technology Co., Ltd., Bragg and his merry band of anti-gun Luddites proclaim that “3D-printed firearms and firearms parts are also increasingly playing a central role in the arsenals of violent extremists.”
While terrorists and terrorist groups have always relied upon illicit firearms, the advent of 3D printing has opened a whole new avenue for these dangerous individuals to acquire weapons and weapons parts. Europol, in its 2025 European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend (EU TE-SAT) Report, found a worrying intersection between ideological extremism, propaganda and hate-speech, and 3D-gun culture, reporting increasing numbers of 3D-printed firearms being seized from these extremists. One such 2023 case in Finland included three neo-Nazis convicted for committing crimes with terrorist intent for their plans to use 3D-printed firearms against perceived enemies and key civilian infrastructure. The men had 3D-printed four FGC-9s and several other firearm components. The increasing sophistication, reliability, and availability of 3D-printed weapons only makes them more attractive to extremists, furthering their abilities to commit violence and menace our communities.
While Bragg has a vested interest in pointing out the actions of neo-Nazis using 3D-printed guns, it’s worth noting that the district attorney did not bring up the use of printed guns like the FGC-9 and a bullpup short-barreled rifle called Urutau by groups fighting for independence in Myanmar.
The military in control of Myanmar is allied with China, so Bragg might have made even more headway by talking about the dangers to authoritarian regimes posed by 3D-printed firearms. Bragg’s letter was also meant for a domestic audience, however, and there are plenty of folks across the political spectrum in the United States who believe that privately manufactured firearms can serve as a bulwark against tyranny here at home.
Guns are tools, whether they’re mass produced in a factory in Georgia or assembled by hand in a basement workshop in Brooklyn. They are neither good nor evil. It’s the intent of the user that matters.
Am I thrilled about neo-Nazis making their own guns that they want to use to commit acts of terror? I hope it’s obvious that I’m not. Will sacrificing our liberties prevent those terrible people from doing terrible things? Not at all. If nothing else, these bad actors will simply build their own printers to bypass any blocking technology deployed by commercial printer makers.
New York has already banned 3D-printed guns. Now it’s trying to ban the technology used to make them. If anti-gun lawmakers could ban the bullets used in these guns, I’m sure they’d do that too. Instead of waging a losing war on technology, Bragg and his fellow progressives should be cracking down on the illegal use of guns, regardless of how they’re made. Doing so, though, would mean getting tough on violent offenders, and that’s a bridge too far for too many of these prosecutors.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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