Manhattan DA Continues to Wage War Against 3D Printers in Name of Gun Control

While actual numbers are hard to find for the number of 3D printers in the United States, we do know that the lion’s share of them are sold in the United States, with millions sold each year internationally. That means there are easily a few million 3D printers in private hands. While many of those devices will never make a firearm, many others do.

And in most parts of the country, it’s perfectly legal to do so for private use. To sell them, you need the appropriate licenses from the ATF, but even then, it’s possible.

However, while some people do break the law with these firearms, they’re not the most common source of illegal guns. Still, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has a thing for 3D printers, and now he’s trying to pressure state lawmakers to back restrictions on these devices.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg showed reporters Tuesday how a $250 printer and a few dollars worth of parts can transform an AR-15 rifle into a DIY machine gun.

Describing an evolving public safety threat, Bragg explained, “We’ve moved from the iron pipeline to really the kitchen table pipeline.”

Bragg is calling on state lawmakers to pass stricter 3D gun laws along with the state budget.

The top Manhattan prosecutor is supporting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s effort to crack down on both 3D-printed ghost guns and 3D-printed auto sears.

Banned across the United States but printable on a 3D machine, auto sears can be bright — as small as a Lego toy — and capable of converting handguns and rifles into fully automatic weapons.

“That’s really just shaken up our understanding of guns in this country,” Justin Wagner, the managing director of Every Town for Gun Safety, said during the briefing.

Of course, it should be noted that the full-auto sears are already illegal under federal law. Possession and the manufacturing of them is also illegal under New York law. There are already plenty of laws about those, and yet, they do nothing.

What Bragg wants, and what New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants, is for the printers to have software restricting them from making gun parts. Of course, considering there are a lot of other things that look an awful lot like gun parts but aren’t, this creates an issue that anti-gunners like these two don’t care that much about.

Hochul also wants to ban possession of the files, even if you have never used them to make anything at all. Why? Because screw free speech, right?

Oh, but Bragg wasn’t done.

In Manhattan, Bragg explained in 2017 that his office recovered just 17 3D-printed and ghost guns. By 2024 the number rose to 438.

Prosecutors are dealing with constantly evolving technology and guns that can be printed without any kind of serial number.

“You can’t print counterfeit money. We don’t let you do that,” Bragg said. “So why would we let you print lethal guns?”

First, let me point out that Bragg’s buddies at Everytown claim there were just 173 3D printed guns recovered from crime scenes in 2024. That’s a lot different than 438, now isn’t it?

There’s no reason given for the discrepancy, which isn’t even acknowledged in this story, but my guess is that there’s a gulf between “recovered” and “recovered at crime scene.” In other words, any recovery at all, even if it wasn’t the scene of a crime, gets it counted in Bragg’s number, even if those guns were never going to be used anywhere.

For example, in 2022, Dexter Taylor was arrested in Brooklyn. He had more than a dozen guns he made himself, for his own use, and had never shared with anyone else. Those would count as recovered guns, but were still firearms that would never be used in a crime.

Bragg is trying to inflate the danger by using the largest number possible, all while failing to provide literally any context. For example, how many guns were recovered in total? We know that the NYPD commissioner reported that 240 firearms were recovered in Manhattan–the area that Bragg is responsible for–in the first 26 days of this year, which works out to a pace of about 3,400 guns for 2026. We don’t have numbers like this for 2024, unfortunately, but since crime was worse that year, I think we can safely say that the 3D printed guns were still a minority of those recovered.

The truth is that 3D printers are almost ubiquitous in our culture right now. They’re in schools and libraries. People have created manufacturing businesses based exclusively on using 3D printers. They’re everywhere right now, and so that genie is out of the bottle. Even if Hochul passes the laws she wants, and even if the Supreme Court were to uphold them for some reason, it still won’t stop anyone from making guns. They’ll either cross state lines to get one, get someone else to buy one and ship it to them, or simply jailbreak the things.

Bragg, however, wants to shift the blame for his borough’s crime problems so he can’t be held responsible, despite too many prosecutors out there handing out sweetheart deals. You know, like the “trans migrant” who was convicted of raping a 14-year-old boy in the bathroom of a Manhattan bodega and only got the six months they served already as a sentence.

Yeah, like them.

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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