As the hubbub surrounding 3D-printed guns reaches fever pitch, one New York City Councilman is pushing legislation that would heavily regulate the weapons. The bill, which will be introduced today by Brooklyn Democrat Lew Fidler, would ban manufacture of the guns without a gunsmith license and require owners to give their weapons an ID number and register them with police. It does not, however, ban them outright. And, as the Daily News points out given that all of the above rules are more or less the same as the ones that regulate ordinary, non-printed guns, it’s hard to tell whether this bill will actually do anything if passed.
“If left unregulated, these would be weapons without histories — potentially no identifying marks or sales histories,” said Fidler. “We wouldn’t even know these weapons exist, until they were fired.”
Steve Israel, a Democratic U.S. Congressman from New York, hopes to ban 3D-printed guns on a national level later this year.
