States Pass Legislation to Peer into Your House

It starts with a crusade against ‘ghost guns.’ It ends with government bureaucrats able to see everything you do.

Trish Randall | April 25, 2026

“One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house.”

As an American citizen, whenever legislators deploy the ever-flimsy progressive banner of “public safety,” I feel decidedly unsafe.

Newly proposed and enacted legislation targeting 3D printers and CNC machines would impose restrictions more severe than those the Supreme Court rejects for actual guns.  In conjunction with restrictions on tools, states would create a category of computer source code illegal to possess.

The excuse? “Ghost guns”!

There’s abundant hair-on-fire rhetoric, even written into legislation.  Washington’s recently enacted HB2320 states, “Undetectable and untraceable firearms and firearms components presents a growing threat to public safety.”  The author of California’s AB 2047 testified, “These firearms are incredibly dangerous because they are not part of our regular flow, meaning they are not marked, they are not permitted, they are made in someone’s home, and we don’t even know they exist.”  Not actual use, but private possession frightens this lawmaker.

Plain text on the ATF’s website states that personally manufactured firearms (PMFs) are legal to own and make, even with 3D printed components.

California, Colorado, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington lawmakers are generating restrictions on certain tools and computer code, used to create millions of items unrelated to guns every day, to thwart Americans’ attempts to make a gun it’s legal to make.

In August, Colorado will forbid using a 3D printer or CNC to make any firearm or part, along with sale or distribution of digital firearm-making instructions to anyone but a student or instructor in an approved gunsmithing program.

Massachusetts’s General Laws Section 121 D bans 3D printers or........

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