New York Governor Kathy Hochul has publicly hit back at Cody Wilson, creator of the first 3D-printed gun, after he unveiled a tool designed to bypass a New York law banning 3D-printed firearms. Speaking on the Decoder podcast, Hochul vowed to stay ahead of Wilson's efforts, defending the state's ban as necessary to prevent unregulated, untraceable weapons being manufactured at home without background checks. The exchange highlights a wider clash between gun-safety regulation and digital rights advocates who see such laws as a form of surveillance overreach.

Wilson's "Hochulization" tool alters the digital hashes of gun-design files so they evade government detection systems, while leaving the finished firearm's functionality unchanged; he has said he plans to apply it to a repository of more than 200,000 gun-related files and open-source the technique. Hochul stood firmly behind New York's ban, citing the state's low gun-homicide rate as evidence the rules work, though she acknowledged grey areas, such as a Kentucky-made e-reader case shaped like a gun, and said she would need to "figure out" how such cases are handled. The Verge's Nilay Patel noted parallels between this backlash and bipartisan criticism of Flock surveillance cameras, with Hochul conceding that any misuse of such technology "has to stop".