Irony: he had it right.

Clumpy ugly gun? Seriously? Have you even worked with or seen the product of even a cheap version of these printers? This isn't your wife's glue gun cobbled onto some parts off of an old dot matrix printer and erector set driven by Etch-A-Sketch-ish software.

First lets politely address your concept and image of "crime", it smacks of seedy punks hanging around at night in shadowy parts of town. This is the most neolithic denominator of crime and quite the straw man for this exchange. What makes me curious is your motivation for going "straw man" on me. Is it because of a polarized political mindset? That's understandable these days, this kind of thread is like a candle flame to the moths of gun issues. Politics is science, right? There was a ratio of sarcasm in that last sentence.

Let's embrace this mental exercise sans the politics if we can, hmm?

First, what I think is remarkable so far that I have seen is that you can print up parts inside of parts. This little bit of magic is helped along with an after printing chemical wash to eliminate the support structures. Rinse, dry and you have it. Now lets keep that in mind and explore what crime has already done with 3-D printers. What I'm thinking about at the moment is how they used them to print up faceplates to snap onto ATM's that would steal credit card info. Do you seriously have your ATM's dimensions committed to memory? I know I don't. Fucking brilliant, right? Disturbing isn't it?

I love to write, for fun. Let's for fun think of a character who is motivated by the oldest reasons so we can get a probable character that is reasonable and believable. Let's say they got fucked over in love or business and they simply have an enemy that has to go. This will be a tough target, it's well protected, probably setting pretty with all the spoils of the conflict. So, the objective is murder. What would be brilliant would be a weapon you could produce that has no conventional design limits. It could literally be a Yard Gnome with a kick ass zip gun wired to a web cam as a gun scope. With the right app, you could drill him from across the planet on your 4g network. Look what I did with that. I even got your 1700s tech in there. The Gnome has a blunderbuss. It would be cute all the way up until it shot the victim. That's 2 minutes of spit balling, and I think I can cook up an entertaining scenario.

How the fuck is this relative to real life? We're dealing with some amazing tools for imaginative minds. Let's try to keep people in their happy bubble so that they make happy productive non-evil shit with their imaginative minds. Railgun rifles and gauss pistols? Seriously? I wouldn't hand something like that over to this neolithic child race, holy fuck that's the acme of irresponsible. That's why we keep them for ourselves, says whomever makes one. lol We're American's we are the only ones to be trusted with such powers. Right? We've been setting on the ability to turn the planet into Mars 2.0 and haven't lost our fucking minds and done so. This gives us ..something something, we got nukes fuck off. So, why not? Let's give every American a pistol that can shoot a projectile out of orbit. We'll take skeet shooting to a whole new level. The moon, what did it do to you, BillyBob?

I'm with you on the get a proper gun for applications like "fight the zombie horde" scenarios. Give me heavy metal and a metric fuck ton of bullets.

At last we get to the point you made about bullets. I think you sell the alternatives short. Consider what you shoot is as important as the mechanics of just shooting something. Consider how intricate one could make a projectile when you can print it out instead of casting it? For example this would be a direction to go for making tranquilizer guns. Imagine how handy a reliable, accurate tranq pistol would be? Quiet. Automatic, high capacity magazines. Put some optics on it. Hell, mount it to a drone, and chase targets with your Iphone. Be the envy of your little secret cadre of neighbors who are the "neighborhood watch". Not to mention, the satisfaction of chasing down that raping tomcat that fucks so loud that you even hear it through a mountain of instillation. Roll out of bed, fire up the drone, arm the trang gun, activate thermal imaging get on the laptop and hunt his squalling ass down. Drop him, put him in that cage the hippies left you in the garage, and gloat like the higher species you are.

Or not.

Such trolling. Yawn. The troll was trolling the troll road with a troll motor on his boat, yet the "meh" prevailed.

Nanny state for guards at the school? Seriously? I get a kick out of the "nanny state" terminology generated by the right. Then out the other side of their mouth they want industrialized welfare, or just immunity from the law period. Pesky laws anyway, right?

Did you know that back in the old days, WW2, the NRA was about making sure our boys were armed in the field. As in if I recall correctly, they would send guns from members to those fighting the war. My granddad was in WW2, decorated and was part of the NRA. There is rich American history to it, sadly it's missed by snotty kids these days who use the tech for cute cat pictures and seeing if that safe ever got opened. Propaganda; it's digital these days. Ignorance: It's mass produced.

As far as your "military weapons" are concerned, it wasn't that far back on the scale of time that the cutting edge of weapons were muskets. That innovation alone with the ability to sail ships on the ocean allowed the British to rule the world. Yes, the British. Imagine that. Or not.

At some point the intellectual dishonesty of the NRA bashing should come to complete fruition and the Left is going hate it. I factor about the next election cycle when things swing back to the Right due to the ground swell in the grass roots level of this issue, the Left will wish they had hired me to consult for them. lol

Anyway, we've all pissed around, not came to the table in an intelligent approach to problem solving and this article's issue just might be the forefront of a whole new can of worms that's going to stink to high heaven.

Factor this into the equation. Printable guns; who want this in a very bad way? Hmm..I don't know, but if I was a bad guy, an industrious one, tech savy, educated, smart enough to avoid the system if they wanted to do something evil. Here is a way to produce a lethal weapon, ranged, possible sound suppressed. Completely untraceable and disposable. Ha! It's probably recyclable, so it's not only an effective weapon, but it's green. It has appeal to the environmentally conscience villain. Oh yes, and thanks to the movies, we know that metal detectors don't work on plastic guns or their parts. Hurray!

Yeah, inability to work on comprehensive policies is either hallmark of incompetence or corruption. Either way, we are dealing with the possibility of a whole new animal being released into the wild, and we are fucking around arguing about dumb shit like "background checks". What you need is policy that preserves the integrity and spirit of the 2nd Amendment, and places some highly intelligent safety features into play. You can have your cake and eat it as well if you are smart and can work together.

Here's how I see this kind of animal romping about the countryside. The only hope you will have to contain this is through the tools perhaps, and the plastics used to create this. This will catch the dummies, which leaves the smart guys. They will be able to fabricate this and perhaps come up with their on innovations. Your first bad guys will of course be corporate and government types. This is where the really juicy targets are at. At super high dollar and high level corporate shenanigans, this will make wet work far more elegant, the same with politics. When you are dealing with those resources and those stakes, this will find a nice happy home. On down the food chain it rolls, assassins, vigilantes, crime crews, "militias", you name it.

But the bullets, you say? Seriously?

Factor this, if you can print the gun, you can print the simple reloading tools as well. Why not the shell casings and with some modification, even the bullets themselves. With modern chemistry and completely doped up idiots making meth out of common chemicals, how hard will it be for sober people to create a propellant? The variables on that equation get difficult to lock down as any chemical training will probably yield results.

This is dismaying. Even if we found a bottle on the beach and wished every gun on the planet to be turned into kittens and cheese burgers, we will still have them appear, but now not out of predicable venues, but out of thin air as far as any system is concerned. Let's face it, bad people will have reached their weapon production zenith, while the rest of us flounder around in inept, corrupt politics.

Seriously? We're not even talking about the need for traditional bullets either, are we? This takes shit to another level that I'm not comfortable with.

What interests me are the policies that we will be seeing regarding drones. I'm not talking about "death from above" drones, (i hope) but surveillance drones. I can see where corporations will want to keep private drones grounded. After all, what good are fence to keep people out from observing your shenanigans when a damn drone can wiz over, capture everything in high definition? It's not trespassing and they don't own the airspace yet. It could lead to easy evidence of foul doing unearthed by those pesky liberal hippies and their damnable ideas about not fucking up the environment, fair trade, dumb shit like that, right? So, there goes big evil money with big evil lawyers after it right now.

But how about the farmer who is trying to keep his costs down and invests in a drone to check his livestock instead driving a gas guzzling 4 wheel drive all over hell and creation? Send out the drone, it can count cows, at least living ones, maybe even dead ones with an upgrade. Environmentalists who want to count Spotted Owls or something silly, they will be wanting to tap into this awesome bit of tech. And why shouldn't they? There are countless applications for this technology. My idea of where it could go if not fucked with, might even be an advancement in delivery services. Don't laugh too hard, but imagine a FedEx drone with a special delivery for you. Or how about a Dominoes Pizza Drone? An automated postal service? Your own personal utility drone that picks up your prescriptions, drops off your dry cleaning. It could all be orchestrated from data servers, flight plans instantly filed, the entire hive of a community of drones operating at peak efficiency and safety. Much mundane traffic by humans could be eliminated.

Dreamers, huh? Who do they think they are? We're not going to see progress if neanderthals make policies. We have to balance our fears with our aspirations and of course we need to preserve our freedoms and privacy. We can do it, but we can't let the bad people win. Who are the bad people? If you has to ask, seriously, get with the program.

I'm with you. Anything with their logo on it is a boycott for me. I'm sure people will track them as they try to squirm away. They have evoked the wrath of gamers and they will find we are an unforgiving lot. Track them, never buy a thing any of them produce, no matter where they hide, no matter what they change their names to, whatever. All the way down to flipping burgers, if you find one flipping burgers, throw it in their face and demand your money back.

Examples must be made and EA should become a cautionary tale that companies tell around the campfire to scare the living shit out of each other. Behold the power of a a completely pissed off customer base. Release the Kraken.

I can't wait to dance on their fucking grave.

Look, you can't have people with unsupervised mass accelerators that can fire a bucky ball through the moon, just out firing willynilly about the landscape. It's down right rude, man! Think about it! Nor can you expound upon the issue in public, lest you arouse the leviathan of curiosity, "gauss rifle...wtf is that?" And there we are, with yet another 2nd Amendment crisis on our hands. By the way, I think bullets are a choking hazard as well.

There are some people who are dangerous with a sharp stick in their hand, right? Qualifications is all I'm saying.

Seriously? Is someone trolling for free ideas or what? This isn't a hard thing to find applications for, also one will want to "intensely study" it of course for their own fiendish curiosities at least. To me there is just so much "kick ass" potential here that it should go without saying; its going to be awesome. I would suggest we all get cracking on a payday for this one and not be left at home plate watching this one go by.

Don't you have a nerdary to tend to?

Incoming mysterious drone strikes on Linux developers around the world.

How's it feel to have one of the few intelligent comments on this?

Or ...are you a clever counter intel agent? If so, ni hao.

By the way, please get your half retarded monkey known as the NORKS back on a leash and grow the fuck up over the fishing area conflicts with Japan. Please? Japan, they are our friends and they are brilliant, they might seriously fuck you up with something we don't know about. Also, they have had a break through that could render oil as the main power source obsolete. We would all love to tell the Middle East to go fuck itself, no?

We have space and science projects to work on, please promote peace. The fucking war machines aren't very profitable, now are they? You can't plant rice with a rifle, and you can't harvest corn with a nuke. Get a grip on the "cyber warfare" please, Washington might be looking to mug you of your lunch money so they can pay you back our loans. This "Cyber Warfare is REAL WARFARE" smacks of something out of Dr Strangelove, we don't need melodramatics from either side.

Stop distracting us from our own highly entertaining internal politics.

By the way, fuck you for Wal-Mart, we should carpet bomb you all to death with 100mt nukes, killing even the cockroaches, all for that backstabbing double dealing economic brick you threw through our living room window. What's that?? I can't hear them either, dem Subs...lol....the ones with the nukes that are parked really fucking close...or are they? That's the problem with having a big red button that makes things go BOOOOOM. You want to touch it. It calls to you. It says "Touch me...pweeeeze".

But enough of that, we're all friends, we all just want to get along. Right? God, I love the modern world!

I got a feeling that if we don't get our shit together as a planet, we are going to really be surprised with someone else shows up to the party. By someone else, I mean someone from out of the neighborhood, as in not from EARTH. I really want to know more about that shit that hit Russia. WTF...? We need to start thinking as a species, all of us on the same fucking rock that is statistically overdue for some cataclysmic shit to happen. As the sweet gal says "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

Promote peace and science, fuck war, seriously, I think something worse is coming.

  Kool-Aid, don't drink it unless you make it. I like grape, oh yeah!

Why not build a monster one in space instead? Think space elevator please.