RepRap is half of that. so what is your point? And I think you miss the point of 3D printed firearms in that they are still in the R&D phase. they are not intended to be zip guns, even if a zip gun is cheaper and more practical. Here's an exercise for you, given what we know about 3D printing today, where do you think it will be in 5 years? Do you understand the interest and controversy with such a technology with this simple short term projection and how it differs from a zip gun?

A RepRap is cheaper than a mill, which is one of many tools you would need to make a proper firearm. So I don't buy the "more expensive" assumption.

Right now it is a cheap and dangerous toy. Or another way to state it, an interesting experiment in materials, design and politics.

A camera housing for my robot or the servo heads for my airplane could appear gun-like to such a thing. I think even getting a human being to identify gun like parts would be difficult unless he could see all of the components together. With a software check you could skirt it by feeding it only one component at a time. This isn't like printing money where the end product must all look the same.

If one can cycle properly then the main difference is that a person with a 3D printer can produce several firearms a day without much effort. The complexity of the device doesn't matter that much with a 3D printer, unlike when a machinst works.

Of course a cheap end mill modified to do CAD/CAM is quite capable of producing receivers and maybe even short barrels out of metal. And those projects have been around for decades now.

I think people are only months away from making a printable machine gun. These printed guns are improving pretty quickly. And everyone is going to have to scramble to figure out what to do about them.

But the internet is a series of tubes.

Unlike being an investment banker.

I heard if you hold a person under water long enough the evil spirits will leave them. I don't know where they go, maybe into a fish?

Null pointers are great, assuming you actually write tests for code coverage. Otherwise you potentially have many of the typical C bugs lurking, not just null pointer dereference.

I remember using sentinel structures for a linked list in Pascal, just like it was recommend in my old computer science texts. And I had a bug where I would sometimes return the sentinel and the rest of my program would happily write to it. So instead of a crash, It would silently write data and lose track of it. I don't remember how many days it too me to track that bug down.

I'm a C Programmer. It's the only language where I'm paid to program.

"do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free"

No, murder is still illegal and whether you use a pressure cooker full of fireworks or a one-shot plastic pistol, the authorities are going to chase you down for as long as it takes.

You need to go to the source of the problem and ban women.

Banning children is as pointless as banning ammunition. Because an industrious person can always make more at home.

That's a classic article. Do you have anything more recent?

Once you create a black market, though poorly crafted bans on an easily transported good, you empower criminals and plant the seeds for organized crime. We saw this with Prohibition. We see it with the War on Drugs. And some countries have seen it with bans on guns.

I challenge the assumption that the US is most like the UK and Australia. What if the US is culturally more like Latin America, or Ukaraine.
What if we're like Greece? They have 3000 legally registered private gun owners in the entire nation, but an esimated 2.5 million guns. And this discrepency is from a country that has a relatively low rate of private firearm ownership (about 25 in 100) compared to the US.

Firearms in the US is a much bigger problem than firearms in Australia. And I mean bigger in terms of scale. I'm not ready to accept a solution to a problem that worked on a small scale on the hunch that it will work on a large scale or that the US is even culturally or politically similar to countries that have successfully implemented bans on guns.

I never heard of the Boston TV API programming contest until it was won by a young woman... so maybe it's just me, but I don't think so.