It sounds wonderful, but Texas scares the fuck out of me. All those guns and an express lane to the death chamber, it just smacks of too much trouble for my comfort zone.

But seriously, it sounds fun as hell. I remember doing some minor game design in High School back in 1980 for a mercenary rpg that was just pure guns, tactics and wild ideas of such. Friends and I would play test it, switch off administrating it so we could all try out our ideas. We had a blast with it. I can't imagine that being a job, it would be like cheating at life or something. Nobody is suppose to have that kind of fun and get paid for it. Everyday you do it, God has to punt a puppy into outer space when nobody is looking. Just to balance the universe out, you know. (just kidding)

I met him at a game shop owner's convention in New Orleans back in the mid 90s. He was pushing his "Illuminati" card game at the time. My customers tried it out, and it received a tepid at best response. Magic the Gathering was young back then and was steam rolling other card games trying to compete. GURPS didn't take so well with my customers either, sadly. I still carried it. You need a selection to contrast and compare in a game shop, plus it adds to the atmosphere.

He was friendly and decent to talk to. I told him I had been a fan of "Car Wars" since I was a kid. He thanked me, and said he now felt old.

He's a good actor. You know it's good if he's in it.

Bribery is not freedom of speech. What we have is corruption that has gone all the way to the top, the SCOTUS with their treasonous "Citizen's United Ruling". We have to cut this cancer from the body government before it kills it.

Indeed, and when you dabble in crime like that, you risk becoming some psychopath's new shrunken head trophy. Porno can rabbit trail to some serious mental disorders pretty pronto if you look at case studies. So by all means, blackmail away people who might potentially cut you up in tasty bits and make a coin purse out of your scrotum. It sounds like a self correcting problem to me.

Ok, thank you for the link. I'm clearly busted though. Clumpy gun, yup! I've seen price check guns far more intimidating. I swear to Christ I could hold up a bank with one. GET THE FUCK ON THE GROUND OR I WILL PUT A LAZER IN YOUR ASS! Think about that the next time you are in Wal-Mart and that hefty gal who is dressed like she seriously isn't from the planet, comes trooping by you with one of those in hand. Or is it? Or is she? Fuck!

Here's my wild sci-fi fun gun to print out. Remember those plastic star trek guns they made back in the 70s? They shot disks that spun like fuck! You could seriously jack a bag of green army men up with one. My question is how fast can one make a disk spin with this new fangled particle acceleration tech?

I can see me at Wal-Mart, looking at that behemoth bitch in those purple heels that someone a fraction of her size should be in. You know, the one with the menacing price check gun. She in line in front of me, looking back at my cart full of saw blades, Duracell batteries, some damn laser I found in sporting goods, and a big can of coffee. She knows. I could feel a bead of sweat forming on my forehead to take a slalom course down my brow. If she made a move, I could take her. She knows that too.

She flashes me a smile. I'm terrified, it's not a she-alien, but a human female/Sasquatch/mutant who's taking a fancy to me. She does have an ample bosom. I come to my senses later sneaking away with my Wal-Mart bags from some part of town and my car is a subject I don't want to discuss.

I return home and my crew has been patiently waiting, smoking my fucking weed, and are eager to load up "the gun" with ammo, and we got Duracells for this, going balls out on this budget. Fuck them cheap batteries. Note: Make sure you work in a well ventilated area when cobbling PVC particle slider/spinner/accelerator barrels together, the glue will get you high as fuck, and in a way the math will always be more difficult way, not the weed way.

Why is this important? Because of that! That thing that landed in our community's back yard. Seriously, look at the size of it! It's fucking so obviously from space or worse, it's just laying there, resting, and I bet it gets up pissed, hungry, thirsty, and whatever ry that trips its trigger. If it's not friendly as a puppy and shits golden eggs, we just might discover the dire need to seriously fuck it up. Shooting saw blades like photon torpedoes at it sounds like a plan to me. If it bleeds, we can kill it. We can then cook it and eat it. That's what happens when you come to Earth and start shit. We fucking kill you, then we cook you, we are after all civilized, then we eat you.

OK, which way do these batteries go in again? Jesus, I haven't seen this many D-Cells since your mom's vibrator got flagged by the TSA at the airport last Thanksgiving.

------

I digress. 100 duck sized horses of course. And the question is: Why did they make that fucking gun so ugly? Don't they have a kinky cosplay girl friend who makes costumes who could touch it up so it doesn't look so blah. Blah, I will point my blah gun at you and blah you with its blah powers of blah! Give it to some kids with Sharpies, anything.

True story, was in an engineering class of sorts, doing Solid Works and the instructor printed out the train we all made. I was really surprised at the level of detail and how tight it went together. We are talking simple as shit train, something Santa's elves would fucking bust a nut laughing at. But it was cool how we could work it up in that, then just print it. It takes forever though. Nobody is going to print out a gun on demand to go down stairs and check what that scary noise was any time in the foreseeable future. I could be wrong.

In parting, I think steering these fellows away from printing guns to something more interesting. We need a print your own girl friend project. Print up the android frame under the latex or whatever kind of rubber skin. Animating it would be awesome, it could be a community project, like a wiki, the whole thing. You know all of those poor guys who buy body pillows with cartoon girls on them? They are the kind of sick desperate geeks that could pour that kind of dedication into bringing something like this to life. Damn it, lets write a Weird Science reboot if nothing else. Were you around when that came out? That gal was the acme of smoking hot back then if you were the target age of an alive audience. Now to waste time pondering who to cast that part these days. Sigh.

Ciao

Not many released for the PC? Are you a recent sufferer of blunt force trauma to the head? I'm seriously concerned.

Indeed, good points all around. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the good free citizen being armed, especially if they are proven capable and responsible. We've really not made any progress towards letting the good people be armed, nor are we progressing from keeping bad people from being armed. The Left pounced on Sandy Hook in typical idiot liberal fashion, they have stepped up their anti-gun propaganda to a full court press. They are seriously retarded in their tactical sense. I think it's not a coincidence that the 1% that controls both sides wants this issue under wraps. This issue alone is folly.

All they are doing is burning political capital in a bonfire. Instead of working on real issues, and putting a stake in heart of the GOP, they are reviving them, sending the GOP grass roots into overdrive to beat them hard the next election.

Back to the printed gun thing. I think it will fill a niche market nicely. Assassinations and murders come to mind. Murder especially, it's the ability to construct in secret a lethal ranged weapon. I can think of applications, but fictional writing is an aspiring hobby of mine. I'm thinking the odds though are in favor of somebody out there looking at this with peaked homicidal interests.

Here's an idea, with 5 seconds of pondering; What if you wanted to assassinate/murder someone inside a heavily secured area? You can't get a weapon in. But who's going to suspect the weapon printed up on the spot? Then comes fact that it's plastic and can be melted/dissolved into a plastic turd and flushed down the toilet. Pesky metal guns, hard to flush them or even hide them from a hard security sweep. How's our protagonist going to solve that one? Awesome stuff.

I don't think your average thug on the street is clapping with glee for one of these, nope. But it makes for another toy in the arsenal. Just what we needed. At least for now it's not low hanging fruit. It will take someone technologically minded to produce one. Christ, if they are that smart, chances of them being criminals is thinner, right? It's just those few anomalies that worry me for now. When BillyBob can run down to Wal-Mart, get what he needs to gun down his sister/wife, is when we all need to worry. That's the nature of tech too, we keep making it simpler for all the fucking idiots. Read slashdot lately, that point is proven elegantly.

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.