The communities pushing “COVID was a lab leak” the hardest are demonstrably not cured by evidence.

They dismiss it because it’s bullshit. Every stop on the slope is not inevitable.

In this particular case, why is the pro-gun community able to prevent changes to gun laws – despite those laws being deeply flawed and with only a minority of Americans supporting them – but somehow unable to prevent the floodgates after that?

The response the gun lobby wants to hear is “they gubbermint won’t do it because they’re scared we’ll shoot them!” but it’s pure bravado. Grossly negligent gun laws haven’t prevented the American government from doing things to its citizens that would make China blush and the pro-gun crowd didn’t even change their vote, let alone sacrifice their lives to prevent it.

Because everything is a bullshit slippery slope to them. “Oh you want to get rid of the second amendment? What’s next? The first amendment? The fourth?”

Nope. Just the second. It’s repealing an amendment, not dabbling with heroin. They’re not going to say “oh why not, maybe one more”.

Making the “responsible” part of “responsible gun owner” mandatory is not going to cause the collapse of civilisation.

If any of those (conspicuously unnamed) household items were used to kill even half as many people as guns, there would absolutely be legislation to reduce the public safety risk.

If that legislation failed as routinely as America’s gun laws do, it would be improved or replaced until it worked.

Isn’t it lucky where that slippery slope starts?

It doesn’t start before guns, with things like high explosives, despite them being arguably “arms” and inarguably more useful in a tyrant-overthrowing war.

And it doesn’t start after guns with knives and all the other things you’re sure they’re going to take, even though they could have taken them at any point in the past 20 years.

Nope, the slippery slope starts exactly at the point it cuts into the profits of the gun lobby and the convenience of reactionaries, the moment they “grab guns” by introducing things like “licenses issued at the completion of a background check, safety and operation test and demonstrated ability to store safely”.

The pro-gun community sure hit the jackpot there.

Edit: Oh also, it was the modified rifle that was considered a “machine gun”, or the specific device made from a shoelace designed to convert it to full auto. This is so fuckwits can’t circumvent laws against fully automatic weapons, carrying and selling devices to illegally modify the weapon and then claiming “but its not on the gun so it doesn’t count!”.

That entire linked blog post could be completely undermined by adding the word “part” to the initial letter.

The thing is, if 3D printed guns were a significant problem (and not primarily just an excuse to do nothing about failing gun laws), your situation would still be a massive improvement.

Domestic terrorism is planned. At some point, every mass shooter has thought about how they could kill the most people, with the least effort and lowest chance of failure.

And of course when they can walk into a gun store and buy cheap, semi-automatic weapons on a whim – even with a long history of red flags – that’s exactly what they do.

Sure, maybe they could kill more people with a bomb. But they’d have to learn how to build one, then actually build it without being caught or blowing their hands off. On top of all of that, there’s no for-profit death cult for explosives so many of the most effective tools will bring men in suits to your door.

The reality is if they had to buy, build and tune a Voron, then print a gun, then clean up the spaghetti and print another gun, then test the gun wouldn’t explode in their hands many of them simply would just try and stab people instead (or better yet, just do their suicide without taking innocent people with them).

Means reductions has been proven to reduce suicide rates. Mass shootings are a form of suicide.

This proposal is just an awkward attempt to address an issue early, because they can do so without the gun lobby sicking their lawyers and reactionaries on them, who are the ones pushing "Why bother with gun control when you can just 3D print full auto weapons?“ in the first place.

What a shame that would be

A lot of the WASM ecosystem is still pretty rough