Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy. I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes. Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.
He started with tinkercad and thingiverse. I tried basic elegoo and bambu printers. He can’t read very well but he likes dragging shapes around on a tablet. He would ask me to find shapes using the search engines then he mixes them together or reshapes them. I would add them to his history. This is why I was surprised to hear about 3D printed guns. I was quite sure there wasn’t anything like that in the history. It w…
I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have.
Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded")
And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow.
The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...