Really wish they transitioned to a “Not-for-profit” structure, rather than non-profit. Non-profits can still be profit driven, sadly.

“But muh family and fwiends use it!” or “I have an autistic cousin twice removed so I can’t stop because it’s the only thing he’ll use!”

Any excuse to keep huffing that copium.

Did you miss the qualifier “that uses explosive charges”? The engineering challenge is in the explosive part.

Projectiles are a part of human nature. We’ve always thrown spears, rocks, etc – firearms are just an extension of our better understanding of the world. I know of barely anything else that uses explosive charges that is as widely applicable to the general public. Roofing nail guns? But that’s such a niche subject, it’s not something people are really worried about trying to make with 3D printing. Believe me, if I had a better engineering challenge for 3D printing, I’d be suggesting it. But nothing quite hits like containing an explosive charge, and utilizing the energy in a way that performs work without destroying itself.

I used to run the 3D printing community on G+ at around 500k strong, (about 10k weekly active users according to Google’s stats) and I ended up actually pissing off a lot of my European users because of this. My viewpoint on it, was as an engineering exercise – it’s an amazing thing. It’s not advocating for guns, and guns aren’t only used to kill other people. So I stood up for the guys posting about their engineering challenges, and their work making 3D printed parts for a machine with high impact loads and loads of cycling issues.

Unfortunately, it lost me some friends, like Gina Haubage and Tomas Sanladerer – as they disagreed highly; and wanted to ban anyone posting firearms related 3D printing content.

Everyone is abandoning their safety advisory council just before elections…I wonder why…

I mean, they’ve been all over Reddit running accounts for decades at this point, no? At this point I feel like 75% of my interactions on mainstream sites are going to be from foreign agents and/or bots.