Without him knowing, this guy perfectly illustrates the real gun problem in this country - gun obsessiveness.
You bring up a good point, but this conversation could be taken a step further and shift our focus from guns to 3D printing, and an open source world in general. I do agree that Americans have an obsession with guns. We romanticize them. I have a friend who has three guns. Another who just recently bought a revolver, and another who also purchased a compact semi-auto pistol. All they do is clean their guns, they don't even take them out to the range, claiming that ammo is expensive. Well, it is! A gun is a tool, not a toy, and these boys don't have the heart, the skill, or the head to kill another human. These guns are sitting as "collectors" items, hardly being fired. I'm split in the gun debate. On the one hand, there are WAY too many out there, but on the other, I'd rather not face the end of a barrel without having one myself. This is America, after all.
It's kinda hard to figure out what I want to say about this video. On one hand there's this kid thinking that he's bursting someone's bubble with his insta-receivers, but who's bubble is he really bursting? He talks about doing ideological damage with his work, but the ATF apparently gave him the green light. So where's this "neo-liberal" opponent wanting to return to the 1990's where "everything will be perfect forever"? It seems like his entire crusade is against a strawman of his own construction. On top of that, there's this guy's politics (ugh), and then the video editing to give the aura of an oncoming apocalypse. So many things to feel conflicted about. 3d printing could change society drastically in many ways, the least of which being firearm control. The prospect of any material good being produced with little or no labor is foreseeable in the future; it could change the entire fundamental basis of the economy.
Exactly. This is beyond guns, beyond laws and regulations, beyond anything that we could possibly imagine right now. I'm investing in several 3D printer companies because I feel as though 3D printers will only become more and more complex, producing higher resolution objects, working with different types of materials. The technology is relatively new, but it's here to stay: Open source world. Manufacturing could be changed, if material goods are created from 3D printers. We've done amazing things with plastics, this is just the beginning. Vice tends to go a little overboard when it comes to their journalism, but generally it seems to be pretty straight forward.