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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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I think that the 3d printing thing is a stupid moral panic.

Depends on location.

In North America, Middle East and similar parts of the world filled with guns up the wazoo, yes, in these cases it would be desperate attempt of closing doors of barn that went empty long time ago.

In heavily gun controlled regions of the world, if you want the plebs stay disarmed, you should be very very worried about this new development.

The fact that a competent craftsman with a machine shop can build a decent firearm

The fact that machine shop is big and noisy, while 3D printer is shoebox sized device you can run in your bedroom without even people in the next room knowing anything makes lots of difference.

the hard part would be building a rifled barrel.

Not any more, look for electrochemical machining. It is slow, but needs only bucket and is completely silent and discrete.

In heavily gun controlled regions of the world, if you want the plebs stay disarmed, you should be very very worried about this new development.

I would have imagined that the problems are not "our citizens are armed and can now overthrow us" but rather "some idiot 3D printed a gun and blew his hand off when he tried to shoot it, now we're looking at a bunch of hysterical screaming on social media about 'why didn't the government prevent this' and some opportunist lawyer persuading the family to sue us for zillions".

Or worse, "some idiot 3D printed a gun then went on a shooting spree in town, now there is hysterical screaming online about 'why didn't the government prevent this'".