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Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I understand fear of handguns a handgun is an easy to procure object in a hurry that allows someone to commit a crime suddenly and violently.
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get? (except of course using it to commit a crime is obviously very illegal)
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
I mean the Unabomber was quite smart, and also opted for bombs over guns.
I'm not sure how wise it is to be giving such recipes on this forum either. I doubt you'll direct the Eye of Sauron our way, but it never hurts to be safe, especially when your point could have just as easily have been made by simply saying something like, "You can make homemade C4 out of materials that are freely available in the US, and then delivering it via a drone would be trivial" or something like that.
I do think it is lucky that people who want to hurt others are mostly uncreative. I have definitely come up with ways of doing mass damage that I'm surprised have never actually happened in the United States, since I wasn't thinking particularly hard about the problem. It just seems like we are lucky that when humans are high in the desire to do mass violence, they mostly tend to be low in traits like intelligence that correlate with successfully perpetrating the most harmful kinds of mass violence.
That's one of the worrying things about AI for me. While I know all of the big AI labs test for this, and have their own systems in place to detect users trying to use LLMs in this way, I really worry about what will happen if someone is able to manufacture a bioweapon they otherwise wouldn't have been able to manufacture thanks to an LLM.
Fortunately, the type of amateur idiot trying this is indeed more likely to blow their own face off in their basement or garage before they can get around to leaving their bombs in a public place. Handguns are different.
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