>You can easily go through a couple hundred rounds in one visit to the range.
Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
This legislation is insanely, horrendously bad and harmful, but "3D printed gun components are useless" isn't a solid argument against it. They're useful enough.
The real arguments, as others said, are:
1. You can achieve much more already without 3D printers
2. The legislation won't achieve its stated objective as any "blueprint detector" DRM will be trivial to circumvent on many levels (hardware, firmware, software)
3. Any semblance of that DRM being required will kill 3D printing as we know it (the text of the law is so broad that merely having a computer without the antigun spyware would be illegal if it means it can drive a 3D printer)
> Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition, but it's not good enough to actually compete with them.
> Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record. Given his apparent political alignment, he presumably used 3D printed parts for trolling purposes since there was no actual need for him to do so. He could have bought any firearm from any of the places they're ordinarily sold.
>It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition
Does anyone actually believe this? Is there any funds for this theory?
Seems to be too far fetched to be even worth sitting.
>Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record
That really isn't the point (he still doesn't have a criminal record, by the way).
The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
> The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
I guess the counterpoint is that it's not actually useful to criminals either, so there is no incentive for any non-fool to want laws like this and then all incentive arguments are weak because foolishness can be attributed to anyone.
One, you succeed in never being identified or apprehended. Consequently you, rather than the police, have the gun you used, and you can file off the serial number and throw it into the sea or whatever. They don't know who you are so they never come looking for the gun you no longer have and it's just one of millions that were sold to random people that year.
Two, you get caught before you do the murder. Some cop thinks you look too nervous or you get into a car accident on the way there etc. and they find the gun. Having one without a serial number at this point means you're in trouble when you otherwise wouldn't be. It's a disadvantage.
Three, they catch you in the act or figure out who you are because your face got caught on camera somewhere after you took off your mask etc. At this point it's extremely likely you're going to jail. This is even more likely if the weapon is still in your possession because then they can do forensics on it, and it not having a serial number at that point is once again even worse for you. This is apparently the one that actually happened.
Whereas the theory for it allowing you to get caught would have to be something like, they don't know who you are but they have a list of people who bought a gun (which, depending on the state, they might not even have) so they can look on it to find you. But that's like half the US population and doesn't really narrow it down at all.
There is no criminal benefit in doing it so that leaves the remaining options which are either trolling or stupidity.
It comes back the same thing, there is zero evidence that gun manufacturers are lobbying for this while Everytown is very publicly and proudly announcing that they are pushing this exact legislation.
I'm not sure that's a big strike against it yet. Kinda the whole point of engineering in academia is to work on hard things that are far from commercialization.
The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.
First, Gen Alpha is in their teens, so it's kind of hard to say what is happening there or will happen.
Second, there is a growing divide between gen Z males that are skewing conservative in some ways. Their church/religious attendance is up, but overall attendance is still down.
Gen Z females that are the most liberal demographic in history.
At this point I don't see any difference between the two. Modern religions are shaped (warped, really) by the larger organizations that control them.
Sure, the concept of "spiritual/non-scientific belief" isn't a parasite in and of itself, but even if the existing organized religions ceased to hold their sway, and people treated religion as a personal thing without centralized authorities, I still don't see an end to (for example) people trying to get their religious beliefs enshrined in law. That's parasite behavior.
That's why they followed up with an actual experiment with mice, where they found that just adding the bacteria made them stronger.
Of course we won't know for sure before doing human experiments, but it'd be an odd coincidence if we saw the correlation in humans and causation in mice, but there was no causation in humans.
Someone else here pointed out that when your biggest asset is a network of thousands of satellites that all have a five-year lifespan, earnings after depreciation is unusually important.
Those are a lot of great points but I'll nitpick a couple things. While it's true that Starship has never reached orbit, they have reached orbital velocity several times. They could have gone into orbit if they'd aimed in that direction, but they didn't because it's a test rocket and they didn't want it to stay up there if anything went wrong.
And I don't think the multiple failure causes mean they aren't iterating. They're making changes with every launch. It might mean that everything's a tradeoff, and a lot of times when you fix one thing, you create a problem somewhere else. Building a fully, rapidly reusable rocket is a really difficult task.
Something you didn't mention is that even on the "successful" flights they suffered some damage on reentry. They'll have to fix that if they want rapid reuse, which is essential for the super low costs Elon estimates.
I'm not sure what you mean by "never caught a ship" but they did catch a landing first stage with their launch tower, which was a pretty fancy trick nobody had tried before.
So far everybody's playing catch-up, but there are some innovative rocket companies out there. Blue Origin is finally getting to orbit with partial reusability, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are doing some cool stuff, and Stoke Space is working on full reusability, evaporative cooling for reentry (using hydrogen fuel for the second stage, which works much better for this than methane), can steer for landing without gimbaling the engines, and has a full flow staged combustion engine like Starship.
I don't think anyone can say there are insurmountable obstacles, but it's still a hard problem they haven't solved yet. Bits of the rocket are still melting on reentry, and they have to fix that to achieve rapid reusability. Plus they haven't demonstrated a heavy payload yet. We can't be sure they'll actually achieve extreme low cost until they've done both of these things.
For anything beyond Earth orbit, they also need to demonstrate orbital refueling.
I've seen articles raising technical concerns about all of these, but I'm not enough of an expert myself to have an opinion.
But SpaceX launches manned missions, with a perfect safety record so far, plus a fantastic success rate for their unmanned Falcon flights. They "launch early, launch often" for their test flights.
The main reason NASA can't do that with Artemis is that every SLS launch costs at least $2 billion.
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