It may be a view which you can't grasp but I am more than happy to be part of the unarmed population.
No, you're right I can't, because I've been around them since birth. So it's just something we have. If you're taught right from an early age there isn't anything to be afraid of and you know to respect it.
I kinda wish nobody knew anything about guns but it's too late for that.
>>And now we are able to print them on a 3D printer, it's going to get real ugly.
:'D you don't actually believe that shit, do you?
Believe what? That you can print a gun? If that's what you're asking me then the answer is yes. And if you don't then you should visit your favorite search engine.
As you say, if someone wants to kill someone, a great many things can be used as weapons. But guns are only weapons, they have no other purpose. Except for a very few which are designed for and only really useful for target shooting, they're designed for the sole purpose of hurting/killing other creatures. And in the vast majority of cases they're designed with humans in mind.
What does it say about your (people in such a country, not you specifically) attitude to life and your fellow humans that you feel the need to carry a weapon around? That you place that much of a premium on your safety, regardless of the cost to that of others.
It seems to me a very self-centred/selfish thing to do and bespeaks an uncivilised society, really.
It's not really, for me at least, about the guns. It's about the culture that allowing people to walk around armed fosters. An attitude to violence and human life that I just don't agree with and couldn't live with. And this is borne out by statistics since while your rate of homicides with firearms is obviously higher than ours (3.21 per 100k as opposed to 0.07 on our end) your non-firearm homicide rate is higher too (1.54 compared to 0.99).
You realise that it's a very shit gun? And that the printer required to print a working gun would cost tens of thousands of pounds? At this point, you may as well just buy a gun.
And while sure this stuff is going to eventually get better and cheaper to the point where most homes will have a 3D printer, you still won't be able to print ammo*. And we don't sell ammo here, so no problem.
(*until we get to like Diamond Age nano-printers, like)
I'm well aware of the shitty little plastic tube with a nail in the end. It's hardly a gun, though.
So you don't think that will improve?
>>(*until we get to like Diamond Age nano-printers, like)
I had a lovely chat with one of the top bio-engineers from NASA a few weeks back. She was telling me about the replicators they're working on for the Mars mission (which she reckons will be GO GO GO as soon as the Chinese start making any realy progress in space (by which time the USA will have no money left anyway :'D )).
Anyway, they sound really cool. She's designing bacteria things that can a) self replicate and b) turn the Martian soil into bricks which are then assembled into buildings by robots. She's also working on a bio replicator that can build pretty much any organic organism (bacteria, vacine, food etc.) from a selection of raw ingredients and some instructions - crucially instructions that can be uploaded from Earth, so if the astronauts on mars suddenly get ill and need a vacine we can send it to them :D
Seemingly NASA's Mars plan is to have a base built and ready by the time the astronauts get there. I kept thinking she must be bullshitting me, but she seemed totally serious (and extremely knowledgeable) about the whole thing.
Not until we can print materials with the same precision and strength of current manufacturing methods - and that is likely a /loong/ way off. And when that happens a 3D printed gun will be the least of our worries.