bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
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There is also a lot of nonsense that does not involve rhetorical fallacies, e.g. the 3D printer argument. As if everyone was suddenly going to manufacture guns in their basement to thwart gun control laws. How many of us actually manufacture anything at all with 3D printers? All the new technology does is make manufacturing easier and cheaper. You still need equipment and raw materials. And you still run the risk of criminal violations for printing items that are illegal.
The reason for the 3D printer argument is that soon the criminal will be able to print their own gun. It's not practical yet because metal printers are quite expensive but the price is falling rapidly. Nobody will know you're using your printer to print a gun so they won't be able to stop you.
It's a shit argument that depends upon a hugely simplistic view of what gun control laws actually achieve.
In the UK, guns are not hard to come by. A criminal can buy a gun from the traditional dodgy bloke in a pub for about the same price that it would cost a licensed gun owner at a gun shop. But criminals in the UK rarely carry guns, because of the law.
The gun nuts of the USA would have you believe that this is absurd, and cannot be true; They think that a gun law that doesn't prevent criminals from obtaining guns at low cost and at any time is completely ineffective - because, like so many idiots, they rely on theory when observation would give better results (they are the same people who say that Universal Health Care cannot possibly work too).
The reality is that the law in the UK doesn't make it hard to obtain a gun; but it makes owning a gun very risky indeed.
In America, if a citizen (or even a cop) sees a gun in your car or your house, then that's no big deal. You likely are allowed to have it; If a citizen reports seeing a gun to the cops, the cops just wonder why he is making a fuss over what is likely perfectly lawful. Even if a cop decides to check out the fact that someone has a gun, and finds that they are prohibited from having it, the penalty is light. Perhaps the gun gets confiscated, and the person who had it gets a small fine.
In the UK, if the cops find a gun in your possession, then you had better have a licence for it, or expect to spend a long time in jail. If a citizen sees (or thinks he sees) a man with a gun, they call the cops in a panic; and the cops send an armed Tactical Response team (what Americans would call a SWAT team) to investigate. That's just if one citizen says he thought he saw a person with a gun. Not a person committing a crime with a gun; just a person with a gun in their possession.
A UK criminal doesn't own or carry a gun on a regular basis, not because they are difficult to obtain, but because they lead to a whole lot of unwanted police attention. Even armed robbers tend not to own guns - they rent them from black-market gun handlers who take them back once the job has been done. Because nobody in the UK gets away with flashing guns about - the handful of criminals who own guns are damn careful about who knows about it, and are aware that mere association with guns is a huge risk.
3D printers make no difference to this; Availability is not the thing that sensible gun control addresses. Gun control makes gun crime and illegal gun ownership more difficult. Then it doesn't matter that obtaining guns is easy. Even the criminals don't want them, except for the brief period when they think they might use them. Because simple possession of the things is a liability, and opens you up to harsh punishment if anyone should just happen to notice that you have one.