[gdiamos]

My kindergartner has a 3D printer.

I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”.

I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand.

I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

[creato]

I can see how something like this happens. We're talking about a 5 year old kid seeing something at school, and describing it to their parents. Who knows what the kid said?

Then you have situations like the young kid that did bring a gun to school and shoot a teacher, and there were tips not followed up on, and the school getting absolutely dragged through the court of public opinion because of it.

So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.

What happened to you is probably the best case scenario: kid told their parent something incorrect, that parent calls the school, the school checks in with you, you tell them they're wrong, the end. If the principal actually thought there was a problem, I doubt she would have simply called you.

[mike_hock]

There's the case of a kid printing a non-functional toy weapon.

And then there's the case of years of consistent violent behavior, and even when the principal was advised on the day of the shooting that the kid was in possession of a firearm, she did nothing.

Hard to tell them apart.

[cucumber3732842]

>So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.

No, they don't. Because 99.999999% of the time they won't have guns and the other 00.000001% of the time well it's your ass anyway.

[warumdarum]

Panopticon in every class room ?

[mptest]

> they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns.

hilarious accidental commentary on the US

> no way to prevent this - only nation where this regularly happens [0]

[qwerpy]

> I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes.

Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.

[gdiamos]

He started with tinkercad and thingiverse.

I tried basic elegoo and bambu printers.

He can’t read very well but he likes dragging shapes around on a tablet.

He would ask me to find shapes using the search engines then he mixes them together or reshapes them.

I would add them to his history.

This is why I was surprised to hear about 3D printed guns. I was quite sure there wasn’t anything like that in the history.

It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.

[crtified]

>It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.

I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have.

Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded")

And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow.

The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...

[somenameforme]

School shootings are extremely rare and so I was curious how it could be that large. The nuance is that those pages are not just listing school shootings as commonly understood/feared, but any shooting involving a school in any way.

So for instance from the 2010s [1] page you get teacher shooting principle, biology professor (female no less!) shooting other professors, guy killing himself in a university library after firing off a couple of rounds at nobody, 60+ guy shooting his 60+ year old wife in a parking lot then killing self, and so on.

I think that's a bit dodgy, because there's something like 130k+ schools of all sorts in the US [2], so you have a massive multiplier there. To put that number in contrast, there are fewer than 17k Starbucks in the US. Do the same by basically any metric, positive or negative, and you're going to similarly see a huge number of incidents.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

[2] - https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

[iamnothere]

Many school shootings would also be better classified as “shootings at a school”, such as targeted gang violence or arguments between individuals. This doesn’t excuse these events (kids should be safe at school) but most are not the sort of Columbine-style events evoked by the phrase. Conflating the two likely makes it harder to find a solution, as “ban guns” isn’t on the table without an amendment.

[defrost]

to be fair, other countries also have listed as school shootings any event that involved shooting and a school; eg: Australia with a population ~ 15x smaller than the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_Au...

has a total of six (6) incidents this century (since 2000) .. somewhat less than a factor of 15 less than the US for that same 26 year period.

Note that three of the six incidents of the past 26 years involved guns being fired but no one being hit (no grazes, injuries, or deaths).

[somenameforme]

I think the connotation of a school shooting is somebody going to a school and shooting numerous students in a mostly random fashion with the intention of creating terror. That's why guns are so scary in this context - it's trivial to kill a person with a gun, a knife, a car, or a brick, but it's much easier to kill 10 people with a gun than it is with the other instruments - well except perhaps a car.

But when you aren't listing just these sort school shootings, but instead listing any homicide that occurred within the vicinity of a school, why is it reasonable to exclude the various incidents of non-gun homicides at Australian [1][2] (or American for that matter) schools? It just feels like a false narrative. Because what matters if we're just speaking of safety at schools is how often people are killed within the vicinity of schools, though obviously subdata including the share of each weapon in homicides would be useful/informative.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lilie_James

[2] - https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15912963/Father-dies-...

[crtified]

We can certainly pick apart any given data point.

It doesn't change the overarching sentiment that guns are a subject that attracts considerably larger attention in the USA than in any other 'developed' nation.

Pick any number of metrics - frequency of incidents, size and power of advocacy groups, political debate, ownership levels, media coverage, constitutional significance - and that pattern is clear.

So my [here refined] point remains : there is no (developed nation) where guns are a greater part of public discourse than the USA. Therefore, when we find ourselves questioning "why are some USA citizens quite passionate about the debate?" (especially where their children are concerned), I don't think we need to look too far for the answer.

That is true for both sides of the debate.

[watwut]

All the dodgy things listed in the second paragraph are solid school shootings?

[amanaplanacanal]

They don't pattern match with what people visualize as school shootings: kids bringing guns to school to shoot other kids.

[win311fwg]

Guns have always posed that risk to children. Despite that, the schools, at least around here, used to have shooting ranges and the kids would bring their guns to school to make use of them! Hard to believe now, and as you can image those ranges have been since decommissioned, but nobody batted an eye back in the day.

Key point here is that adults haven't always been bothered by things that look like guns. That is something that has emerged recently. What changed?

[WillAdams]

Moreover, target shooting is the only school sport in the U.S. to have _never_ had an injury recorded as part of the sport itself --- that my local public school has a locker of rifles locked up and un-used in the basement and no longer has a marksmanship program/participates in competitions is _not_ justifiable on the basis of safety.

Further, children who have attended the NRA gun safety course have a much better record of safety and safe interactions with firearms than those who don't --- learning the rules of gun safety and the appropriate thing to do when finding a firearm which is not in the possession of a responsible adult makes for much less tragedy.

What has changed is that it used to be a part of the immigrant experience to purchase firearms and take up hunting, but the transition from rural farm life to urban city life means that an ever larger portion of the U.S. population has limited experience with/knowledge of firearms.

[warumdarum]

I find it fascinating. There are the stabbings in china and car amoks, but everywhere else on the planet such behavior is only found with disenfranchised veterans after a large war has ended.

[qwerpy]

Nice. My kids are still at the stage where they can only request specific objects and colors but I can’t wait to gradually involve them more and more in the process of model design, slicing, and printing.

There are valid concerns with 3d printing guns but I expect adults to be able to let kids be kids when it comes to something like a Star Wars figurine.

[WillAdams]

Have you considered BlockSCAD?

When the kid is older, the best movie on the societal aspects of firearms is _Witness_.

[rdtsc]

That boy knows what he is doing. Kids figure this stuff out they are no dummies. You don’t like so and so? Tell teachers they printed a “gun”. Or mentioned “gun” or said a politically incorrect word. It’s a form of bullying using a system’s irrationality against others. Kind of like swatting

[peddling-brink]

Not at 5. 10, maybe.

Those are not the thoughts of a 5 year old.

[paytonjjones]

It's not that they are planning the sequence and understanding all the cogs in the machine. It's that they've seen the same situation play out 10 times already with other kids. All they need to do is copy it exactly.

[rationalist]

Unless someone taught that concept to the 5 year old.

[gorgoiler]

Good for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered.

Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.

[SoftTalker]

Why do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?

[gorgoiler]

The rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience:

1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”.

2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world.

3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk.

4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil.

Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk, I say!

[greenavocado]

This guy works in compliance!

[Ancapistani]

Because of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?

[johnisgood]

Oh brings me to the good pre-CoC era when we did not need to have explicit rules and a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. :D You might say that it is too broad, but now with the CoC you have many more broad rules. :P

[kstrauser]

> a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine.

Not a huge fan of overly broad CoCs, but they arose because, in fact, that simple rule did not work fine. It repeatedly did not work fine, in many groups engaged in many different endeavors. It worked not fine so badly and so frequently that people got tired of it and started writing out the explicit rules.

There's a lot of parallels between CoCs and sexual harassment rules. At first, it was a shitty free-for-all that was fun if you were part of the getting-away-with-it group but terrible for others. Then people said alright, had enough, we're going to make hard and fast rules against all this bullshit. Those first versions tended to be awful and heavy handed because they tried really hard to be comprehensive and serious about it, which is very well intended, but probably too far in the other direction. What we ended up with is probably vastly better, on average, for all involved. It's not as fun for people who enjoy treating others badly, but a whole lot nicer for everyone else.

[xeromal]

Fear of everything

[flipped]

Because that doesn't improve actual security. It's for dumb nuggets who can't do real defensive work. Maybe you would also qualify for that numb job.

[iancmceachern]

>I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

This is the way

[paradoxyl]

If you have the resources, you could also serve her with papers. IANAL, but that arguably is libel, defamation, harassment and so incredibly insane that it deserves a severe legal smackdown.

[kube-system]

No, that is not even remotely close to qualifying for any of those things.

The principal merely said someone made a call about it, they didn't present that claim as a fact, they didn't publish it, they didn't act with malice or negligence, and they caused no damages. A statement would have to meet all of those qualifications to be libel or defamation. It meets none.

Harassment is repeated or continuing communication that serves no purpose other than bothering the person. This was a single phone call was made for the purpose of investigating an alleged school incident. It meets none of the qualifications to be harassment.

Our laws do not prevent anyone from discussing claims by other people that may or may not be true. It would be silly if they did.

There is absolutely nothing illegal nor unusual for school staff to call parents to investigate concerning claims made by other students or parents. Doing so is exactly how misunderstandings in these situations are cleared up.

[derwiki]

Not sure I’d want to rope my kindergartener into something like that? I like GP’s approach

[pbhjpbhj]

So their child was accused of 3D printing a gun and taking it in to school, the parent confirmed online that, yes, their child did 3D print a gun and take it to school ... I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve.

It's not libel, it's a misunderstanding.

[amanaplanacanal]

It was a gun in the same way the word GUN on a page is a gun: only symbolically.

[goatlover]

Is it a gun in a meaningful sense if it can't fire a projectile? How could anyone be concerned about that? What if the kid brought toy soldiers to school? Would that be bringing guns to school?

[15155]

What are your damages? What kind of remedy do you seek?

[mort96]

US lawsuit culture is absolutely insane.

[greenavocado]

Judge will throw it out unless you're well connected. They'll say the case has "no standing" unless you shell out massive amounts of money.