Description
Some of you may recognize this design. I designed this just about a year ago, but just before I posted it, there was yet another school mass shooting, and I didn't really feel good about posting even a toy gun design that added to our culture of guns. What I did instead was post a photo of this toy gun along with an explanation of why I didn't want to post the design. I didn't do this so much as a protest, but as a way to start a conversation.
And it did start a conversation. I was actually quite nervous about this as I'm a pretty non-confrontational guy, and I didn't want things to go up in flames. For a couple of days, I was encouraged and even heartened by the comments being posted. People from all over the country (all over the world, in fact) on both sides of the issue expressed their views pretty thoughtfully and actually seemed to gain insight from each other's comments. In particular, I remember someone from northern Europe, who had police officer relative, had never even seen a gun until recently. And someone in the US who had grown up with guns realizing that there were vast swaths of people who have no use for guns and view them as totally foreign.
But then things went south. There were two distinct threads of disintegration. The first was people who accused me of using click-bait to lure them into reading about my political view point. To this I am somewhat guilty. I was hoping, though, that with more than 100 designs posted, some pretty popular, that I might have been granted a little leeway in this regard. Evidently not. There's also the fact that people weren't exactly greeted with a political diatribe. I merely stated why I was uncomfortable with posting a toy gun design in the wake of current events, and that all I wanted to do was get people thinking, and maybe even talking. That was obviously too much for some people.
The second wave of flames came from people who just wanted the goods, and were pissed off when I didn't give it to them. I teased them with a cool looking Thing and then left them empty handed. (And I do have to say, this toy gun is really pretty cool and works quite well.) I've noticed this from time to time, not just on Thingiverse, but in larger world of open-source everything that some people have a real sense of entitlement to anything and everything. On Thingiverse, this ranges from people ingraciously asking for new features to blasting a design that doesn't work for them (in spite of many successful makes being posted). On other forums, I've seen developments completely dismissed because they weren't completely open-sourced. Ultimately, I deleted my original post.
The one thing I didn't see much of was people on either side raging about their particular views on the subject of guns and vilifying the other side. This is what I feared most, and it gives me hope that the nerds who hang out in the 3D printing world are maybe a little more civil on average.
So here we are a year later, and I've decided to go ahead and post the design because, well, confrontation rarely works out well. Please play safe and don't pollute.
