> we should be giving EVERY kid who wants one a free 3D Printer so they can learn to tinker, be creative, and build things

Totally agree. Ironically, I think it'd do a lot more to reduce gun violence than any of these laws given the primary factors in gun violence are 1) being poor and not having good options out of poverty and 2) being a man between the ages of like 15-25

I'm just young enough that I had a high school teacher who was able to get some level of support from the district to run an elective engineering course and had a few of the very early consumer-grade printers that were terrible compared to a modern printer. I was already down the programming rabbit hole at that point, but it was absolutely foundational in me realizing that "you can build things" didn't only apply to the digital. I really wish we'd have similar in just about every school. So many of my peers think that the ability to fabricate basic things and work on anything physical is substantially harder than it actually is (to the level of thinking they'd need similar effort it took them to learn to code to learn to work on their car), and so never do it.

If you can reason about a C compiler, you can definitely learn to do a brake job on a car or 3d print a basic coupler for a home project.