>>4972137
Don't have a source, but the issue of widespread fabrication has the deep state nervous. The banks have always begrudgingly accepted that they needed both trades and labor. Mass manufacturing was a godsend to the banks. They could buy it and use a small number of people to control the course of technology.
The intervening 100 years or so has just been a protracted effort on their part to divest the general public from capital means so as to prevent them from being able to do anything other than request employment - permission to work and be paid.
The threat of 3d printing isn't so much that people are going to suddenly begin printing mass produced items. It is that they will begin to produce the specialized equipment currently locked behind corporate investment. We could build that $1.3M machine for a few thousand, especially if the more intricate parts can be "printed" or milled rather than bought. If we can puzzle out additive manufacture, we can also puzzle out automated production of motor cores. $50 of raw material coupled to a mill and some automated jigs gets you a state of the art induction motor that would sell on the corporate market for several hundred.
That is the real threat - A decoupling of manufacturing from capital means, currently used to keep the market under thumb.
Of course, manufacturing guns is a possibility - but why would I do that when I can build my own turbine engines and chemical processing equipment? Printing a gun is short-term thinking. Printing weapons is moderate term thinking… Printing the things which can break the hold of banks on the trades? That's long term thinking.