I imagine if all 3D printers were distributed with warning stickers saying that they can be used to print guns and knives that more people would try it than if it was less publicized.
Making it just a bit harder to discover the knowledge to weaponize something could give defensive researchers the time to build effective countermeasures.
In your example, the result shouldn’t be warning stickers, it’s laws specifically against building guns with your 3D printer. Or if right to weapons happens to be enshrined in your constitution, it’s aboyt legal liability protocols being amended to take into account the fact that a perpetrator used a weapon that they built in their 3D printer as opposed to a regularly procured weapon.
Think about some of the most famous and influential papers and try to come up with negative consequences. When Codd wrote A relational model for large shared data banks, should he have tried to think of ways big databases could be abused? When Ritchie and Thompson published the paper that introduced Unix, what could they predict? Or Knuth's many papers on compiler design?
Do other disciplines do anything similar? Computer science papers are often so close to mathematics, I suppose mathematics papers should include similar disclosures, right?
This feels a little like putting cancer warnings on everything in California. At least there I understand what they thought the outcome might be but maybe they didn't foresee how quickly people tune it out and you end up making it harder to communicate danger when it's actually there.
Seems like a double edged sword, potentially making it easier to negatively utilize the research.