Homemade stills blow up. Period.
Stills in a classroom are inspected and run small quantities.
A large still, handling several gallons of ethanol, is in fact a bomb and can flat level a barn, chicken coop, or whatever other building its hidden in.
That's in addition to exciting the atoms in your body to the tune of a few thousand feet per second. Which means you will basically fly into lots of little pieces.
I know a guy who went to federal prison for making sugar liquor in commercial-size batches. Though many bad things happened to ol' Joe, he never blew himself up.
uh..."period."
Sure, a large, homemade still producing commercial quantities may be at a higher risk of blowing up... My objection was to the alarmism inherent to the statement that we should all fear our neighbor's still. A still that is run by a person of average intelligence, producing quantities only sufficient for personal consumption is not a danger to surrounding neighbors.