Homemade weapons have been around for centuries, but the appearance of 3D-printed firearms a decade ago revolutionized how guns are acquired and distributed on a global scale.
My colleague and I investigated the growth of one gun in particular, the FGC-9, which law enforcement officials say is by far the most popular around the world.
But this gun is only one iteration of the 3D-printed firearm phenomenon.
How Hard Is It To Make a Gun?
It’s getting easier, but it still requires a lot of technical know-how.
Those unfamiliar with guns and 3D printing might imagine some futuristic printer that produces a fully made firearm with the click of a button. The reality is a little different.
Three-dimensional printing makes it much easier for the average person to quickly, and relatively cheaply, build a gun’s receiver or some of its components. The receiver is akin to the frame of the gun.
Other parts, including the bolt, recoil spring and barrel are usually metal and so are far harder to build with a 3D printer. Some websites sell barrels and bolts, so a person can buy these items and print the rest — almost like a lethal Lego set.
That was what some early iterations of 3D-printed guns allowed. People could print rifle receivers, especially for AR-15 type rifles, and supplement with off-the-shelf parts.
In some states and countries, this type of construction requires a firearms license to be legal, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, a consulting firm that specializes in firearm research.
And since the key internal pieces are commonly regulated and monitored by international law enforcement agencies, many of these homemade guns are not entirely off governments’ radars.
That is changing. People can built the FGC-9 without buying additional components (though it requires metalworking skill and tools).
Who Came Up With This?
People in the 3D-printed firearms field are largely divorced from big corporations. They refine their designs, share them on social media and chat applications, and troubleshoot one another’s process.
This collective is frequently improving and modifying designs.
A group called Defense Distributed posted plans online in 2013 for the “Liberator,” one of the first 3D-printed guns, a crude, single-shot model that used a nail as a firing pin.
Today, one of the best-known groups is called Deterrence Dispensed, which released plans for the FGC-9 in 2020. The gun was specifically designed to circumvent gun laws and equip people with a weapon that cannot be accounted for by the state.
Is This Legal?
In the United States, where the Constitution provides a right to bear arms, laws governing homemade 3D-printed firearms by state.
The Biden administration wants to regulate components of homemade gun as firearms. The Supreme Court says it will consider whether that is constitutional.
The proliferation of homemade guns has especially concerned international law enforcement officials. We tracked the FGC-9 to 15 countries. These governments typically have strict firearm laws and little history of American-style libertarianism around guns.
“It’s not just a gun. It is also an ideology,” Kristian Abrahamsson, an intelligence officer with Swedish Customs police, told us.
In Britain, possessing and sharing the FGC-9 instruction manual can be considered a terrorist offense.
What Happens Next?
As homemade guns become easier to build and more reliable, they are showing up in more and more criminal investigations. And traditional forensic investigative methods are not always reliable when it comes to tracing bullets to the gun that fired them.
Law enforcement officials increasingly worry about the spread of weapons with the capability to shoot automatically. That means one pull of the trigger can fire multiple bullets at high speed, like a machine gun.
In a mass shooting, increasing the firing rate would make it easier to kill more people.
The United States has made the legal possession of fully automatic firearms a complicated and drawn-out bureaucratic process. But 3D-printed devices, known as switches, are gaining popularity. They can be mounted onto pistols to allow them to shoot fully automatically.
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