There goes gun control. “After an attempted gang murder in the French city of Marseille last year, the police found what appeared to be a toy assault rifle, seemingly crafted from plastic and Lego parts. ‘But the weapon was lethal,’ Col. Hervé Pétry of the national gendarmerie recalled.”
FGC is an abbreviation that represents what its creators think of gun control. Nine is for the 9-millimeter bullet it fires.
Mr. Elik, in his email to The Times, said it was wrong to focus on “European cops complaining about a small number of guns being recovered,” and shootings in which nobody was injured, “rather than the gun’s use as a tool of liberation.”
Anyone with a commercial 3D printer, hundreds of dollars in materials, some metalworking skills and plenty of patience could become a gun owner.
While countless 3D-printed guns have been designed and circulated on the internet, international law enforcement officials say that the FGC-9 is by far the most common. The gun is so desirable among far-right extremists in Britain that the possession and sharing of its instruction manual is being charged as a terrorist offense.
Ivan the Troll’s media message is that this is hypocrisy. Western governments, he has noted, have armed the world’s insurgents and authoritarian leaders with weapons of war. “I’m sharing a computer file,” he said in a 2022 interview. “If I’m guilty of sharing information, what does that make them?”
And while the FGC-9 has become a staple with some of the world’s far-right extremists, it has also been embraced by insurgent groups that are fighting Myanmar’s military junta, which has committed atrocities on its own people.
“A lot of people use them,” said a fighter there who goes by the call sign 3-D. He said the FGC-9 was often used for personal defense rather than for combat because its design left it susceptible to jamming in the harsh jungle environment.
possession and sharing of its instruction manual is being charged as a terrorist offense.
Oi! You got a loisence for that PDF?!?
It’s not a new thing, I remember something called the anarchists cookbook (I think) that wasn’t too hard to find twenty years ago which is illegal to possess.
Edit: it is illegal to possess in the UK, apparently it’s legal in some other countries
Maybe in Britland, but not in any country with civil rights and respectable free speech laws.
The Anarchist Cookbook isn’t isn’t illegal. Hell, the US government publishes TM 31-210, a field manual on improvised munitions that goes a lot further than the Cookbook ever did.
Never was illegal also most of the things inside are bullshit and don’t work.
Depended on the copy you got - the counter intelligence response to the anarchists cookbook was to flood networks with versions with subtle but important errors that would either cause premature explosions or the final result to be inert.
It’s a common counter intelligence tactic to bury harmful information in a deluge of misinformation.
I would like some evidence for this, please.
Because some of the “recipes” in the Anarchist’s Cookbook have problems that are way more than subtle errors.
Lol I was going to bring up bananadine
Yeah, I’m guessing THEY™ took one look at the Anarchist’s Cookbook and said, “yeah, we don’t need to bother.”
I think the person on this page puts it well:
Some people claim that the CIA/FBI/author/whoever sabotaged the Anarchist Cookbook to blow up would-be anarchists or to make the recipes fail. However, there is little evidence to support this theory. I find it much more likely that the errors are just due to incompetence. Note that many of the above errors (e.g. wrong symbol for arsenic, wrong formula for alcohol) don’t sabotage anything but are just stupid errors. I would expect that if it were deliberately sabotaged, it wouldn’t have errors like these.
http://files.righto.com/anarchy/index.html
On top of that, the author thinks the book should no longer be in print because of what it’s been used for.
In 2000, Powell posted a message on the book’s Amazon page. He wrote the Cookbook, he said, when he was 19 “and the Vietnam war and the so-called ‘counter culture movement’ were at their height. I was involved in the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations. The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in … The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.” That teenage action clearly haunts him, and has had bigger consequences than he could ever have foreseen.
He wrote it when he was 19. Of course it’s full of errors.
The Anarchist’s Cookbook is actually legal to possess (and buy and sell). It’s a common misconception that it is illegal. In the US, at least.
In the first ever team up between Interpol and Adobe.
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Freecad is always there. 3d printer files are out on the internet anywhere. The genie is out of the bottle, you can’t ban shit like that.
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If CAD files req a license the answer is to start printing…
Manuals to share information on how to get past licensing schemes, nothing else of course.
The reality is this is one of a handful of emerging technologies that are going to reshape a lot of things about the world in the future in ways I don’t think society, as a whole, is cogniscent of, let alone prepared for.
This is one of them. The battlefield use of small drones is another.
I tend to say that the world we’re living in now is one where gun control is increasingly obsolete. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s not a statement on whether that’s a good or bad thing. It’s just what I think we’re going to increasingly find to be the new reality: the rise of small scale, low cost, divertible manufacturing technologies is going to make traditional supply-side approaches to regulation untenable. That genie is out.
(Drones are in a similar, if distinct space: low cost, commodity, and divertible from low/no regulation supply chains in a way that makes it nearly impossible to cut off supply without shutting down other legitimate economic activity).
I don’t know what the right answer is. I do think it’s going to take a pretty fundamental rethink of how we approach these problems. I don’t think the full ramifications of these types of technology have really reached the wider zeitgeist, and, frankly, I kind of worry about how people will react. There are a lot of pretty scary paths this could take, both in terms of how the technology gets used and in terms of what attempts to curb them could look like if they’re not carefully thought through.
… seemingly crafted from plastic and Lego parts.
They thought the Picatinny rail was Lego.
Ivan is the shit!
Or maybe he’s an irresponsible jackass helping people create untraceable murder weapons that are plastic and thus will never protect anyone from tyranny but will lead to more unsolved crimes and (hopefully) some plastic guns blow up in their face.
Whom is to say? No matter how thin you make a tortilla, there’s always two sides.
Looks like you didn’t read the post, it’s literally being used by oppressed ethnic minorities in Myanmar against a military dictatorship.
During WW2, people in Poland mass produced guns out of their bedframes. If you want to make a gun, you need the exact same things as you needed then. 3d printing makes the easy to manufacture parts, you still need the steel ones that aren’t printable. And if you have those, whether you print it or yank a pipe from your bed, it’ll be just as lethal. Not mentioning slamfire shotguns which are a pipe with a nail inside. You can’t control that shit, people will always get one if they want to.
Philip Luty managed to make machine guns in his garage out of square stock. It is only a matter of will.
That doesn’t mean he’s an awesome guy for making it easier.
What gun control?
-Me, an American
I’m saying that any implemented gun control would become easier and easier to bypass. Hopefully our extremists aren’t smart enough.
I’ve never really understood the 3D gun printing use case.
Yes, they can fire bullets but bullets are illegal where guns are illegal.
Am I missing something?
There were cases where decommissioned guns could be bought in the UK (firing pins removed). Gangs were recommissioning these guns by adding the removed components.
However, where do the bullets come from?
Article doesn’t mention. I guess you either get them from the $100 electrochemical machine you bought to make the pressure-bearing parts or attempt to pay an undercover police officer for it, which was the way the only British dude arrested tried to obtain the guns.
Edit: That, or from a state where you don’t need a permit to just buy ammo.
The ECM process isn’t suitable for manufacturing ammunition.
In general, you’d still be generally reliant on the traditional manufacturing supply chain there. There is development happening in that space, but nothing anywhere near as complete as the FGC-9.
What does the machine do for pressure-bearing parts?
Machine is borderline overselling it.
The ECM process works by pumping water containing an electrolyte through a metal part. When a current is applied to the water, exposed metal gets slowly etched away.
What these groups are doing is starting with high pressure hydraulic pipe and inserting 3D printed jigs that are basically a negative mask to bore out the pipe to their desired diameter, cut the chamber, machine in rifling, etc, with the end product being a functional barrel. As far as I’m aware, so far this has been limited to pistol caliber cartridges; rifle calibers are a step up in pressure and come with a whole host of different engineering challenges.
The “machine” is really nothing more than a bucket, an aquarium/pond pump, and a desktop power supply. It’s honestly a really clever approach to the problem from an engineering standpoint.
Thank you! I thought the internals of a 3D printed gun still needed metal parts to withstand firing, but that comment gave me the impression that a 3D printed part could be treated somehow. It makes more sense that the plastic is used as a jig / mask, rather than as the final component.
The majority of components in these things typically are printed. It’s just the pressure bearing components like the barrel where ECM is being used.
The FGC-9 discussed in the article is notable because it was explicitly designed to be manufactured using components that are not regulated as firearms parts under European law. So there are non-printed parts in it, but everything is dual-purpose and can be acquired through unregulated channels, e.g., the hydraulic pipe that gets used as a barrel.
Not for this purpose, but for a diy metalwork (foundry, milling, etc) project I have in mind, I’d really like to see how this works.
As long as you don’t need particularly tight tolerances or fine details, it works perfectly fine. The setup really isn’t anymore complicated than I described. I have done it just because I wanted to see how difficult the process is. It’s around $100 in startup costs assuming you have access to a printer. After that it’s mostly just waiting and occasionally measuring cut progress.
Check out the Rack Robotics Powercore as well. It’s a low cost wire EDM system that uses cheap 3D printers as a motion platform. It uses a very similar principle to cut metal using wire as the cutting tool. May or may not be more suitable depending on your exact use case. Still pretty rough around the edges though; SendCutSend makes more sense for most people that need things cut from flat stock for the most part.
It makes them.
Yeah, it’s only half of the puzzle. A quick and easy way to produce ammo casings would be needed if you really wanted to bootstrap your own guns (for good or evil).
Otherwise, make a flintlock musket maybe?
Ivan the Troll’s media message is that this is hypocrisy. Western governments, he has noted, have armed the world’s insurgents and authoritarian leaders with weapons of war. “I’m sharing a computer file,” he said in a 2022 interview. “If I’m guilty of sharing information, what does that make them?”
- “Owning hypocrites” is hardly a good reason to endanger the general population
- Other people being worse doesn’t make you any better or less guilty
- Sacrificing peoples lives to send a message kinda does make you a terrorist
If this was his intention that is. It seems so given his nickname, but maybe he just got famous and used his chance to come up with some bullshit.
And while the FGC-9 has become a staple with some of the world’s far-right extremists, it has also been embraced by insurgent groups that are fighting Myanmar’s military junta, which has committed atrocities on its own people.
Hey, that’s good to hear! I guess it is more than just trolling.
Jake Hanhrahan of Popular Front has done really extensive reporting on the general topic of 3D printed firearms. He’s interviewed both people in the design community and people involved in the fighting and manufacture in Myanmar.
Arrested for a manual. What a joke of a country.
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