3D gun printer arrested

Teenager With Fully-Functional 3D Printed Gun Arrested in Australia

3D printing news News Australian Police Arrested a Teenager With a Fully Functioning 3D Printed Gun

Published on June 14, 2022 by Clemens M.

During the house raid of an 18-year-old suspect in Western Australia, Police officers from the Drug and Firearm Squad secured a number of illegal firearms, including a 3D printed semi-automatic gun. The 4kg gun is able to fire 15 lethal 9mm rounds and is considered to be fully-functional. The inclusion of select metal parts have enabled this, as often 3D printed guns fall apart quickly after use due to the use of polymers.

Only recently, the European Police Office (Europol), expressed concerns about the increasing amount of 3D printed weapons that have been seized in Europe over the last few years, resulting in a conference held in Den Haag, the Netherlands, at which professionals and experts discussed the problem. Now, after the United States and Europe have already been forced to deal with the increasing danger, it seems like the threat of 3D-printed firearms has found its way down under.

The deadly weapon looks like a plastic toy (photo credits: PerthNow)

According to various Australian news outlets, the Australian Police executed a search warrant on the 3rd of June in Bayside, Western Australia, the officers were surprised to find a fully functional, semi-automatic firearm, allegedly produced in a suburban home. The gun, which has the appearance of a regular harmless plastic toy, turned out to be a dangerous assault weapon with the ability to shoot 9mm caliber rounds, the same caliber used by the armed police. “It’s deeply concerning that this man was able to manufacture this firearm at home with a 3D printer and readily available materials” Detective Senior Sgt. Blair Smith said in a statement. “That is a semi-automatic 9mm assault rifle in essence.”

Australia’s Tough Gun Laws

Although the police had found similar 3D printed gun parts in the past, the firearm found in Bayside is the first fully functioning gun of its kind, made from easily available materials. Besides the 3D-printed body of the weapon, the gun featured a 3D-printed magazine as well. For the trigger and mechanical parts of the gun, metal parts were added.

Australia has a very strict policy when it comes to the illegal possession and use of fire weapons. In November last year, the Government of Western Australia proposed a strict update of its gun laws. In an attempt to prevent the possible threat of an increasing number of 3D printed firearms, the newly proposed amendments included making the illegal manufacturing of plastic 3D firearms a serious felony, which may result in prison sentences up to 14 years and fines of up to $75,000.

Detective Senior Sgt. Blair Smith and the 3D printed gun (photo credits: WA Police)

The exact details of how the firearm was constructed and which technologies were used are yet unknown and haven’t been revealed by the Police, as well as any further information about the alleged manufacturer of the gun. Given its appearance, it is highly likely that the manufacturer used a regular desktop 3D printer and acquired the models for the gun on the internet, as it had been in similar cases around the world. As a result of the discovery of the 3D-printed semi-automatic, the Australian police now even launched a special task force that targets people who try to manufacture firearms at home.

The 18-year-old alleged gun manufacturer has been charged with several offenses, including the unlicensed manufacturing and possession of a prohibited weapon, and is facing time in jail. After noting that this is the first time that a fully operational 3D printed firearm had been seen in Western Australia, Det-Sen Sgt Smith concluded, “These types of firearms are unregulated, unlicensed and have no place in our community. Our team or the drug and firearms squad will remain relentless in identifying these people using all available data to us locating them and you will be prosecuted with serious firearm offences.”

What do you think of the police’s discovery of this fully functional 3D printed gun in Australia? Let us know in a comment below or on our LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter pages! Don’t forget to sign up for our free weekly Newsletter here, the latest 3D printing news straight to your inbox! You can also find all our videos on our YouTube channel.

3D Printed Gun Arrests, Raids and a Man who Got $3,000 at a Gun Buyback - 3DPrint.com

Following an investigative story published by 3DPrint.com this June about 3D printed gun-related arrests and confirmation by the Dutch police of an increase in this type of ghost weapons (unserialized, privately-made firearms), news of security forces encountering more homemade printed guns is becoming much more commonplace than it was a few years ago. In the last few weeks alone, there were several arrests and raids involving 3D printed firearms, plus a man in Houston who sold dozens of homemade 3D printed guns to the city at its first-ever gun buyback event.

A Recent Spat of 3D Printed Gun Offenses

Both U.S. and Canadian law enforcement agencies are trying to tackle 3D printed guns related to violent crimes. In Syracuse, New York, Onondaga County deputies put a man behind bars after being accused of making his untraceable handguns using a 3D printer. The Sheriff’s Office said deputies responded to an apartment complex for a reported verbal domestic incident on July 16 and discovered 37-year-old Daniel Seils – a two-time convicted felon – verbally threatening a woman. The man had several guns, including three unserialized 3D printed weapons.

Around the same time, Winnipeg police charged a 24-year-old man with several offenses related to manufacturing and trafficking 3D printed guns and gun parts. Local police said its Firearms Investigation and Enforcement Unit was notified by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) that it had intercepted parts to assemble 3D printed guns in the mail. As a result, the agencies began a firearm trafficking investigation that led to the arrest of the man, who used the mailed parts between April and May 2022 to assemble a 3D printed firearm for trafficking.

Then in August, the CBSA again announced that it had intercepted more gun parts sent into the country via international mail, leading authorities to seize ghost guns and related 3D printing equipment in Vancouver and Toronto.

Leading the operation, the director of the CBSA’s Intelligence and Enforcement Operations Division, John Linde, said agency officers remain on alert to seize smuggled firearms and firearm parts as a top priority and a way to contribute to Canada’s public safety.

Also concerned about the surge in gun violence, the Canadian Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendicino, said “We’re taking action to keep Canadians safe from gun violence. ‘Ghost guns’ pose a serious risk to our communities for many reasons including they are becoming easier to manufacture and difficult to trace when used by criminals. That’s why we are continuing to invest in new x-ray technology and K-9 units to protect our borders.”

Intercepting 3D Printed Guns

Law enforcement agencies are attempting to halt any potential threat of 3D printed guns, and as Mendicino said, that involves reinforcing security checkpoints, among other actions. In that regard, 3DPrint.com reported on recent advances made by Liberty Defense, a security technology newcomer ready to beta test a new non-metal weapons detection system in airports and other commercial checkpoint applications. This type of AI-based technology could help anticipate the potential future dangers where untraceable and even non-metal weapons exist.

“Our goal at Liberty Defense is to prevent somebody from getting into an event, a place of worship, stadium, school, or shopping, where someone might have a printed, plastic gun or other types of threats,” explained Liberty Defense CEO Bill Frain during an interview.

Hexwave non-metal gun detector walkthrough. Image courtesy of Liberty Defense.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, gun violence spiked, with shootings reported in nearly every U.S. state that killed at least 220 people and wounded close to 570 others, according to Gun Violence Archive. Unfortunately, other fatal shootings followed, the most recent being inside a downtown Minneapolis apartment Sunday night. In many of these cases, untraceable DIY ghost guns have been used. The most high-profile instance of a homemade firearm involved in crime was the assassination of Shinzo Abe.

In fact, last April, the Biden administration revealed that in 2021, law enforcement recovered roughly 20,000 suspected ghost guns in criminal investigations, a ten-fold increase from 2016. Although most of those guns are not 3D printed, police agencies consider the rising threat of these easy-to-build weapons escalating. Moreover, since ghost guns lack the serial numbers marked on other firearms, law enforcement has difficulty tracing them to individual buyers.

A 3D Printed Gun Buyback

Entirely 3D printed guns without metal fall under the ghost gun category. However, a Houston man who wished to remain anonymous sold dozens of 3D printed guns at the city’s first gun buyback on July 30. Fox 26 News interviewed the man who indicated that he traded 62 3D printed guns and received more than $3,000 or $50 per gun. He claimed to make the weapons only cost $3 each and that his goal was not for personal profit but to send a message to Houston leaders about spending $1 million tax dollars on “something that has no evidence of any effect on crime.”

Depending on the type of weapon, citizens turning in firearms were rewarded with gift cards from $50 (for a non-functioning gun) to $200 (for a fully automatic rifle). Additionally, all handguns were retrieved with a no-question-asked policy by law enforcement. However, Mayor Sylvester Turner told the media that next time they would exclude 3D printed guns from the buyback.

“We’re going to exclude those next time around,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said to Fox 26. “This is a program designed for people who want to voluntarily relinquish their guns.”

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Tagged with: 3d guns • 3D printed firearms • 3d printed gun • 3D printed gun arrests • 3d printed gun control • 3d printed guns • 3d printed weapons • arrests • Canada border services agency • ghost guns • houston • law enforcement • Liberty Defense • Winnipeg police

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3D Printer Pistols are Back and Unstoppable / Sudo Null IT News They anonymously share drawings, tips, and create their own community.

And there is no easy way to stop them.

In the United States, a network of supporters of printing weapons on a 3D printer is growing again - but now everything is different. Unlike previous attempts to popularize weapons that can be printed on a 3D printer, this operation is completely decentralized. It has no headquarters, no trademarks and no leader. And the people behind it believe that this state of affairs guarantees the inability of governments to stop them.

“If they want to come after me, they'll have to find me first,” says Ivan the Troll, a member of the group. “I am one of many like-minded people doing this work.”

The troll Ivan is known only by his network pseudonym, and is the de facto representative of an underground organization of gunsmiths working on 3D printers. Ivan says he knows at least 100 people actively developing weapon 3D printing technology, and claims that thousands of people are involved in the network. And this loosely connected network spans the entire world.

They communicate on different digital platforms - Signal, Twitter, IRC and Discord. They critique each other's work, trade weapon CAD files, give advice, talk theory, and collaborate on new blueprints. Enthusiasts of printed guns - who share similar ideas and political views on gun control - mostly meet on subreddits and forums dedicated to this topic.

Ivan himself is only a small part of this network. He says he comes from Illinois and is about the age of a "college student," but otherwise keeps quiet about himself to keep his head down. In doing so, he launched some amazing commercials showing new handgun parts he printed out in his garage, including the Glock 17 pistol frame.0006

On the last video [ , the video is deleted from YouTube, but the videos can be found on other hostings / approx. transl. ] shows the Glock 17 resin frame in various stages of production in the workshop. The footage is sounded with fast synthwave music, and passed through a VHS filter for greater aesthetics. By the end of the video, Ivan fires several shots from a ready-made pistol, and the captions that appear at the same time read: "Anyone can do this", "Live free or die", "Let's try to stop this, you dirty etatists." He also uploaded a complete CAD model of the AR-15 assault rifle to a file sharing site. It is clear that Ivan is trying to provoke his detractors to the maximum.

In February of this year, Ivan and his group decided to call themselves "Distributed Deterrence" transl. ], which is an allusion to the name of the company Defense Distributed [distributed protection], which was previously headed by Texas crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson.

In September 2018, Wilson, aged 30, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing a minor. He allegedly paid $500 for sex with a 16-year-old girl in his hometown of Austin, Texas. Naturally, this arrest took Wilson completely out of the world of 3D printed guns. Many of the people who admired him were either disgusted or realized that his time had passed. He retired from Defense Distributed, which used to be the main driver behind 3D weapon printing, since its inception in 2012. Wilson was released on $150,000 bail, but hasn't been in touch since.

Defense Distributed has many other legal issues. Attorneys in more than 20 US states are currently suing the company - which has filed counterclaims - in an attempt to undo the company's win in court that allowed the company to upload and share 3D weapon blueprints online. All these processes are long and tedious (New York State just passed a law to ban 3D printed weapons).

But for Ivan's group, Deterrence Dispensed, none of that matters. They upload their files singly to services like Spee.ch, a media hosting site powered by the LBRY blockchain, without waiting for anyone's permission. They themselves make blueprints for printing weapons, tweak old ones, and distribute all blueprints from Defense Distributed for free.

“Even if no government forbade me to do this, I think I would still do it,” says Ivan. “Some people enjoy video games, but I like to spend time drawing things in CAD.”

But Ivan doesn't just "draw things" in CAD. He's giving away files for free to help anyone with a decent Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printer and certain tools build a working gun. Once the CAD file is downloaded, it is opened in a slicing program that translates the CAD files into instructions that the 3D printer can understand. After the parts are ready, they can be assembled, getting a fully working weapon.

The blueprints that Deterrence Dispensed shares with the world are so good, according to Ivan, that they are not just "working", they are of excellent quality. “Our AR15 model is the best available to the public without a doubt,” says Ivan.

Despite active antagonism with the authorities, Ivan has had no problems with them so far. His Twitter account was permanently shut down by Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, but so far, from the point of view of law enforcement and government, all has been quiet.

Ivan considers himself and other radical gun printing groups like FOSSCAD to be hobbyists who want to do something “wrong”. He believes that the problems of 3D printing weapons are overblown. He points out that while printable gun parts can be used to kill people, homemade guns have always existed and are probably more lethal. From his point of view, all this hysteria and backlash is directed to the wrong address.

"Trust me as a gun maker. A semi-automatic shotgun is 100 times easier, faster and cheaper to make than a regular pistol. I can go to Home Depot and buy a shotgun for $8."

In 2019, 156 people have already died in mass shootings in the United States, and in principle, the number of deaths related to weapons is a 20-year high. In March, a terrorist armed with two semi-automatic rifles and two shotguns killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. Does the US (and the rest of the world) need more weapons in these circumstances, homemade, printed or otherwise? Ivan thinks so.

“The police killed more people last year than were killed in all the mass shootings in the last 10 years,” he says. “We in America live in a society where there is always the risk that a cop will shoot your ass off for nothing. And you don't even have to pose a threat to him. A cop can kill you just because he wants to, and he can get away with it."

He cited numerous examples of policemen shooting at unarmed black Americans, especially Steven Clarke. Clark, 22, was shot and killed by police in his garden with only his cell phone in hand. “I think it’s extremely important that everyone has the opportunity to have a gun,” Ivan continued. “Everyone should have the same legal options as the cops using them to control you.”

However, the facts are undeniable. Slightly more than half of deaths from firearms occur in six countries, incl. in the USA. And analysis from Harvard University shows that the more guns there are, the more murders there are.

Opponents of weapons, of course, are not satisfied with the concept of a downloadable pistol. Avery Gardiner, one of the presidents of the Brady Campaign, said that 3D-printed weapons "pose the greatest threat to our security." Following the court ruling in August, Gardiner said, "There is already a wave of dangerous individuals trying to illegally post blueprints on the Internet."

Members of this decentralized 3D printed weapon society are often motivated by a mixture of libertarian views and the pleasure of designing and creating tangible items as a hobby. They upload drawings to the Internet, share them, improve diagrams and make it easier to print, while remaining out of sight. Ivan states that he does this for the love of freedom and radical adherence to the first two amendments to the US Constitution: freedom of speech and freedom to bear arms.

However, his radicality goes as far as to talk about the right to have his own Tomahawk-class missiles, saying that they would be safer in his hands than in the hands of the US Army and its allies - given the history of accidental killing of civilians by the military, including a wedding in Afghanistan and a school bus in Yemen.

Describing the growing list of civilians who died at the hands of the US military in foreign wars, Ivan often comes across as more of a radical leftist than the right-wing gun fanatic that many think he is. However, he rejects any particular ideology, saying, "I myself am special and unique."

So far, Troll Ivan, Deterrence Dispensed and thousands of 3D weapon printing enthusiasts, united by a worldwide network, have let the genie out of the bottle. Unable to stop anonymous file sharing for weapon 3D printing. Whether they are hiding behind freedom in the process or not, one thing is clear: it is too late to stop them.

Taiwanese authorities arrested the creator of blueprints for weapons for 3D printing - RBC

www.adv.rbc.ru

www.adv.rbc. ru

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