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The 3d printed gun
3D printed guns: Warnings over growing threat of 3D firearms
Published
Image source, AFP
Image caption,The "liberator", an early design of a 3D printed gun
By Chris Vallance
Technology reporter
Last month police said they made one of the largest seizures of 3D printed firearm components in the UK.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police's Specialist Crime Command had discovered what they alleged was a "suspected makeshift 3D firearms factory" at a home in London on 7 October.
Officers said it demonstrated how "the emerging threat of 3D firearms continues to evolve".
The discovery comes as some experts also warn of a growing threat.
Early versions of 3D printed guns were unreliable, single-shot weapons. Now the National Crime Agency (NCA) tells the BBC the guns are "credible and viable".
The NCA's Matthew Perfect, head of the the National Firearms Targeting Centre, says the latest 3D weapons are "stuff that you definitely, definitely wouldn't want to see on the streets in the UK".
"These are automatic weapons. These are weapons that are capable of multiple rounds of discharge," he said.
At present, the 3D printed components only form some of the parts needed to make a gun, at most 80 to 90% of the weapon, Mr Perfect says.
Key metal components such as the barrel typically have to be manufactured in more traditional ways. And the guns still require ammunition.
As a consequence Mr Perfect is confident the guns can still be detected by "normal security processes".
Image source, Metropolitan Police/PA Wire
Image caption,A box of 3D printed firearms components recovered during the Met Police raid
But these firearms are hard to trace as they are made without serial numbers.
Police are seizing 3D printed weapons in greater numbers.
From the start of last year there have been 21 recoveries of weapons, a "significant increase" on previous years, though still small compared to conventional weapons, Mr Perfect says.
Difficulties in transporting weapons across borders during the coronavirus pandemic may have contributed to criminals' interest in printed guns, he suggests.
Peter Squires, professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton, said the threat was likely to grow.
"Things have moved quite fast," he told the BBC, adding the pace is only a little over expectations.
"I'd certainly anticipate more of this, the technology is out there ... and the software and designs are available on the web."
And even if some of the "plastic-type" guns he says remain relatively unreliable, they still have the power to intimidate; guns, he notes, are only fired in about 20% of gun crimes.
Image source, Alamy
Image caption,A 3D printed FGC-9 gun being fired
Rajan Basra, senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London, says the situation in the UK mirrors a trend visible around Europe.
While most violent extremists will prefer established weapons, printed guns are an alternative for those who can't obtain illicit firearms.
"We've seen a steady succession of extremists looking to either make 3D printed guns or even use them themselves," he said.
"We've seen cases in Spain, Sweden, Germany, in the Netherlands, and several here in in the UK."
He said the clear majority of these cases involved members of far-right groups. Other terrorists groups seem less interested in the technology.
In part, Dr Basra suggests, that is because discussions on far-right extremist forums and communities sometimes included instructions on how to produce 3D printed weapons.
In June, members of an extreme right-wing terror group were convicted at Sheffield Crown Court. It was revealed police had found a partially constructed 3D printed firearm in the home of two members of the group.
Dr Basra warns the weapons are "moving into the mainstream" and on to mainstream internet platforms.
The emergence of new automatic weapons much more powerful than early single-shot designs has also increased their attractiveness.
Among extremists, he said, experts saw recurrent references to one semi-automatic model, the FGC - the name is an acronym expressing, in strong language, opposition to gun control.
"It's a specific gun that was designed to be used with parts that aren't regulated in the EU," Dr Basra said.
The weapon was posted online in spring 2020 with step-by-step instructions. It comes with an over 100-page manual, and videos on how to go through each step of the process of manufacture, Dr Basra added.
Mr Perfect, from the NCA, says modified versions of the gun can be "as good as any automatic firearm that you would buy from a reliable manufacturer".
Image source, Europol
Image caption,A 3D printed gun on display at a Europol conference on the topic
But police are keen to stress that gun violence in the UK is still relatively uncommon - about 35 homicides a year Mr Perfect estimates.
And use of an automatic weapon would attract a lot of police attention. But criminals want these weapons to intimidate other criminals.
For that they need a credible weapon, and 3D guns are now earning that credibility, due to better designs, and better printing technology - technology that is changing and improving all the time.
Christian Goblas, a ballistics expert at France's University of Rouen, recently told Euractiv "3D metallic printing" could become affordable in the next decade, which could make self-made weapons more durable and reliable.
And Europol told the BBC that national authorities within the EU have uncovered a number of cases of the production, sale and possession of 3D printed weapons and parts.
Some of the weapons and components were offered on illicit dark web marketplaces, which Europol said showed the synergies between the firearms trade and cybercrime.
The organisation noted that while producing a complete 3D printed firearm was still challenging "rapidly evolving advanced technology may cause this to emerge as a more significant threat in the near future.
"
But Dr Basra warns of another risk. Terrorists have a history of copying methods that have previously been shown to be effective. He said there was a rise in terror attacks where a vehicle was driven into crowds after the 2016 Nice attack.
He says if 3D printed weapons are used in an attack that causes mass casualties, that would in turn send a message that "3D printed guns are viable, and they're effective".
- Firearms
- Gun control
What Are 3D-Printed Guns, and Are They Legal?
For decades, weapons manufacturing has been the domain of arms industry heavyweights: Glock, Sig Sauer, Remington, Sturm, Ruger & Co. Making a gun from scratch at home required thousands of dollars of machining equipment and years of engineering expertise.
But in recent years, that has begun to change. Advancements in 3D-printing technology have yielded increasingly reliable 3D-printed firearms, many of which require no federally regulated components to function.
Below, we break down the basics of plastic, 3D-printed firearms, and the controversy generated by the swelling movement to deliver them to the masses.
In the simplest terms, it’s any firearm that includes components manufactured with a 3D printer.
But 3D-printed guns vary a lot. Some models — like the 3D-printed gun company Defense Distributed’s “Liberator” — can be made almost entirely on a 3D printer. Others require many additional parts, which are often metal. For example, many 3D-printed gun blueprints focus on a weapon’s lower receiver, which is basically the chassis of a firearm. Under federal law, it’s the only gun part that requires a federal background check to purchase from a licensed dealer. To subvert regulators, some people print lower receivers at home and finish their guns using parts that can be purchased without a background check — metal barrels, for example, or factory buttstocks. Many gun retailers sell kits, which include all the components necessary to assemble a gun at home.
Advances in printing technology have driven the price of 3D printers down — they’re now around $200 on Amazon — and gun groups offer guides for getting started. These developments have lowered the barriers to entry for those in search of untraceable guns, which have turned up at crime scenes with increasing frequency over the past few years.
The process still remains more involved than most methods of obtaining a firearm, though. For instance, 3D printers require meticulous setup — the component that extrudes plastic must be calibrated, software must be downloaded to convert designs into 3D-printable slices, and the printer must undergo a slew of upgrades to reliably print weapons parts, which themselves require precise construction to ensure they can contain the explosion from a gunshot.
Why are they a big deal?Because 3D-printed guns are made outside traditional supply chains, and don’t require background checks, they’re effectively invisible to law enforcement agencies.
They are a form of ghost gun: unserialized, and unable to be traced if recovered by law enforcement.
There isn’t good data on the number of 3D-printed firearms that have turned up at crime scenes, though state attorneys general opposed to the technology insist that some have been recovered. On a few occasions, crimes involving the guns have made headlines. In February 2019, police arrested a Texas man after he was found test-firing a 3D-printed gun in the woods. He was prohibited from purchasing firearms and had a hit list of lawmakers on him.
Of particular concern to many law enforcement agencies are guns that can be completely 3D-printed at home without metal components. Politicians and law enforcement professionals fear that such guns would be able to evade metal detectors, and thus slip into places where firearms are prohibited, like airports or government buildings. At present, these fears are largely unfounded — 3D-printed gun designers have yet to develop an alternative to metal bullets, and security officials say that X-ray detection in place alongside most metal detectors can identify the outline of 3D-printed firearms with ease.
Indeed, Transportation Security Administration officers have seized 3D-printed firearms at airports on several occasions.
Still, the weapons’ lack of traceability has already caught the attention of terror groups, according to Mary McCord, a former U.S. attorney and prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. “We know from a counterterrorism perspective that there’s great interest among terrorist organizations in being able to have workable, usable, efficient, functioning 3D-printed weapons.”
Is it legal to make a gun using a 3D printer?In most cases, yes. Federal law permits the unlicensed manufacture of firearms, including those made using a 3D printer, as long as they include metal components.
In the absence of federal regulation, a handful of states have taken their own steps to clamp down on the creation of homemade guns. In California, anybody manufacturing a firearm is legally required to obtain a serial number for the gun from the state, regardless of how it’s made.
In New Jersey, you are supposed to obtain a federal manufacturing license before 3D-printing a gun. The state also criminalizes the manufacture, sale, or possession of undetectable firearms, and made it illegal to purchase parts to make an unserialized gun. Several states — including New Mexico and Virginia — are considering bills that would enact similar restrictions.
The legality of sharing the files required to print guns and gun components is murkier territory. No federal legislation bans the practice. But in 2013, the State Department ruled that releasing blueprints online violated arms export laws. In 2018, after a lengthy court battle with Defense Distributed over the guidance, the State Department settled, and agreed to permit the files’ release. But before the prohibition was lifted, a coalition of states sued to keep it in place — and won. Now, gun groups intent on sharing the files online have exploited a loophole in the State Department’s policy, which allows for the distribution of blueprints exclusively to U.
S. residents. Defense Distributed maintains it has established a vetting procedure to ensure only U.S. residents are able to download them.
In 2019, the Trump administration transferred oversight of gun exports from the State Department to the Commerce Department, which would have rolled back restrictions on releasing 3D-printed gun blueprints. But a second suit filed by the coalition of state attorneys general has kept oversight of the files with the State Department, pending future litigation.
New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal is a plaintiff in the case. “If a company like Defense Distributed can simply sell printable [gun blueprints] to their customers without running the usual required background checks to make sure someone’s not a criminal, it would blow up the entire regime of firearm laws that we have in this country,” he said.
In 2019, after Grewal sought an injunction to block Defense Distributed from releasing files to New Jersey residents, the company countersued. It alleges that the blueprint files are a form of speech, and that Grewal’s effort to block their release violates the First Amendment. The case has yet to go to trial.
The first 3D-printed firearm to make a splash in the popular consciousness was the “Liberator” — a near fully plastic gun designed by a self-described anarchist and ghost-gun advocate named Cody Wilson. (Designs for the Liberator call for a small steel block to be sealed inside the plastic in order to comply with federal law.) Wilson founded Defense Distributed to advance and share the technology, and has initiated many of the group’s highest profile legal battles. In 2019, Wilson was sentenced to probation and ordered to register as a sex offender after soliciting sex from a minor.
Though Wilson’s is the best-known and formally recognized gun printing “company,” the practice is mostly advanced by informal collectives across the internet. These groups, like Deterrence Dispensed and Fosscad, gather anonymously in chat rooms and on social media platforms to crowdsource the development of new gun designs and spread them across the web. They have thousands of members, but remain mostly decentralized, making it difficult for technology companies or law enforcement agencies to police them.
Over the past two years, however, the groups have run up against censorship policies at major tech platforms, many of which prohibit weapons content. As a result, they’ve been forced to increasingly obscure corners of the internet. Most recently, the operations hub for most of the 3D-printed gun groups — an encrypted chat and file-sharing platform called Keybase — pledged to remove all weapons-related content, and told the groups they would be banned.
Proponents of the technology fall into several different camps. Some, like Mustafa Kamil, a creator of 3D-printable guns based in Romania, and a member of the Deterrence Dispensed team on Keybase, think that concerns over homemade weapons are overblown. Gun printing, he says, is mostly the domain of hobbyists like himself: technical experts interested in tinkering and engineering. To 3D-print a gun: “you need to have enough money to buy a printer. Then you need enough expertise and experience to know how to use the printer. If your axis is off by 0.15 millimeters the gun isn’t going to work,” he said. “To buy a black market firearm would be much easier.” Kamil said he’s owned 32 printers and completed two apprenticeships with gun manufacturers.
Others see the potential for armed conflict with the government as the driving force behind their creations. Members of Deterrence Dispensed and Defense Distributed have fashioned a brand out of this perceived threat, adopting popular Second Amendment slogans like “Come and Take It,” “Live Free or Die,” and “Free Men Don’t Ask.” Leaders of the groups share a deep conviction that gun ownership is the only way to ensure freedom: In an interview with Popular Front, a conflict journalism outfit, the founder of Deterrence Dispensed — a man who goes by the username jstark — continuously pointed to the threat of government tyranny as a justification for creating 3D-printed guns and distributing their blueprints. “Just look at the Uighurs in China,” he said, referring to the ongoing genocide of the ethnic minority. “Just look what’s happening to them. No one’s helping them. Nobody does shit. You know what would help them? If they were armed. That would be a deterrence.”
To jstark, identical threats exist anywhere where civilians are largely unarmed, including in Europe, where he lives. When asked if he would fight police who tried to confiscate his guns, he was frank: “Basically, yes. Live free, or die. These are not empty words.”
Are these groups aligned with extremists?While politicians and law enforcement agencies have dubbed the advocates of 3D-printed firearms extremists, the movement has no unifying political ideology. Jstark, for his part, said in the Popular Front interview that Deterrence Dispensed has no tolerance for people who wish to harm others: “If they do show through [their actions] that they’re extremists, racists, islamic terrorists — then we would kick them out immediately,” he said. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The alarmism about about looming government tyranny has attracted groups eager to ignite government conflict, particularly in the U.S. Members of groups connected to the boogaloo, a loose-knit coalition of anti-government extremists that advocates a violent civil war, have seen 3D-printed gun advocates as allies in an overlapping struggle. Last summer, Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University, tracked online boogaloo-connected groups as they navigated crackdowns from social media platforms. Many ended up on Keybase, drawn by the large and growing 3D-printed gun community.
In early April, Deterrence Dispensed released blueprints for a printable auto sear — a component that can be used to turn a semiautomatic rifle into an illegal, fully automatic firearm — called the “Yankee Boogle,” an apparent boogaloo reference. In September, two boogaloo adherents were charged for allegedly attempting to sell auto sears to representatives of Hamas, the Islamist extremist group. In court documents, prosecutors alleged that one of the defendants in that case said he obtained the auto sears from a supplier who 3D-printed them. In a separate case, federal prosecutors charged a man from West Virginia with 3D-printing auto sears and selling more than 600 of them online, including to several boogaloo adherents. One man who bought the 3D-printed auto sears is accused of killing a police officer and a security guard in California. It is unclear if any of the auto sears used in these crimes were designed by Deterrence Dispensed.
Correction: An earlier version of this article highlighted a case in which police in Rhode Island said a suspect used a 3D-printed gun in a murder. While police initially made that claim, an analysis by the state crime lab later ruled the method of manufacture “undetermined.” The story has also been updated to include that Defense Distributed’s “Liberator” gun model includes a small metal component for federal compliance.
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3D printed gun with a metal barrel will make you feel excited
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Author:
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08 October 2016 14:58
Tags: 3d printer
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An American craftsman made a 3D printed pistol with a customizable barrel.
Thanks to metal inserts, the weapon can be adjusted to different calibers, and the design of the pistol is safer to use. The nylon version of the barrel withstood about two hundred shots with small-caliber cartridges without visible damage.
An interesting feature of the new pistol is a separate barrel that can be customized to the desired caliber, and most importantly, modified using metal tabs. It's no secret that simple 3D printed weapons pose more of a threat to users than to anyone or anything else. FDM-printed models somehow suffer from reduced tensile strength due to the layered structure, and therefore a 3D-printed barrel can simply break right in your hands.
The metal liner allows not only to increase strength and, as a result, safety, but also to improve shooting accuracy, because nothing prevents a metal rifled barrel from being inserted into the 3D printed module. On the other hand, if you already use real weapon components, then it is easier and more reliable to make a whole metal gun without resorting to 3D printing. In other words, the project is of purely academic interest.
However, even such ideas are met with disapproval from the vigilant public and law enforcement agencies. In the videos below, the maker under the nickname Guy in a Garage did not neglect the metal inserts to comply with the law - the inserts are needed so that the weapon can be detected by conventional metal detector frames.
The body of the gun is printed from ABS plastic, but the barrel in the first version is made of nylon. A version with a fully polymer rifled barrel withstood about 200 rounds of small-bore .22 rounds. For more powerful ammunition, a barrel with a smooth metal tab was made. Interestingly, the barrel with the liner withstood several rounds of .
