A growing number of confiscations of homemade weapons made from 3D-printed parts is raising alarms among European police about the possibility of an emerging threat.
For now, the interest of far-right activists will be limited, experts say, and the fear of a society overrun with self-printed weapons remains unlikely. But homemade weapons have become more widespread since in 2013, a gun enthusiast in the US first showed a mostly 3D-printed pistol and shared the design online.
In September last year alone, Icelandic police said they had arrested four people suspected of planning a “terrorist attack”, which involved the seizure of several 3D-printed semi-automatic weapons.
In the same month, the Spanish authorities in the Basque Country discovered an illegal arms factory operated by a man. That discovery followed two other similar cases in the country in 2021. Police in Spain’s Canary Islands found white supremacist manuals on urban guerrilla warfare alongside two 3D printers. And in the city of A Coruña, in Galicia, police have detained a man who was almost able to complete the printing of an assault weapon.
“With rapidly evolving advanced technology, this could become a greater threat in the near future,” said Ina Mihaylova, spokeswoman for the European Police Station Europol.
While traditional weapons are easily traceable thanks to their serial numbers and proof markings, these “home-printed” models are less easily traceable by authorities.
Focus on the far right
At the moment, “there is still a big difference between the quality of professionally manufactured weapons available on the criminal market and 3D printed/homemade weapons,” Mihaylova said. “3D-printed firearms made entirely of plastic generally cannot withstand the pressure of live ammunition,” he added.
But Christian Goblas, a ballistics expert at the University of Rouen in France, told AFP that “metallic 3D printing” could become affordable in the next decade — which could make 3D-printed weapons more durable and reliable.
With 3D parts and a metal firing pin, the “Liberator” pistol was put on display in 2013 by the self-proclaimed “crypto-anarchist” Cody Wilson, who copied a single brute weapon of the same name that was thrown at French resistance fighters. War II.
Wilson posted instructions for the weapon online and raised the alarm in the United States, a country struggling with a heavy history of mass shootings.
Since then, 3D printers have become cheaper and more 3D weapon designs have been published on the so-called Dark Web.
Rajan Basra, senior researcher at the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR), says 3D gun printing remains primarily a curiosity.
Even in countries with strict restrictions on the legal purchase of weapons, there are better options for those looking for a firearm: in France, for example, Kalashnikovs are available on the black market for between 500 and 1,500 euros.
But even to a lesser extent, DIY weapons are also attractive to “terrorists,” far-right militants and mobsters, Basra added.
Eleven of the 12 recent 3D weapon seizures in Europe involved far-right activists, he noted.
Not ‘the future of terrorism’
One of the most impactful uses of weapons with 3D printed parts took place in Germany in 2019. A gunman killed two people in the eastern city of Halle after failing to break into a synagogue. Before the attack, he had posted a racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic manifesto online.
In a video, the attacker demonstrated his anger at gun jams. “At least I’ve shown how useless improvised weapons are,” he said at one point.
Blyth Crawford, another ICSR researcher, says this attack was an exceptional case.
In online discussions among some far-right extremists, “3D-printed firearms are still not considered a serious alternative to regular weapons for carrying out mass shootings, due to a lack of testing,” he said.
Extremists may view other new technologies, such as drones, as more promising for their purposes. “It’s unlikely at this point that 3D printing is the future of terrorism,” Jacob Ware, a counter-terrorism researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, told AFP.
However, “legal systems need to be prepared… to ensure gun control laws are not circumvented before it is too late,” he added.
Source: DN
