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.
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.