Gun violence is no small issue in the world. Ever since automatic guns were patented in 1884, gun regulations have spread over technologically advanced nations in varying degrees of severity, all attempting to quell the use of automatic weapons.
However, with the aid of 3D printing and a bit of metalwork, it’s becoming easier and easier to create a real gun, no permit required.
The FGC-9 is being described as “a lethal Lego set” (source 1). Thomas Gibbons-Neff from The New York Times explains “The gun was specifically designed to circumvent gun laws and equip people with a weapon that cannot be accounted for by the state” (source 1).
So what? In the grand U S of A, buying a gun can be easier than buying a glass of wine.
One major importance of the FGC-9 and other homemade guns is they’re difficult to trace. It doesn’t really matter if the police can trace the gun in a school shooting when a dozen kids are already dead and the suspect apprehended, but for other criminal cases, the ability to trace guns via casings and serial numbers is generally useful.
Some have taken to the FGC with passionate terrorist aggression. Gibbons-Neff, with co writer Lizzie Dearden interviewed firearm experts and law enforcement worldwide, gaining that the FGC-9 has made it’s unkind presence “in the hands of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, rebels in Myanmar, and neo-Nazi’s in Spain” (source 2).
In the case of neo-Nazi Matthew Cronjager, the FGC-9 manual he downloaded was an attempt to “topple the government” as well as put an end to “Jews, gay people, Muslims and members of ethnic minority groups” (source 2). While none of this is revolutionary to gun-obsessed America, in other parts of the world, the ability to produce guns under the radar is a calling for terrorist groups to fulfill their long sought dreams of power, domination, and many, many, deaths.
It remains unclear how the issue could best be treated, but for now, the best way to treat the rise of guns is by working to change the ideology that carrying a gun is simply exercising the right to self-defense. Carrying a gun is a promise to commit violence. It is as often as not that those promises of violence mean far more than simple self-defense.