Making the world freer with homemade guns

Recently, while touting gun seizures in a city that has some of the most authoritarian gun laws in the United States, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch lamented, “the number of illegal guns that we’ve seen used in New York City has exploded since 3D technology has come about.” She’s not alone. Homemade guns are increasingly sophisticated and available almost everywhere. That’s a good thing.

American dedication to privately owned weapons alarms observers from more restrictive countries—much to the amusement of many Americans, it should be noted, whose ancestors fled those places in search of greater freedom and found it, in part, in the ability to arm themselves and to generally flip the bird to government. That means that from the foundation of the U.S., privately owned weapons and their protection by the Second Amendment have had a strong ideological component. Now, innovators around the world are embracing private arms as expressions of liberty and creating simple designs that can be built in home workshops with commonly available tools and parts.

Critics argue that 3D-printed DIY firearms and their enthusiasts are spreading libertarianism around the world. Let’s hope they’re right.

Summarizing events at June’s MoneroKon conference in Prague, an annual meeting devoted to “privacy-enhancing technologies and distributed systems,” security expert Zoltán Füredi described a presentation by the pseudonymous Zé Carioca, designer of the recently unveiled Urutau, a 9mm select-fire firearm designed to be constructed with a 3D printer and components purchased at any hardware store. Rather than focus on his creation, Zé Carioca instead championed 3D-printed firearms as companions to cryptocurrency in challenging the power and reach of governments.

“His speech blurred the lines between technology, ideology, and extreme libertarian politics,” commented Füredi. He added of the speakers’ message, “Just as the freedom to transact (via cryptocurrency) is now seen as a fundamental human right, so too should be the right to bear arms—worldwide.”

To that end, Zé Carioca includes with his freely downloadable Urutau designs a document co-authored with fellow weapons designer Ryan Smith. Dubbed “The New Second Amendment,” the authors state their “deep conviction that the unlimited right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental human right.” To that end, they make it their objective that “a governing entity must find it impractical or impossible to overcomplicate or prevent the production of a privately manufacturable weapon.”

Zé Carioca appears to have succeeded. In January, with Yannick Veilleux-Lepage of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University, Füredi described the Urutau as “much easier to build than the FGC-9, a semi-automatic 9mm firearm primarily constructed with 3D-printed parts and simple tools.” They added that “the assembly instructions for the Urutau are exceptionally well-designed.”

The FGC-9 (Fuck Gun Control 9mm) was designed by Jacob Duygu, a former German soldier who went by the pseudonym JStark before he died under mysterious circumstances after being questioned by German police. It was refined by an American identified by The New York Times as licensed firearms manufacturer John Elik. In a documentary about Europe’s underground DIY weapons movement, a masked Duygu said that “to bear firearms is a human right” and that people “need to have the same force on the individual level as the executive force of the government entity that is ruling over them.”

“This American brand of libertarianism has historically been a tough sell in many other parts of the world. Even if some people believed it in theory, strict laws made buying a gun so difficult that the ideology was almost beside the point,” wrote Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the Times. “The FGC-9 is changing that.”

The FGC-9 quickly became globally popular. In 2022, France24 reported the FGC-9 to be in wide use by rebels in Myanmar fighting that country’s brutal government. They used the DIY guns for training, for hit-and-run missions, and to fill in the gaps in supplies of commercially produced arms.

The Urutau is designed as a simpler-to-produce successor to the FGC-9. It’s intended to make restrictions even more difficult for governments to impose. And what’s interesting is that both it and the FGC-9 were designed by non-Americans who embraced the idea that individuals should be put on an even footing with government enforcers. That’s a major shift for a movement that began when Cody Wilson, a former law student from Austin, Texas, created the first 3D-printed single-shot pistol in 2013. That gun, dubbed the “Liberator,” was also intended to enhance freedom and limit the reach of government. The movement, and the ideology behind it, have found fertile ground outside the United States.

Scofflawry as a means to expand liberty isn’t limited to the field of firearms, of course. Zé Carioca gave his presentation at a conference where the main focus was on cryptocurrency and encryption—two technological means for putting human activity beyond state control. Marijuana is currently legal for recreational use in roughly half of U.S. states, but it remains illegal at the federal level. Those states choose to ignore federal law under pressure from residents who have long enjoyed the stuff with little concern for its legal status.

Decades ago, the movement to legalize homosexuality got its jump start from the Stonewall Uprising. In 1969, gays and lesbians streamed into the streets of New York City to violently confront police after the latest in a series of raids on the Stonewall Inn, a popular bar.

And, perhaps most famously, Prohibition ended in the U.S. largely because mass defiance, moonshiners, and bootleggers made enforcement impossible.

It makes sense that people from countries with restrictive firearms would take the lead in a movement that seeks to make those laws unenforceable. Americans may have cultivated the ideology and offered inspiration, but the movement picks up support where it’s most needed.

That’s not to say the U.S. is immune to gun banners. As mentioned above, New York City has authoritarian laws as do other jurisdictions. Zé Carioca and Ryan Smith are clear that their New Second Amendment is for Americans too, should the government and its laws become more restrictive. “Legal constraints like the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution are finite, vulnerable to ignorance, and have national boundaries, but our guiding principle does not,” they wrote.

Americans delivered a libertarian DIY firearms movement to the world. The world may help preserve it.