RAJAN BASRA
Every year, on Easter Sunday, Irish republicans commemorate their martyrs, remembering lives lost during the 1916 Easter Rising and in the years since. Such events have a pattern: a street parade, speeches, and flowers at the cemetery. The 2022 commemoration, however, was unusual for the presence of four men wearing balaclavas and dressed all in black. They were members of the dissident republican paramilitary group Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓNH).
This was the group’s first public appearance since its ceasefire announcement in January 2018—but it also carried wider significance for terrorism experts because of the weapons that two of the men were carrying. This was the first time paramilitary members in Northern Ireland had been seen with 3D-printed guns—specifically, a .22 calibre modification of the FGC semiautomatic firearm. FGC stands for “fuck gun control,” and the acronym reflects the ideological leaning of its designer—and many others involved in the development of 3D-printed weapons.
The first 3D-printed firearm emerged in May 2013 with the release of the Liberator, a handgun created by Cody Wilson, a University of Texas law student and libertarian pro-firearms activist. Essentially a proof of concept, Wilson let the BBC film him firing the gun before releasing the open source design for anyone to download. Its release caused a sensation: The gun was pictured on the front page of the New York Post, with fears it could be smuggled past metal detectors onto planes (in fact, a metal detector would spot the gun’s metal firing pin and any ammunition).
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