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22 September 2024

He’s Known as ‘Ivan the Troll.’ His 3D-Printed Guns Have Gone Viral.

Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff

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.

In the past three years, this model of homemade semiautomatic firearm, known as an FGC-9, has appeared in the hands of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, rebels in Myanmar and neo-Nazis in Spain. In October, a British teenager will be sentenced for building an FGC-9 in one of the latest terrorism cases to involve the weapon.

An online group known as Deterrence Dispensed publishes free instructions on how to build the weapon, a manual that says people everywhere should stand armed and ready.

“We together can defeat for good the infringement that is taking place on our natural-born right to bear arms, defend ourselves and rise up against tyranny,” the document says.

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.

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