The rising threat of homemade guns
...and an ode to Finland's Freedom of Information laws.
When I started working on a story about the rising threat of 3D-printed guns a few months back, I wasn’t expecting the issue to suddenly be catapulted to the top of the news agenda. But that’s what happened after the arrest of Luigi Mangione in the US on 9 December. It seems that Mangione, who has been charged with the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson, was in possession of a “ghost gun” that might have been partially made with 3D-printed parts. This hasn’t actually been confirmed yet - further testing is needed to ascertain what Mangione used to construct the gun. But it’s a stark reminder of all the ways in which advances in technology are already complicating gun control around the world.
My story, which was in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, isn’t actually about ghost guns (which are typically constructed using incomplete frames and receivers, two key components of a firearm). It’s about the rising popularity of the FGC-9, a semi-automatic weapon for which blueprints are easily available online. FGC stands for “fuck gun control” while 9 refers to the 9mm bullets it uses. If you don’t know much about these weapons, here’s a short primer from the article, explaining why the FGC-9 has proven so much more popular - and dangerous - than previous models of 3D-printed guns:
The FGC-9 changed everything. Unlike those early models, the FGC-9 includes no regulated components: it can be made using just a 3D printer and parts available from a hardware store; it requires only some metalworking skills. Today, 3D printers are available for a couple of hundred pounds, while strong plastic polymers to print with are relatively inexpensive. The upper and lower receivers of the FGC-9 (the barrel assembly and trigger sections) are fully 3D-printed from plastic, as are the pistol grip and stock. The magazine can also be printed. Unlike previous 3D-printed gun models, it is a semi-automatic weapon. “It was revolutionary,” says Dr Rajan Basra, a researcher from King’s College London who studies 3D-printed weapons. The FGC-9 is now thought to be the most popular 3D-printed weapon in the world. It is particularly difficult to police, given that it doesn’t involve illegal parts. As Basra says, “You can’t regulate a steel tube or a spring.”
As always with a subject like this, the challenge was working out how to turn it into a story with real, human stakes. I wanted to focus on one particular case, but this wasn’t a simple proposition. Thus far, most criminal cases involving these guns have related to the manufacture of the weapons rather than their use; most people have been apprehended before they’ve actually committed an act of violence. When I was speaking to experts, the case that came up again and again was that of a small group of far-right activists in Finland who had been sentenced for manufacturing four FGC-9s with the aim of using them to incite a race war. It was emblematic of the problem in many ways, since 3D-printed guns have so far proved most popular among the far-right (along with organised criminals).
The next challenge was working out how to actually report on this case, given that everyone involved is serving a criminal sentence and the lead suspect Viljam Nyman was a loner with few friends outside the far-right scene. In the UK, it’s extremely difficult to report on criminal cases. We do ostensibly have Freedom of Information laws, but as any journalist knows, most state bodies are now well-practised at evading requests, and it’s common for responses to come long after the time limit of 20 working days. Generally speaking, police records aren’t available under these laws anyway, unless the case pertains to you: an individual can make a subject access request to get any records the police hold about them, but a journalist can’t request those same records. I’ve written before about how, despite our principle of open justice, it’s essentially impossible to get hold of court records if you weren’t actually sitting in the courtroom. On top of this, investigating officers rarely give interviews about their cases - of course, there are exceptions, particularly for reporters who often cover the crime beat and are well-connected with police forces (which I’m not) - but in my experience most police officers and forces simply stonewall or ignore requests.
It turns out things are very different in Finland. On the advice of a very helpful and generous Finnish journalist, I sent a Freedom of Information request to the relevant police force, and within a couple of days was sent a trove of thousands of pages of documents, including full transcripts of interrogations and Telegram chat logs between the suspects. I also sent a request to the district court that had heard the case and, within a couple of weeks, they sent a copy of the full court judgement which contained really useful details about the proceedings. And when I emailed the police force’s press office, the lead officer on the case responded himself immediately agreeing to an interview. It felt a bit like stepping into an alternate universe, reporting-wise, to simply be handed so much information without having to fight for it or think of endless work-arounds.
It was a new exercise for me to try to write an engaging story while primarily relying on documents, rather than interviews and interactions with actual people. The hardest part was trying to get a sense of the culprit’s motivations. Interestingly, in the police documents, a lot of personal information about the suspects was redacted - things I’d consider quite basic and uncontroversial information, like their employment history, as well as a document written by the lead suspect outlining his own radicalisation. This document was cited extensively in the court judgment, though, so I was able to quote from that. This was really useful in building up a sense of his motivation and character, and ended up being the opening to my story:
Long before he started making guns with a 3D printer, Viljam Nyman was a kid who was bullied. In a document police later found on his computer, titled “The life story of how I became a far-right extremist”, Nyman described his childhood in Lahti, a city in southern Finland, being picked on by other kids and feeling abandoned by the adults around him. He wrote that this experience taught him something: “‘Be yourself’ or ‘don’t care’ were really bad pieces of advice. Violence and power, or the threat of using it, were actually the things that mattered. Equality and accepting difference were just words on paper, naive and idealistic fantasies. Human nature, in reality, was discriminatory and racist.”
The Finnish journalist who’d advised me on getting hold of the documents said that this is a norm in Finland - generally, personal information about individuals is redacted from official documents. In a similar vein, journalists don’t tend to publish the names of suspects in criminal cases unless they are given a substantial sentence. This meant that in all the Finnish coverage of the 3D-printed gun case I was writing about, Nyman was named, but his three collaborators were not, simply because their sentences were shorter and they were found guilty of slightly less serious crimes. It’s very different to the UK, where local papers often publish the full names (and in local papers, street addresses!) of people in court for even very minor offences. We have less information at our disposal but tend to publish every shred we have.
After spending some serious time with Google Translate and Chat GPT’s translation function, I had a lot of Telegram message exchanges and police interview transcripts to work with too. You can read the story here. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about 3D-printed weapons in the weeks and months to come.
Reading/listening
I enjoyed this New Yorker profile of the philosopher L. A. Paul, who wrote a book about the transformative experience of becoming a parent, and the decision to become one. (Now’s as good a time as any to mention I’m pregnant, and am expecting my second child in the spring!)
I whizzed through the CBC podcast Bad Results, about a Canadian company giving dodgy paternity test results, with often devastating consequences.
This New York Times magazine story about an Uyghur man’s escape from China is a reminder of the claustrophobic and all-encompassing nature of China’s persecuton of this minority group.
Thanks for reading! As always, do share this on social media or forward it on to anyone who might be interested. I’m really limping towards the end of the year but will be back in your inbox in a couple of weeks.