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1 of 3 Photo: The police
With small funds, anyone can make deadly 3D printed firearms. This year, the seizures have skyrocketed and according to the police, it is only a matter of time before they are used to commit murder – or terrorist acts.
In autumn 2021, the task force attacks a farm in Falköping municipality. The security police have for some time mapped the farm’s owner, a 25-year-old man with neo-Nazi sympathies, who is suspected of planning an attack.
Online, he pays tribute to the mass murderer Anders Breivik and orders home a helmet with a mount for a go pro camera of the kind used by the right-wing extremists he idolizes when they broadcast their terrorist acts live.
Nazi propaganda and what the prosecutor calls the beginning of a manifesto are found on the farm. There are also bomb-making materials and 3D-printed weapons in various stages of completion.
With 3D printers, anyone, without detours via smugglers and arms dealers, can produce deadly weapons in their chamber with little means.
Across Europe, police and security services are warning of the dangers of do-it-yourself technology. Even the Swedish police, who previously received a few individual copies per year, see with concern how the seizures of home-made weapons are increasing.
Record number of seizures
– We have already made more seizures this year than in the whole of 2022, says Isabel Thorén, head of the National Firearms Centre.
The weapons usually consist of 3D-printed plastic parts that are supplemented with a few key metal components and assembled into fully functional firearms. Complete kits with parts can be ordered online. Compared to regular weapons, they are both easier to manufacture and destroy, as well as harder to track.
So far, the quality is often significantly worse than professionally made weapons. But as the printers become cheaper, the plastics stronger and the design more sophisticated, the 3D weapons become an increasingly attractive option for criminals.
– To make a fully functional weapon, you still need metal parts, because the impact and heat are so high. But in the future there is a risk that reliable weapons and also ammunition can be manufactured in pure plastic.
In such a scenario, it would be possible to evade detection in metal detectors – and thus smuggle weapons into courts or airports.
Terrorist threat in focus
The police’s seizure of 3D-printed weapons often takes place in environments linked to criminal networks. At the Security Police, it is instead the terrorist threat that is in focus.
The National Center for Terror Threat Assessment (NCT) recently stated that the interest in 3D weapons is great in violent extremist environments and pointed to the risk of them being used in terrorist acts in Sweden in 2023.
Instructions for bomb-making and truck attacks have long been spread online. There are now also loads of readily available manuals for manufacturing firearms using 3D technology.
When Europol conducted a test in which a person with no previous experience with weapons was tasked with producing five 3D-printed semi-automatic pistols, it took a few weeks to obtain the materials and complete the weapons. The cost amounted to a total of approximately SEK 25,000.
Forensic capabilities
Compared to regular weapons, which are provided with serial numbers, 3D weapons are difficult to trace. But already in 2018, a study came from a research group at the University of Buffalo in which 3D printers allegedly leave unique “fingerprints” on the objects that are manufactured. According to the study, this would make it possible to tie a weapon to a specific printer.
However, Patrick Belfrage, a weapons investigator at the National Forensic Center (NFC), is skeptical.
– Currently, it is difficult to tie a weapon to a specific 3D printer. Even the plastic is difficult to tie between the weapon and the reel. But there are other traces that can give results both against the printer and against the person, he says.
TT: What kind of track could it be?
– It goes into our methods and how we work and I am not allowed to comment on that.
Tightened legislation
The National Firearms Center was established in the summer of 2022 as a collaboration between the police and customs. The purpose is, among other things, to strengthen the work against smuggling, illegal manufacture and sale of weapons.
According to Isabel Thorén, an urgent issue going forward is to adapt the weapons law to better access 3D production, where the production of individual components is not necessarily illegal at the moment.
– It is about the manufacturing itself being criminalized. We need to modernize the law so that we are one step ahead.
The legislation is currently being reviewed within the framework of the so-called weapons investigation.
Facts
3D weapons
3D-printed weapons began to appear in the United States around ten years ago. In 2013, the company Defense Distributed published the blueprints for the “Liberator” pistol for free download. With the help of a 3D printer, a working weapon could be manufactured with the instructions.
The drawings were downloaded over 100,000 times in just two days, before US authorities demanded their removal. However, they continued to be made available through a number of file-sharing sites.
Today, blueprints for tons of different weapons are available for free download. The models have gradually become more and more sophisticated.
Several countries have introduced various types of bans on 3D weapons, as well as possession of blueprints and manuals.
In Sweden, it is forbidden to print 3D weapons if you do not have a license for weapons manufacturing. Certain parts of the weapon, such as the barrel, are subject to a permit, but others are not.
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Cases with 3D printed weapons
March 2023: A 25-year-old man is charged on suspicion of serious weapons offenses after he manufactured a functional automatic weapon in his home on Gotland. In the residence, more 3D printers and a large amount of 3D printed weapon parts are found.
March 2023: Three men are charged on suspicion of serious weapons smuggling. The men are suspected of having smuggled in over a hundred 3D-printed weapon parts from China and Italy. About half are confiscated. The customs authority fears that the other parts may have had time to be assembled into weapons that ended up in the hands of organized crime.
November 2022: A 19-year-old is sentenced for weapons offenses to three months in prison, after the police found a 3D-printed semi-automatic submachine gun with an empty magazine under the man’s bed.
September 2022: A 25-year-old man (mentioned in the article) is sentenced to three years and six months in prison for aggravated weapons offences. He is convicted of possessing firearms, explosives and parts for three 3D-printed semi-automatic weapons.
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