An early email dropped into our inbox this morning from the Press Office of Greater Manchester Police.
It was headlined Component parts of UK’s first ever 3D gun found,(I see the story is on the front page of the Evening News) and detailed that as part of Operational Challenger, a multi agency crackdown on organised crime across Greater Manchester, police found a 3D printer, what is suspected to be a 3D plastic magazine and a trigger during a raid at a property in Baguely.
According to the police report:
“The technology works by allowing anyone who has a 3D printer – which can be bought on the high street for about £1,200 – to download designs for guns or components. The printers themselves squirt molten plastic to produce 3D shapes of whatever design has been downloaded. The model can then be converted to become a genuine firearm capable of firing bullets.”
The police are obviously concerned.Detective Inspector Chris Mossop of Challenger’s Organised Crime Coordination Unit said:
If what we have seized is proven to be viable components capable of constructing a genuine firearm, then it demonstrates that organised crime groups are acquiring technology that can be bought on the high street to produce the next generation of weapons.
In theory, the technology essentially allows offenders to produce their own guns in the privacy of their own home, which they can then supply to the criminal gangs who are causing such misery in our communities. Because they are also plastic and can avoid X-ray detection, it makes them easy to conceal and smuggle.
These could be the next generation of firearms and a lot more work needs to be done to understand the technology and the scale of the problem.
If what we have seized today can, as we suspect, be used to make a genuine firearm then today will be an important milestone in the fight against this next generation of homemade weapons.
But as it stands at the moment, the police are saying that they cannot categorically say that these are parts of a gun assembly and may well be simply spare parts for the printer.
The threat of home-made 3D guns emerged earlier this year after the world’s first printed gun was produced by a Texan law student and activist Cody Wilson. Within days of his company’s website posting the blueprints, the US State Department intervened and took them down.
