The head of the National Crime Agency has called for ministers to make possessing 3D-printed gun blueprints illegal after a fourfold increase in seizures.
Seventeen 3D-printed firearms were confiscated by police last year, up from three two years ago, Graeme Biggar told reporters at a conference in central London.
“The government is considering legislation and we have asked them to take forward legislation that would outlaw the ownership of blueprints and would change the definition of what a gun is so that something that is part-built is a gun,” the Biggar said.
Giving the annual security lecture at the Royal United Services Institute on Tuesday, Biggar also said that introducing end-to-end encryption on Facebook would be like “consciously turning a blind eye to child abuse”.
In June, Majeeb Rehman from Bradford, West Yorkshire, was held in possession of an FGC9 homemade automatic submachine gun, magazine and bullets. He was sentenced to five years and four months after being found guilty of possession of ammunition and conspiracy to transfer the firearm.
In May, two men were jailed for making submachine guns using a 3D printer. Sibusiso Moyo, from Hull, and Christopher Gill, from Bradford, were convicted of plotting to build and supply the homemade weapons to criminal gangs.
In the same month, NCA officers uncovered a specialist factory in south London for converting blank-firing guns into lethal weapons using 3D-printed parts.
The NCA has set up a project to bring together experts on 3D-printed firearms and better train police officers to identify the weapons and the equipment needed to make them, Biggar said.
“We’ve got a project called Interknow, which is pulling together everyone who is relevant in the UK to 3D-printed firearms to try and share knowledge, not least so that when your average police officer goes into a house to do a search, and they find something, they actually recognise it’s a 3D-printed firearm and not a Nerf gun,” Biggar said.
“And then when they see a 3D printer, they know what to look for around the materials. Because not surprisingly, that’s not what they’re expecting, what they are trained on.”
Biggar said 3D technology had also become far more sophisticated such that an entire gun could be printed, not only in plastic but even in metal along with the ammunition.
“You can kill with these things,” he said. “In the early stages of 3D printed firearms, they were as likely to hurt the person firing them as they were the person they were being aimed at. That is no longer the case.”
He disclosed that the government was considering outlawing the ownership of blueprints, putting them effectively on a par with possession of a terrorist manual as evidence of lethal intent.
“At the moment, if you go in and find someone who has got a three-quarters printed 3D firearm with the blueprint, it’s not a prima facie offence,” said Biggar. “So we want to change the law so it is the case.”
He also said “the blunt and increasingly widespread” rollout by major tech companies of end-to-end encryption without sufficient protections posed a fundamental and negative implication.
“If Facebook roll out end-to-end encryption, their ability to spot child sexual abuse will significantly reduce, as will the number of children we save from sexual abuse and the number of criminals we arrest on the back of their information.
“Let me be clear: this would be tantamount to consciously turning a blind eye to child abuse – choosing to look the other way,” he said.
A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it expected to provide more information to law enforcement as the encryption was rolled out.
