PerspectiveRight-Wing Extremists’ New Weapon
The 9 October 2019 attack on a synagogue in Halle, in eastern Germany, highlights terrorists’ growing affinity for homemade firearms as a means for leaderless resistance, a decentralized strategy of guerrilla warfare popularized by Ku Klux Klan member Louis Beam. Eric Woods write that “This presents particular legal challenges to the United States, more so than other countries. The United States has an idiosyncratic approach to homemade production of firearms, rooted in its history as a frontier country where informal networks of artisan producers existed for decades before federal armories.”
The 9 October 2019 attack on a synagogue in Halle, in eastern Germany, highlights terrorists’ growing affinity for homemade firearms as a means for leaderless resistance, a decentralized strategy of guerrilla warfare popularized by Ku Klux Klan member Louis Beam, Eric Woods writes in Lawfare.
The guns used in the attack were improvised and craft produced, specifically a “slam-fire” shotgun and a “Luty” submachine pistol. The online extreme-right milieu on 8chan’s successor site, 8kun, was drawn to the particulars of the attack and its failures. In a thread detailing online resources for homemade weapons production, one user exclaimed: “Can we talk about Halle? I am angry at this ****** for building such nice homemade guns and then just wasting them.”
The most extensive evidence for extreme right terrorists’ growing interest in homemade firearms is on Telegram and can also be seen in private chats. A member of one active extremist chatroom recently shared an image of a Tec-9 he created by combining 3D-printed and metal parts. A short Google search leads directly to the CAD file used to manufacture it. On the largest open channels, which sometimes contain thousands of subscribers, expanded versions of the list of resources for homemade weapons production seen on 8kun are posted alongside calls for attacks on religious centers and minority communities. The posts demonstrate direct links between the extreme right communities online and their increasing discourse about the utility of homemade firearms for leaderless resistance.
Woods write that “This presents particular legal challenges to the United States, more so than other countries. The United States has an idiosyncratic approach to homemade production of firearms, rooted in its history as a frontier country where informal networks of artisan producers existed for decades before federal armories.”
