Domestic terrorismFBI: Boogaloo Extremists Acquired 3D-Printed Machine Gun Parts

Published 4 November 2020

Depending on their configuration, 3D-printed guns contain no metal parts, and thus can be smuggled into metal detectors-protected venues. In a criminal complaint filed against a West Virginia men selling 3D-printed gun components, the FBI says his customers included multiple members of the Boogaloo movement, a heavily armed extremist anti-government group.

Depending on their configuration, 3D-printed guns contain no metal parts, and thus can be smuggled into metal detectors-protected venues. Wired notes that the first 3D-printed gun was fired more than seven years ago, and that ever since then, the technology has been regarded as a tool which could arm individuals who otherwise could not legally obtain a firearm, or who wanted to get into a location protected by metal detectors.

criminal complaint filed last week in West Virginia, Wired reports, shows that “the digital gunsmithing method has been adopted by violent, anti-government domestic extremists: the Boogaloo movement.”

The criminal complaint accuses Timothy Watson of selling more than 600 3D-printed plastic components of automatic rifles through his website, Portablewallhanger.com. The FBI also says that Watson advised clients on how to disguise the guns’ parts as wall hooks for keys or coats. The 3D-printed components could also be used as a “drop-in auto sear,” a simple, precisely shaped rifle part that can convert a legal AR-15 into an illegal, fully automatic machine gun.

Wired notes that these simple components, with few exceptions, have been banned in the United States for more than twenty years.

Wiredreports:

According to the FBI, Watson’s customers included multiple members of the Boogaloo movement, a heavily armed extremist anti-government group whose adherents have allegedly wounded and killed multiple law enforcement officials in incidents across the United States. The so-called Boogaloo Boys have aimed to incite violence amidst racial justice protests like those that followed the police killing of George Floyd, reportedly in an effort to start a civil war they call the Boogaloo. The FBI alleges that one of the recipients of Watson’s 3D-printed auto sears, a California man named Steven Carrillo, is likely the same man accused of shooting members of the Santa Cruz police department and two Oakland courthouse security guards in May and June of this year, killing one guard and one police officer.

To the best of my recollection, there has been very little in the way of tangible evidence that domestic extremist groups have successfully used 3D printing to modify guns, until now,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism, which first spotted the criminal complaint, told Wired. “When you have individuals who so strongly support the second amendment—pro-gun, anti-government individuals trying to evade any kind of gun control measure—it makes sense for them to shift to this kind of technology.”