Long before he started making guns with a 3D printer, Viljam Nyman was a kid who was bullied. In a document police later found on his computer, titled “The life story of how I became a far-right extremist”, Nyman described his childhood in Lahti, a city in southern Finland, being picked on by other kids and feeling abandoned by the adults around him. He wrote that this experience taught him something: “‘Be yourself’ or ‘don’t care’ were really bad pieces of advice. Violence and power, or the threat of using it, were actually the things that mattered. Equality and accepting difference were just words on paper, naive and idealistic fantasies. Human nature, in reality, was discriminatory and racist.”
In 2005, when Nyman was 11, violent protests broke out in a number of European countries after a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in response to a debate about Islam and self-censorship. Why was it, Nyman wondered, that he was mocked for being different and no one did anything about it, but criticising a religion from faraway countries was off limits? He wrote in the document that “all of this” reinforced his belief that something was wrong with society and no one was on his side. Nyman became obsessed with Hitler and Nazi Germany. He began with the notion that bullies could be classified as subhuman and sent to camps, but became fascinated by the discipline and order of the Third Reich. As he got older, he immersed himself in online message boards that shared antisemitic theories. Until this point, Nyman had spent a lot of time playing video games. Now, he thought, he needed to do more so that he would not be a disgrace to the white race. He started to feel something he had not felt before: a sense of purpose.
In 2020, when Nyman wrote the document, he was 26. He was still living in Lahti and he still did not have many friends. He was often lonely and resented not being in a relationship. Most of his social life was conducted over the internet; he regularly posted virulent racial hatred about black people, Muslims and Jews on far-right messaging platforms. He also attended far-right music events, which take place regularly around Finland, meeting like-minded people scattered across the country with whom he kept in touch online.
On the encrypted messaging app Telegram, he regularly chatted with three friends in particular who shared his views. The police suspect they connected at far-right events. They were Niko Petteri Suikki and Tuukka Karinkanta, both in their 20s, and Jyrki Niemi, who was in his 60s. One of the things the men discussed was their shared belief in “accelerationism”, the idea that violence is a necessary means to hasten social collapse and introduce new power structures – ideally ethno-nationalist and authoritarian. One accelerationist tactic is to attempt to trigger a race war by carrying out attacks on ethnic minority groups in the hope of provoking retaliation. Rightwing accelerationists also emphasise the importance of stockpiling weapons in order to be prepared when society collapses.
In different messaging threads and groups – including one named “Seize Finland by any means necessary” – the men shared thoughts about the coming race war. Sometimes this was couched in the ironic humour often seen in the far-right scene (“If this discussion is read by a government actor, I want to underline that I am in this chat by accident. Maybe someone else added me, I don’t know why I’m here,” Nyman wrote in December 2021). But frequently it was shockingly racist and violent. “The pleasure of shooting black gangs might take precedence over the annoyance of a prison sentence,” Nyman wrote to the group in August 2022. “At this rate, we will soon be a minority in our own country if we do not oppose those who enable the import of blacks,” Karinkanta wrote in a message to Suikki the same month, adding, “Many of them wouldn’t be ready when the race war starts.” Suikki responded with a joke about “shooting a negro”.
To carry out shootings and stockpile weapons, you need guns. Nyman did not have a gun licence and was unlikely to get one. In November 2021, he bought his first 3D printer and immediately started printing gun parts.
Nyman was working from a blueprint, easily available online, for a model called the FGC-9, which revolutionised the world of 3D-printed weapons when it was published in March 2020. FGC stands for “fuck gun control” and 9 refers to the 9mm bullets it uses. The slogan reflects the ideological leaning of many involved in the development of 3D-printed guns. In an anonymised interview given after the manual was published, the creator of the FGC-9, who posted under the name JStark1809, said, “We fucked gun control for good … Gun control is dead, and we killed it.” JStark1809 has since been revealed to be Jacob Duygu, a German man of Kurdish origin. In the FGC-9 manifesto, he called on people “to defend yourself and not be a victim to unjust firearm legislation any longer”. Elsewhere, he had posted about being an “incel”. In 2021, he was arrested by the German police. Two days later, he was found dead in a car parked outside his parents’ home in Hanover. He was 28. The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that an autopsy had been unable to determine the cause of death, but foul play and suicide had been ruled out. His mysterious death is the subject of many online conspiracy theories in the 3D-printed gun world.
The 110-page FGC-9 manual takes readers through the process of making a weapon in meticulous detail, with step-by-step diagrams akin to those that accompany flat-pack furniture. Although 3D-printed weapons have been around since 2013, earlier models were rudimentary, requiring off-the-shelf parts manufactured by gun companies along with the 3D-printed parts, and usually firing just one or two shots before they disintegrated. In 2019, the white nationalist Stephan Balliet livestreamed a horrifying attack on a synagogue in the German town of Halle, carried out on Yom Kippur. Before the attack, he posted a manifesto online saying that one of his goals was to prove the viability of homemade weapons, including some that were 3D-printed. But on the live stream, his guns frequently jammed and he is heard cursing himself as a failure. (He did shoot and kill two people, and is serving a life sentence in prison.)
The FGC-9 changed everything. Unlike those early models, the FGC-9 includes no regulated components: it can be made using just a 3D printer and parts available from a hardware store; it requires only some metalworking skills. Today, 3D printers are available for a couple of hundred pounds, while strong plastic polymers to print with are relatively inexpensive. The upper and lower receivers of the FGC-9 (the barrel assembly and trigger sections) are fully 3D-printed from plastic, as are the pistol grip and stock. The magazine can also be printed. Unlike previous 3D-printed gun models, it is a semi-automatic weapon. “It was revolutionary,” says Dr Rajan Basra, a researcher from King’s College London who studies 3D-printed weapons. The FGC-9 is now thought to be the most popular 3D-printed weapon in the world. It is particularly difficult to police, given that it doesn’t involve illegal parts. As Basra says, “You can’t regulate a steel tube or a spring.”
The open-source manual was initially shared among niche gun manufacturing forums but quickly spread across the internet, and the guns have been manufactured around the world. “The guide is incredibly detailed,” Basra says. “There are videos online showing the entire process and the blueprints are shockingly easy to find – you can Google and get them in under five minutes.” The rise of these weapons is a particular concern in the UK, where 3D printing can circumvent extremely strict gun control laws. Since the FGC-9 manual was published four years ago, there have been at least 12 UK criminal cases involving these weapons. In October, 20-year-old Jack Robinson from Portsmouth was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for attempting to construct an FGC-9 and possessing documents that could be used for preparing an act of terrorism. Robinson, who was just 18 at the time of his arrest, had posted online with the username “kill Jews” and had a large amount of neo-Nazi material on his computer. Three men in Yorkshire accused of manufacturing FGC-9s to attack an Islamic centre are due to stand trial in 2025. This year, Abdiwahid Abdulkadir Mohamed, a 32-year-old Londoner, became the first known case of someone with jihadist sympathies being sentenced for possessing the FGC-9 manual and instructions for other homemade firearms (the crime was possessing documents likely to be useful for preparing an act of terrorism). But generally, around the world, 3D-printed guns have proved most attractive to organised criminals and people on the far right. “There are ideological reasons for this, such as the far-right emphasis on race war and stockpiling weapons, but it’s also a practical issue about who is sharing the blueprints online,” Basra says. “The extreme rightwing space overlaps with the hyperlibertarian idea that any gun control is a form of tyranny.”
Rueben Dass is a researcher at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore who has compiled a database of arrests related to 3D-printed guns worldwide. “If you look at the numbers, 95% of the plots have been failures in the sense that people have been arrested before they actually shot the guns – for manufacture, possession, trafficking,” he explains. “But it’s a serious, growing risk because the technologies are becoming cheaper and more advanced and accessible.” Making a 3D-printed gun involves significantly more than simply downloading a blueprint and clicking print. To construct an FGC-9, you need drills, metalworking equipment and commitment. “You essentially turn yourself into a gunsmith. It involves frustration and trial and error and setbacks,” Basra says. “But many have followed these step-by-step instructions to make one.”
The UK’s National Crime Agency says that although the weapon accounts for a small proportion of firearms cases overall, illicit interest is increasing. This is a serious concern for the authorities. While 3D-printed guns were considered to be illegal anyway by virtue of being a firearm, in November 2022 the UK government updated legislation to specifically outlaw possessing, buying or producing component parts for a 3D-printed gun. The NCA has urged the government to go further and outlaw having the blueprint at all, and there are currently two bills on this going through parliament.
Nyman started printing parts for his first FGC-9 in November 2021 and worked on it for months, acquiring a stick welder and an angle grinder to craft the metal sections of the gun. He frequently messaged the other three men about his progress, and sometimes they swapped ideas about how to avoid detection when buying parts, not all of which were easily available in Finland.
“Did you explain that the parts were for a bicycle suspension?” Suikki asked Nyman in one exchange.
“Yes,” he replied. “I said they were parts for a suspension fork; I didn’t have much more information, just that a friend asked me to make them, but my own equipment wasn’t good enough.”
“I hope you’re paying in cash,” Suikki said.
In another message, Nyman asked, “Any ideas for a believable story about what this part is for and what it locks, etc?” Suikki responded, “Say you’re building a safe for a school project, and since you’re an automation guy, you have to cut corners on the mechanical parts.”
On 13 April, Nyman completed his first FGC-9. Niemi, the older man in the group, got hold of some 9mm bullets for it. (If you have a gun licence in Finland, it is not difficult to purchase bullets.) A few weeks later, Suikki took a train to Lahti from his home in Hyvinkää, around an hour away, to meet Nyman. They went into the forest to practise shooting and were elated to find the gun worked. Around the same time, Suikki borrowed it from Nyman and took it to his home town where he filmed himself shooting an immigrant family’s mailbox.
Nyman soon started work on making more guns. In June, he rented out a warehouse to scale up his gun production. Within a few months, he would have four functioning FGC-9s. The men discussed plans to produce 15 weapons in total. Some would be hidden in case they were needed when the race war came. Others would be sold for between €1,000 and €3,000 each. (The 3D-printers cost around €250 each – by this stage, Nyman had three of them – while the other parts added up to a further €200-300 a gun.)
In May, soon after Nyman finished constructing the first gun and ascertained that it could actually fire shots, he and Niemi discussed the possibility of carrying out attacks. “Now is not the time for small skirmishes; the attacks need to be of such calibre and so well-planned that they make headlines,” Niemi wrote on Telegram. In another message, he said, “That doesn’t mean we’ll be running around Helsinki with guns next week; it requires extensive planning, funding, and various preparations.” In August, Nyman messaged, “I’m leaning towards wearing an FGC-9 under a coat and going to East Helsinki or wherever those ‘roadman’ [street gang] blacks hang out.” In other messages, the men discussed the possibility of attacking critical infrastructure, including power stations, water supply systems and transportation hubs, with the aim of destabilising society and precipitating race war.
“We need to hit them where it hurts. Multiple locations at once – make them scramble,” Nyman wrote in August 2022. Suikki replied, “If we time it right, the police won’t know what’s happening until it’s too late.”
“The goal is to cause maximum confusion and fear,” Niemi said. “They need to feel like they’ve lost control.”
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That same month, Suikki decided to toughen himself up for the coming race war. He took his cat to Niemi’s house, where he borrowed a gun and shot the cat three times. In a Telegram message to Karinkanta, he wrote that people who thought this was harsh were “probably ready to take it from a black man because they’re too scared to kill”.
As Nyman pressed on with producing more FGC-9s, he did not know that police were on to him. Tuomas Kuure is a detective chief inspector in the Päijät-Häme region, of which Lahti is the main city. He is a polite, softly spoken man who has been a police officer for 20 years, mostly specialising in narcotics and organised crime. In early 2022, he got some surprising police intelligence: someone in Lahti was manufacturing guns using a 3D printer. The idea of 3D-printed guns wasn’t totally new to Kuure – there had been a couple of reported arrests for their manufacture in Finland – but it was the first time he’d ever worked on this crime himself, which made it exciting and nerve-racking. As he and his team started to investigate, they knew they had to think carefully about it. “We usually only did narcotics, and this was quite different,” Kuure tells me on a video call. “It’s easy for us to say, ‘OK, there’s some cocaine, let’s go through the normal process.’ But with this, we had to figure everything out from scratch. What do we need to show? And how can we show it?”
As Nyman built his guns, Kuure, along with a team of five investigators and four officers on surveillance, were gathering information and biding their time. Kuure knew it was essential to wait for the right moment to make the arrests. If police acted too soon, before they knew for sure that the guns were capable of firing shots, it would be much harder to obtain a conviction for an aggravated firearms offence. “If the guns hadn’t been working, it would have been easy for them to say, ‘We’re not making guns, we’re just making prototypes or collectors’ items,’” Kuure says. But wait too long and the consequences could be much worse.
In late August 2022, Karinkanta took a train from his home in Oulu, a city in central Finland, to visit Nyman in Lahti to practise shooting the FGC-9s. Suikki was invited, too, but couldn’t make it. Nyman collected Karinkanta from the train station and they drove to a Lidl supermarket where they bought a watermelon. They drew a Star of David on the melon with a marker pen and drove to some woodland nearby where they filmed themselves firing shots at it. After this, they returned to the car and drove back to the warehouse Nyman had rented. “We sat in the car and smoked cigarettes,” Nyman later told interrogators. “I threw the weapons in the blue box inside the warehouse, then we drove back to my apartment.” When they got there, police officers were waiting to arrest them.
“Nyman’s been taken,” Suikki messaged the Telegram group the next day.
“Get out, scatter, we’ll regroup soon if we can,” Niemi replied.
Kuure is used to investigating organised crime, where suspects usually answer “no comment” to every question. This was different. “These guys were more open,” he tells me. “None of them said they had terrorist motives, but about the guns they were clear: ‘I’ve shot these guns, I had them in my possession.’ Our main suspect quickly said he believes there will be confrontation between different ethnic groups. I think they might even be a bit proud because of their ideology – they think they are doing the right thing.”
In his interrogation, though, Nyman insisted he did not make the guns with violent intent. Instead, he said he was worried about the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the idea that Russia might invade Finland next. “I decided I should make a gun, so people wouldn’t just shoot me here,” he told police. “I’m such a survivalist that there were hundreds of jars of canned goods, nuts and so on in my apartment, and I had more dry food in storage downstairs … I’m also prepared to defend my property and myself. The FGC-9s were not to initiate any kind of violence, they were mainly for self-defence.” It’s true that when police searched Nyman’s computer they found survivalist manuals, with tips for what to store and how to carry out rudimentary medical procedures at home in the event of injury. But there was also a huge amount of neo-Nazi and accelerationist material. And the messages Nyman had exchanged with the three other men told a very different story.
Soon after Nyman and Karinkanta’s arrests, Niemi and Suikki were arrested, too. Police searched all their homes and devices, uncovering a significant arsenal of weaponry, mostly at Nyman’s apartment and the warehouse he had rented. Nyman had made four FGC-9s, with plans to produce more. He had also made a 3D-printed pen-pistol. Police found a large quantity of ammunition – about 1,400 9mm cartridges – and explosives. All the men had a considerable volume of extremist material on their devices. They had mistakenly believed deleting Telegram chats would remove them, but police were able to recover significant portions of their conversations, revealing the extent to which they had discussed manufacturing the weapons and potential attacks and targets. Just a few days before his arrest, Nyman had shared a link to a news article about Sanna Marin, then prime minister, giving a speech in Lahti; he asked, “Should I go with an FGC in a hoodie?” Perhaps most worryingly, when police searched Niemi’s house, they found a list of addresses of leftwing activists and politicians. But police struggled to find evidence of plans for a specific attack – and that made it hard to prove intent. “Our suspects didn’t have any particular or detailed plans, not that we had knowledge of, but they frequently discussed what type of things should be done and whom they would target with their actions,” Kuure says.
The men were released on bail while police, along with investigators from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, continued to build their case. “We had functioning guns; from the device searches we had videos of the guns being used, we had parts, tools, printers,” Kuure says. This was clear evidence for firearms offences, but they wanted to pursue terrorism charges, too – and astonishingly, Finland had never seen anyone convicted for far-right terrorism.
During this period, most of the men kept their heads down. Nyman did not. In December 2022, the mailbox shooting video was published online, to an account believed to be run by Nyman. Police already had a copy, as it had been discovered in the device search, but until this point it had not been made public. “We believe it was the main suspect that made those publications – maybe he wanted to show like-minded persons that this is possible,” Kuure says. In this period, out on bail, Nyman also posted his own modification of the FGC-9 blueprint online, explaining that he was frustrated that not all the parts were easily available in Finland and had updated the design to address this. “I found this constant ordering and waiting for packages frustrating and also a factor that increases the risk of getting caught,” he wrote. He bought himself a new 3D printer. Soon after this flurry of activity, he was arrested again.
The trial began in September 2023. Nyman and Suikki were charged with aggravated firearms offences with terrorist intent; Karinkanta was charged with aiding and abetting this; Niemi was charged with firearms offences but not terrorism, due to insufficient evidence. Journalists filled the courtroom as prosecutors presented damning evidence from the Telegram message exchanges. The defendants argued that the guns weren’t that effective and the messages were pure fantasy. “It’s daydreaming that has no basis in reality,” Nyman’s lawyer said.
Kuure followed news of the trial nervously. “I knew we had a lot of materials, but I didn’t know what it would take to get that terrorism conviction,” he says. For the last two days of the trial, he slipped into the courtroom to watch proceedings first-hand. As he heard the final cases presented, he began to feel more confident.
The men were all found guilty. The verdicts against Nyman, Suikki and Karinkanta marked the first time in Finnish criminal history that anyone had been convicted for far-right terrorism. Nyman was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for the firearms offences and training to commit a terrorist act. Suikki was sentenced to one year and nine months, Karinkanta was handed a seven-month suspended sentence and Niemi was sentenced to one year and two months. The court judgment stated that Nyman “produced weapons primarily for the purpose of using them in violence aimed at promoting his adopted ideology”.
Around the world, authorities are grappling with how to tackle this growing threat; some countries, including the UK, are looking at making it illegal to access or download blueprints, while others continue to rely on existing firearms laws and intelligence. “Law enforcement take 3D-printed guns very seriously, but the political system we’re in is reactive,” Basra says. “If there’s a completed attack, where someone is killed, the threat will seem much more urgent and will receive more resources and attention. It’s pretty sad that we’d have to wait for that point.”
In Finland, Kuure remains concerned about what might come next. “This technology makes guns available to everyone. If you have a few hundred euros, some spare time and craftiness, then you have a gun.”
