'Gun control is dead, and we killed it'

Blueprints for 3D-printed weapons are increasingly being used by far-right extremists to evade gun control laws. So what can be done?

- Samira Shackle

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.