Hey, everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is me and mar printing The Revolution Part two. Since the dawn of firearms, regular people all over the world have had the same basic idea, maybe if I made myself a gun, the government wouldn't be able to be such a dick to me. Historically, this has had little impact on the willingness of governments
to be dicks to people. In the beginning, all gun manufacturing was done by individual artisans, and thus making a gun in your home was really no different from making it in a shop, as long as you had the proper tools. Guns in this period weren't super useful on their own and were best fired in a volley by a shitload of dudes at once. Since individual firearms were extremely inaccurate and cumbersome to use, the fact that some poor blacksmith could make himself one wasn't much of a
threat to anybody in power. It did mean that battlefield prowess came from large blocks of trained soldiers, not fuel lords on horseback rallying untrained peasants. This change in technology led to a change in warfare and helped to change society. As firearms evolved and became these central weapons of battle. They required more intense tooling and more expensive manufacturing capacity. Nations and peoples without the know how our infrastructure were
at a tremendous disadvantage. As soon as this situation came into being, these unfortunate communities set to work finding ways to gain the advantages of firearms without the manufacturing capacity their foes enjoyed. Indigenous cannons and regions resisting imperialism often consisted of composite materials less sturdy than bronze or iron. In the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, Indigenous Americans in South America used wooden cannons to fight against Spanish and
Portuguese conquerors. The Vietnamese used wooden cannons to resist the French during the Cochin China Campaign of eighteen sixty two. American Indians used wooden artillery to blast settler fortifications in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds. In the months that led up to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the men who fought to create the United States busy themselves building rifles and cannons in their homes and communities to
resist the English. This trend has never really stopped in warfare. The day before we recorded this, James, my partner in this series, sent me a screen grab from a live stream of someone in Ukraine printing pieces for AK forty sevens on a three D printer. Firearms manufactured outside the arms industry have played a role in every conflict of the modern era, but as you probably guessed, they have had the greatest influence in the little wars of colonialism.
European nations rarely allowed any sort of firearms ownership in their colonies except the individuals and ethnic groups that adopted its local enforces. Since most of these places had never developed their own industrial base from arms industry, colonial rebellions often relied on homemade weapons in their early stages, along
with modern firearms pilfered by deserting local soldiers. Where domestic productive capacity existed, European colonizing nations went out of their way to relocate it, along with the profit it generation, to the metropol All were reflected on this in his novel Burmese Days, saying in the eighteenth century, the Indians cast guns that are at any rate up to the European standard. Now, after we've been in India one hundred and fifty years. You can't make so much as a
brass cartridge case in the whole continent. Meanwhile, among the colonizers, being armed became almost a synonym for being a man. This was particularly true for the colonial police forces and militaries, but it was also true domestically. Most people are broadly familiar with the u S. Second Amendment the robust gun culture that it's spawned, but during the heighther colonialism, English
citizens are also free to arm themselves. In nineteen hundred, Prime Minister Robert Gascoigne, Cecil Marquis of Salisbury, gave a speech in which he claimed he would laud the day when there was a rifle in every cottage. In England, firearms were utterly and restricted at this point. The first chaine to this came in nineteen oh three with the first law that required a permit to carry a handgun
and restricted children from buying guns. Still, firearms were widely available until a red panic gripped the nation in nineteen nineteen following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Across the ocean in Spain, where firearms ownership was less strictly restricted, where orwell himself would learn what it was to fire a rifle at someone who shot back. Armed unions and working people served as the only bullwark to a military coup.
In nineteen thirty six, in Madrid, one officer opened his armory to the union militias, but another refused to hand over for the bolts for the guns they had been issued. In Barcelona, where the anarchist left had a long tradition of armed political violence, the coup was repelled by workers with guns, and a general leading troops there was imprisoned and executed. The same pattern played out all across the country in July nineteen thirty six, when the military rose
up to topple the elected government. In the cities where the government opened the armories to the people, the coup was repelled. In the cities where the government did not, the coup succeeded. Reflecting on this in nineteen forty one, or w Wait, the totalitarian state can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do. They cannot give the factory work or a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or
working class flat is a symbol of democracy. It's a job to see that it stays there.
Despite Orwell's please. The years that followed the Second World War led to greater restrictions of the ability of the public to arm itself. By the nineteen fifties, carrying any weapon for self defense was illegal. Semi automatic center fire arms were banned in nineteen eighty eight, and pistols were banned in nineteen ninety six after a mass shooting killed sixteen children in Dunblane. This was all utterly infuriating to a man named Philip A.
Looty.
Loody, born in nineteen sixty five grew up on a farm in West Yorkshire, England. We don't have a tremendous amount of detail about his upbringing, but by the time he was in his early thirties he'd become a committed crusader for an unrestricted right to bear arms. A skilled machinist with a well equipped shop, Loody began the long process of learning how to craft homemade firearms. Soon he was building semi and fully automatic weapons. Now these were
not military grade firearms. The barrels were unrifled, which made them terribly inaccurate, but every piece could be crafted from widely available things like sheet metal, washers and screws. The person assembling a looty gun would need to be a skilled craftsman, but they would not need access to welding rigs, forges, or rather expensive industrial equipment. Loody published a book Expedient Homemade Firearms, The nine millimeters Submachine Gun in nineteen ninety
eight through Paladin Press. In the late nineteen nineties, Paladin was one one of the places you could go to mail order fringe political literature and guides for stuff like trapping human beings or disabling the drive system of an Abrams tank in the United States. Nothing about Loudy's book was or is illegal, but Phil didn't live in the United States. He was arrested several times, starting in the late nineteen nineties when a pair of illegal home built
guns were found on his property. Ludy spent the rest of his life, which ended in twenty eleven, operating a website where he raged against gun control. His main argument was that England was headed for totalitarianism, and like Orwell, he believed only public ownership of arms could prevent this.
Unlike Orwell, Ludy was firmly on the right wing. He traced society's problems to quote a combination of political correctness and anti freedom of speech laws legislation governing how we speak about such subjects as religion or a person's race
being just two examples. Words and phrases that have been used for centuries without malice are now insipid in people's mouths, said to cause a fence by those very same speech police, who, on the other hand, turned a blind eye to the violence, foul language, and sexual references blasted daily through our TV sets of phenomenon that really does cause a fence to many people. Luti never succeeded in sparking a renaissance and civilian arms ownership in the UK, but his ideas were
adopted by organized criminal groups all around the world. In Brazil, looty guns can go for as much as twenty five hundred dollars. From twenty eleven to twenty twelve, nearly half of the submachine guns seized by police in Sao Paulo were homemade. Most of these arms were certainly used as tools by drug dealers or other gangsters, but some of them were surely also the tools of citizens who simply sought a way to defend themselves in a place with
no real rule of law. Looty guns have long been popular among motorcycle gangs in Australia, and in October of twenty nineteen, a fascist terrorist carried out the last of that year's eight Chan shootings in Hulla, Germany with a lootygun. His weapons, thankfully did not work well. As a general rule, looty guns were never going to be of much use to anyone besides organized criminals. They aren't great in a gunfight, but you can use them to spray bullets into a
room or a vehicle at close range pretty well. The year after Phil Loudy died twenty twelve, a fellow named Cody Wilson decided to carry on his work. Cody felt three D printing carried the possibility of eventually manufacturing arms of a quality that might rival traditionally produced guns. He started simple with a single shot three eighty handgun based
around the old Liberator pistol from World War II. The Liberator had been a single shot forty five caliber handgun meant to be dropped into Nazi occupied territories and used by insurgents to stealthily kill single German soldiers and take their guns. Cody Wilson described himself as a crypto anarchist, and when his ideas began to draw attention, he dropped out of law school to create Defense Distributed. This organization was dedicated to the development and distribution of plans to
craft three D printed weapons. It used a platform called deaf Cad to allow users to develop and share blueprints. In twenty thirteen, the first CAD gun file became available online to everyone. It was downloaded more than one hundred thousand times in two days. I'd like to quote now from an article on the website three D Natives. This prompted the US government to demand that Defense Distributed remove
the file from their site. What followed is a legal battle between Cody Wilson and the US government, consisting of back and forth lawsuits. It lasted five years until in twenty eighteen, the Trump administration legalized three D printed guns. The same year, Wilson was charged with sexual assault of an underage girl and had to step down from Defense Distributed. Nonetheless, the organization did not cease to exist without Cody. Today
for a yearly fee of fifty dollars. Users of the DEFCAD website can access the files containing different designs of three D printed guns. And I should note here that it's probably more accurate to say the Trump administration legalized sharing the plans and printing the files and whatnot of three D printed guns, not legalized three D printed guns. Home made firearms have been federally legal in the United
States since forever. The fighting in the courts over all this has continued ever since, and in twenty nineteen, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked DEAFCAD. This sparked the creation of a new group, de Terence Dispensed, which was even less centralized. The basic idea was that this would make them harder to take down via lawsuits or police action. Not stated was that this might also protect their reputation
from a Cody Wilson's situation. The debate over the legality of three D printed firearm plans continues on to the present day, but the development of these arms has continued at an ever faster pace. The best modern three D printed arms can even rival conventional guns. It's worth emphasizing
that these are not purely plastic tools. The Liberator pistol used a metal nail, and the better three D arms have metal barrels rifled using other craft methods that require some knowhow, but arguably less than it took to manufacture a looty gun. Three D printed arms have been confiscated by police around the world, but in recent months they've begun to crop up somewhere new in the arms of revolutionaries fighting against a military coup.
Me and mah Berman before that said relatively strict gun control laws for decades. When George Orwell was a policeman there in the nineteen twenties, he may have carried a gun, but the people he was policing did not. In the nineteen thirties, the British leaders allowed tat organizations similar to militias to form and drill, but they weren't allowed to carry guns. Gun licenses under the dictatorship were issued primarily to party members, but most were revoked after nineteen eighty
eight failed Pro democracy uprising. The only civilians who were permitted to own arms through the Chin, the nation's poorest ethnic group, who allo on guns to hunt for food. In many cases, these guns were flintlocks that would not have looked that out of place on the battle Fill two centuries before. In practice, though, things are very different. The current conflict is best seen as a flare up in violence, so it has been ongoing since Britain left
the country in nineteen forty seven. The Tatmador has consistently used violence against marginalized ethnic groups in the country and they have consistently taken up arms in response. But unlike civil wars in the Middle East, wealthy nations in the West have not been flooding me and Mihle with weapons for decades, and the various EAOs or ethnic armed organizations have had to turn to much more unorthodox roots to
arm and equip themselves against the government. To get a better idea of what things are like on the ground, we spoke to Pierre. He's French, but he's a serial volunteer with national liberation struggles around the world and fought with the Korrenn people in the early two thousands.
Yes, so the ammunition is a constant problem.
The shortage is absolutely permanent, and yes, there is two sources for the for the for the weapons, there is the black market, and the prices, especially of ammunition, are prohibitive. This is why I would like to have my notebook here with me, because I think I wrote down the conversation I had with some leaders of the kind at the time, asking them why we didn't do more persons. But we just can't afford it, you know, we just
can't afford it. Like strictly, we we don't well, we don't have enough ammunition to do any kind of of operation we need to. So all the operations we did were always focused on if we could capture some ammunition, if we could get you like weapons, but especially ammunition.
Yeah, so there is you know that that's the second source of of course, of of weapons.
Uh, let's say source is the it is the captures of course, then the black markets. The black markets used to be huge in Cambodia. I don't know, it's the situation now. That was in the nineties. It was it was a bit of the Albania of some Systizia at this time, right.
And so there is also the other ethnic groups that receive sometimes say a lot of.
Of of arms and ammunition from sponsors, like some of them, like the Western term is our sponsors by chin that sort of like the supply of nation. It's pretty good of webons. I think it's even cartolony and stuff. Then there is also groups that also produced locally quite good.
They are on arms, light arms.
Usually, so yeah, these are the different sources of what comes the OK in the time I was there.
In the early weeks of the protests. Once it I claimed clear that non violent demonstrators were going to be met with state violence, protests began to fashion weapons. First, they thought soldiers with assault rifles, using catapults and bows and arrows. It was incredibly brave, but it wasn't very effective. By the twenty eighth of March, protesters have taken a step fo A group calling itself the Klay Civil Army set up barricades. I defended them using pressurized air rifles
that fired marbles and bicycle wheel bearings. The rifles all used the same design and the same components. They were based on a video someone found on YouTube, but they weren't lethal. They helped protesters defend their space, albeit at great cost. In that first clash, four protesters and four soldiers were killed. The protesters in Calais were able to hold out a few days using old hunting rifles and air guns. The ambush military patrols and they took four
police hostage. Then they exchanged them for nine incarcerated protesters. But in early April, the Tapmador returned to the protest camp in Calay with rocket propelled grenades and machine guns and killed eleven people. We must fight back against them. If not, our generation will face a worse situation than us. They have no laws, a neighborhood villager who battled the regime's forces told The Irrawaddy, a local paper. The air guns spread around the cuntry trey quickly to avoid surveillance.
Protesters talked about cooking up berryani on telegram channels, and what they meant was desperately scouring the Internet for a way to fight back and finding a way to make an air rifle out of a buttane canister, a pipe and a cigarette lighter, combined with fireworks and smoke bombs made of potassium nitrate. The air rifle gave protests just enough cupboard to escape police charges, but they also gave the hunter an excuse to further escalate the violence.
Attitudes are hardening among the protesters too. In Mandalay, they took air rifles to the barricades on Saturday, hardly a match for the weapons of war they face, but now they know this is a fight to the death and more destruction. After a fire raged in pg Dagon township overnight, people living there but kept away by security forces returned
to find sixty homes burned to the ground. Now all they can do is picked through the ashes, trying to save anything from the military's policy have scorched a.
Even the top Madaw makes its own weapons, a highly unusual move for a relatively small nation. Top Mada troops and police can be seen with a bewildering array of indigenously produced copies of M sixteen's ouzies and even five to five six Galil pattern AK style rifles, as well as M three light machine guns, which are slightly updated copies of the MG forty two used by the Nazis
in World War Two. After the failed eight eight eight eight uprisings in nineteen eighty eight, the military offered concessions to China in return for more advanced weapons. They got them, but it didn't stop China from also supplying ethnic armed organizations. EAOs don't have access to the same munitions factories that the government does, but there is a long tradition of
homemade weapons in Myanmar. In more remote parts of the country, home made air rifles and shotguns seem to have been relatively commonplace before the start of the conflict, and they were mostly used for hunting. The country is also covered with land mines, which the EAOs used a great effect against the topmat Aw. We spoke to Pierre, a former combatant with the KRIN who no longer lives in me
and Maar. His experience is not that recent, but it helps us to understand the way this conflict has been fought for decades.
What we used to to produce a lot of land mines, that's that's produced at the base.
Yes, with like you know, very systems. Is a little bit of.
One type of plastic explosive, a couple of BOMBOO for contactors and.
Battery. That's it.
Pellet guns are not good for combat, and EAOs mostly relied on weapons imported from Thailand, India or China. Overwhelmingly these were ak or In sixteen pattern rifles.
Yeah, mostly in my in the units have been there is probably a majority of platforms.
In this time.
Yes, yeah, definitely, I mean it's more reliable and you know, simple to part. It's very adapted to the to the to.
The type of guerrilla it was. It was quite correct, I mean.
From the moment that I switched to a case at least because at first I tried to use this Sucreparency M sixteen and it was a nightmare of malfunctions. So I switched back to a case. What I best know used doesn't have this. I never really had any any malfunction music case. Maybe one time it's a qulty lot of communition, but that's it. Not really the rightful inlude.
The fight, Pierre says, has never been restricted to the battlefield for the top of the door. Violence against civilians is part of their four cuts doctrine that cuts off funding, food, intelligence, and recruits for the EAOs. Now they are moving that same outlook to the cities.
Like literally.
Literally a bye by absolutely no rows of wall of hers.
I mean, like one of.
The first things that I saw when we went going patrolling in the in the Karen villages, huh around the houzone of operation, is that there was absolutely no girl between the edge of eleven to the age of seventeen. I was, like, I asked you know, my my commander about it, and he says, yeah, like obviously if they if they stay us, they will be rapped by the tapmado and the first patrol like the first time they will will come.
You know.
So this this gives you a little bit of the tone of what they are about. They constantly ransom civilians when they don't model them, like you know, shell villages for norrision or because there had been an operation of the kind of a and they take revenge and who they can take revenge.
And with the civilians. You know, this is this is how they be. This is who they are basically.
The Topmadaw is a large army in many of the conscripts are hardly high speed operator types, but that hasn't stopped them from killing thousands of innocent civilians.
I mean they have as many army, different units with different military value. Let's say, uh, you know, many times the units that they stuck on hilltop in the middle of rebel zone are not like the most combative let's say, but sometimes you will get surprised resistance. But yeah, except for that, when.
They do.
An operation in in a place, they bring in like more elite troops let's.
Say, by contrast, the k n l A, the Karnean National Liberation Army and other e aos relied on civilian support to survive.
The CAN operates in in Karen territory and the civilians are karent. I mean, uh pretty much when we when we arrive in uh in a village as medics, you know that with us that take care of the population, distribute medicine.
Uh No, like I don't know what to tell me. Is like quite it's quite a funny accusation coming from the technolo.
This attitude has helped them, Per says, and they have always been open to non current recruits.
First of all, it is not absolutely not.
Let's say, some kind of ethnicist organization or ethno nationally it's like, you know, with some hate for I think group, including the Obama I think group that like traditionally you know are the leaders of the Tamadel that have been oppressing them for seventeen years. But they have absolutely no resentment. They are extremely open to work with Democrats, democratic forces from from every In fact, yes.
Since nineteen eighty eight, Per said, the k in l A had been willing to link up with democratic rebels providing them with training and shelter in order to further their shared goal of a federal and democratic country that treated all ethnicities with respect.
So PDFs.
So these rebels, let's say, also trended by the Karrents and also by people I know very well since it was my commander then Neda. So I've seen I've seen the Karrents. I've always been extremely accommodating to the Bama opposition, meaning the Bamara, the main ethnic group are I'd say this for you of people that might not know the difference. And so the Karens always add representation and they took like you know, political refugees, let's say, from inside the
Boma in the territories. The control manor prose was like the student association, which exact na my cantricle right now. But all these our organization of position. And so now they keep this tradition by helping the these new rebels of the PDF to get military training.
And yes, by the summer of twenty twenty, young people had fled into the jungles and many of them, even the ones of Burman ethnicity, were fighting alongside the Karin and Karni rebels. They'd previously seen as troublemakers and terrorists. Just a year or two before, we spoke with one of these people, Zahlin, who left his home in May of twenty twenty one.
There was students, friends, but also young people from just the neighborhood. Most people were just above twenty, a lot of somewhere single. You know, there's women as well, people who knew technology, young people from the from the technology computer coologists why Caauk University. A lot of these people who knew modern technology went into the jungle to go in the jungle to train and be able to overthrow the men online government. So there, it was very tiring.
We had to go up and down on lots of hills. It was two days of walking get there, so up and down the hills and back down, up and down until we got to the training plan.
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