Myanmar: Printing the Revolution, Part 2

We discuss the history of homemade guns in liberatory movements, and meet two fighters who battled the Burmese government.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is my Anne
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

(00:26):
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 shipload 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

(00:49):
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 technolo
ology 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

(01:09):
manufacturing capacity. Nations and peoples without the know how or
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

(01:33):
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 coach In China campaign of
eighteen sixty two. American Indians used wooden artillery to blast
settler fortifications in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds. In

(01:54):
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

(02:15):
for a K forty seven's 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've
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

(02:35):
ethnic groups that adopted as local enforces. Since most of
these places had never developed their own industrial base for
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

(02:56):
went out of their way to relocate it, along with
the profit a generation to the metropol All were reflected
on this in his novel Burmese Days, saying in the
eighteenth century, the Indians cast guns are at any rate
up to the European standard. Now after we've been in
India a hundred and fifty years. You can't make so

(03:16):
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 US Second Amendment
the robust gun culture that it spawned, but during the

(03:38):
higher colonialism, the English citizens are also free to arm themselves.
In 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 unrestricted at this point. The first change

(03:59):
to is came in 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 following the ball stric
Revolution in Russia. Across the ocean in Spain, where firearms

(04:20):
ownership was less strictly restricted, where all Well himself would
learn what it was to fire a rifle at someone
who shot back. Arm unions and working people served as
the only bullwalk to a military coup. In ninety six
in Madrid, one officer opened his armory to the union militious,
but another refused to hand over for the bolts for
the guns they had been issued. The Barcelona, where the

(04:44):
anarchists left, had a long tradition of armed political violence.
The coup was repelled by workers with guns, and the
general leading troops there was imprisoned and executed. The same
pattern played out all across the country in July, when
the military rose up to top of the electric government.
In the cities where the government opened the armories to

(05:06):
the people, the coup was repelled. In the cities where
the government did not, the coup succeeded. Reflecting on this
in nine or worldwide, the totalitarian states can do great things,
but there is one thing they cannot do. They cannot
give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to
take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That

(05:28):
rifle on the wall of the laborers cottage, working class flat.
It's a symbol of democracy. It's a job to see
that it's 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 nine and

(05:50):
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

(06:11):
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,

(06:34):
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. Looty published a book Expedient Homemade
Firearms the nine millimeter Submachine Gun in ninety eight through

(06:56):
Paladin Press. In the late nineteen nineties, Paladin was 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 Abram's tank. In
the United States. Nothing about Ludy'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

(07:20):
a pair of illegal home built guns were found on
his property. Ludy spent the rest of his life, which
ended in two thousand 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

(07:43):
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 and said to
cause offense by those very same speech police, who, on

(08:03):
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 offense to many people.
Loody never succeeded in sparking a renaissance in civilian arms
ownership in the UK, but his ideas were adopted by
organized criminal groups all around the world. In Brazil, looty

(08:24):
guns can go for as much as twenty five hundred dollars.
From two thousand eleven to two thousand twelve, nearly half
of the submachine guns seized by police and salpolo 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

(08:45):
rule of law. Looty guns have long been popular among
motorcycle gangs in Australia, and in October of two thousand nineteen,
a fascist terrorist carried out the last of that year's
eight Chan shootings in Halla, Germany with a Looty gun.
His weapons, thankfully did not work well. As a general rule,
Loody guns were never going to be of much use

(09:06):
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 Looty died two thousand twelve, a fellow
named Cody Wilson decided to carry on his work. Cody
felt three D printing carried the possibility of eventually manufacturing

(09:28):
arms of equality 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 Two. 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

(09:50):
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.

(10:10):
In two thousand thirteen, the first CAD gun file became
available online to everyone. It was downloaded more than a
hundred thousand times in two days. I'd like to quote
now from an article on the website three D Natives.
This prompted the U. S. Government to demand that Defense
Distributed removed the file from their site. What followed as
a legal battle between Cody Wilson and the U. S. Government,

(10:31):
consisting of back and forth lawsuits. It lasted five years
until in two thousand 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 deaf Cad website can access

(10:52):
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. Homemade firearms have been
federally legal in the United States since forever. The fighting
in the courts over all this has continued ever since,

(11:14):
and in two thousand nineteen, a federal judge and Seattle
temporarily blocked Deathcat. This sparked the creation of a new group,
Deterence 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 situation.

(11:34):
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

(11:56):
other craft methods that require some nohow but arguably us
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.

(12:23):
Me and Ma Burman before that set 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 tact organizations similar to
militias to form and drill, but they weren't allowed to

(12:44):
carry guns. Gun licenses under the dictatorship were issued primarily
to party members, but most revoked after failed pro democracy uprising.
The only civilians who were permitted to un armed with
the Chin, the nation's poorest ethnic group who rely on
guns to hunt for food. In many cases, these guns

(13:05):
were flintlocks that would not have looked that out of
place in the battlefield two centuries before. In practice, though,
things are very different. The current conflict is best seen
as a flare up in violence has been ongoing since
Britain left the country. In the Tapma door has consistently
used violence against marginalized ethnic groups in the country and

(13:27):
they have consistently taken up lands in response. But unlike
civil wars in the Middle East, wealthy nations in the
West have not been flooding me and male with weapons
for decades, and the various E A O S or
ethnic armed organizations have had to turn to much more
unorthodox routes to arm and equip themselves against the government.
To get a better idea of what things are like

(13:48):
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 Karen people in the early
two thousands. Yes, so the UH, the ammunition is a
constant problem. The shortage is absolutely permanent. And yes, there

(14:11):
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

(14:34):
kind of at the time, asking them, why we didn't
do more operations, Well, like we just can't afford it. Uh,
you know, uh, we just can't afford it. Like strictly
we we don't we we don't tell enough ammunition to
do any kind of uh of operation we need to.
So all the operations we did were always focused on

(14:58):
if we could capture some ammunition, if we could geture
like weapons, but especially immunition. Yeah, so there is you know,
that's that's the second source of of course of uh
of weapon. Uh. Let's say source is the is the

(15:19):
captures of course. Then the black market. The black market
used to be huge in Cambodia. I don't know what's
the situation now. It was in the nineties, it was
it was a bit of the Albania of some Systeia
at this time, right. And so there is also the

(15:42):
other ethnic groups that received sometime say a lot of
uh of of arms and ammunition from sponsors. Uh like
some of them, like the West Townies are sponsored by
Chick not so like their supplier of ammunition. It's pretty

(16:03):
good of of weapons. I think it's that cartio and stuff. Um.
Then there is other groups that also produced locally quite
good their own own arms light arms usually, so yeah,

(16:26):
these are the different sources of welcomes to the OA
in in the time I was there. In the early
weeks of the protests. Once have a claim 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 both and arrows. It was

(16:47):
incredibly brave, but it wasn't very effective. By the twenty
eight so march protesters are taken a step First, a
group calling itself the Clay Civil Army set up barricades
and defended them using pressurized air rifles that fired marbles
and bicycle wheelbearings. The rifles all used the same design

(17:08):
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

(17:29):
military patrols and they took four police hostage. Then they
exchanged them for nine incarcerated protesters, but nearly April, the
Tapmador returned to the protest camp in Calais 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,

(17:52):
a neighborhood villager who battled the regime's forces told the Irrawaddy,
a local paper. The air guns spread around the county
real quickly. To avoid surveillance, protesters talked about cooking up
Berrianny on telegram channels, and what they meant was desperately
scaring the internet for a way to fight back and
finding a way to make an air rifle out of
a beautyane canister, a pipe and a cigarette lighter, combined

(18:17):
with fireworks and smoke bombs made of potassium nitrate. The
air rifle gaves protest is 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

(18:40):
war they face. But now they know this is a
fight to the death and more destruction. After a fire
raged in Pgdalgon 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

(19:04):
policy of scorched Even the Tatmadau makes its own weapons,
a highly unusual move for a relatively small nation. Totmadaw
troops and police can be seen with a bewildering array

(19:24):
of indigenously produced copies of M sixteen s ouzies and
even five or five six Galil pattern A K style rifles,
as well as in 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 uprisings, in the military offered concessions to China

(19:45):
in return for more advanced weapons. They got them, but
it didn't stop China from also supplying ethnic armed organizations
e a o s 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, homemade air rifles and shotguns seemed
to have been relatively commonplace before the start of the conflict,

(20:07):
and they were mostly used for hunting. The country has
also covered with land mines, which the e a O
s used a great effect against the Totmadaw. We spoke
to Pierre, a former combatant with the Karin who no
longer lives in Myanmar. 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 produce

(20:28):
a lot of uh non mines, that's uh that's produced
at the base. Yes, with like you know, very very
lot of systems with a little bit of of type
of plastic explosive cople of bomboom for contactors and like batield.

(20:49):
That's it. Pellet guns are not good for combat and
e a os mostly relied on weapons imported from Thailand,
India or China. Overwhelmingly these were a K or In
sixteen pattern rifles. Yeah, mostly in my and the units
have been there is probably a majority of a K

(21:09):
platforms in this time. Yes, yeah, definitely. I mean it's
more reliable and you know, simple to operate. It's very
adapted to the to the to the type of gala
it was. It was quite correct. I mean I swee

(21:30):
from the moment that I switched to a case at
least because at first I tried to use this scarperency M.
Sixteen and it was a nightmare of malfunctions. So I
switched back to a case, which is the whether you
best know and used or my ideas doesn't have this.

(21:57):
I never really had any any malfunction with the is
maybe one time. It's a forty lot of communition, but
let's see, not really the rifle includ the fight, Pierre says,
has never been restricted to the battlefield for the top
medalf violence against civilians as part of their four cuts
doctrine that cuts off funding, food, intelligence, and recruits for
the E a O. S Now they are moving that

(22:19):
same outlook to the cities like literally uh literally bide
by absolutely no laws of well ass. I mean like
one of the first things that I saw when we
went going battle and in the in the Karen villages,

(22:40):
huh around the house one of operation is that there
was absolutely no girl between the age of eleven to
the age of seventeen. I was like, I asked, you know,
my my uh commander about it. And he says yeah,

(23:03):
like obviously if they if they stay as they will
be repped by the model and the first patron 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 ransome civilians when
they don't model them, like you know, shell villages for

(23:27):
no reason or because there had been an operation of
the can and they take revenge and who's the cantach
evenge and the civilians. You know, this is this is
how the b This is who they are. Basically, the
top Metal is a large army and many of the
conscripts are hardly high speed operator types, but that hasn't

(23:47):
stopped them from killing thousands of innocent civilians. I mean
they have as many army defferent units with different military value.
Uh let's say, uh, you know, um many times the
units that they stuck on hilltop in the middle of

(24:12):
rebel zone are not like the most combative let's say,
but sometimes you will get sur highed resistance. But yeah,
except of that, when they to UH an operation in
UH in a place they bringing like more troops, let's say.

(24:37):
By contrast, the K and L A the Karni National
Liberation Army and other e aos relied on civilian support
to survive. The Canada operates in uh In karen uh
territory and the civilians are Karen. I mean pretty much

(24:57):
when we when we arrive in uh in a village.
As as medics, you know that with us that the
kind of the population distribute medicine. Uh, No, like I
don't know what it was like quite uh it's quite
a funny acquisition coming from the technology. This attitude has

(25:20):
helped them pierces and they have always been open to
noncurrent recruits. First of all, it is not absolutely not um,
let's say, some kind of ethnicist or organization or ethno
nationalist like you know, with some hate for US. I
think group including the Obama ethnic group that like traditionally

(25:42):
you know is the is our the leaders of the
model that have been oppressing them for seventy years. But
they have absolutely no resentment that are extremely open to
work with the Democrats, democratic forces from from every pop Yes.
Since nine said the k and l A had been

(26:04):
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 PDF. So these Obama rebels, let's say,
uh so trained by the currents and so by people
I know very well since it was my commander. Then

(26:26):
never so I've seen, I've seen the currents. I've always
been extremely accommodating to the Obama opposition, meaning the Obama
the Man ethnic group. I'd say this for me for
people that might not know the difference. So and so,

(26:49):
the currents always had representation and they took like you know,
political refugees. Let's say from a fromer inside the Boma
in the territor is the control monoplose, I was like
the students Association, exact name, I contricle right now. But

(27:13):
all these are organization of position. And so now they
keep this tradition by helping the UH these new rebels
of the PDF to get military training. And yes, by
the summer of young people had flooded into the jungles,

(27:34):
and many of them, even the ones of Burman ethnicity.
We're fighting alongside the Karin and Karenni rebels. They had
previously seen as troublemakers and terrorists. Just a year or
two before we spoke with one of these people, Zall Lynn,
who left his home in May. There was students, friends,
but also young people from just the neighborhood. Most people

(27:56):
were just above twenty, a lot of somewhere single. You know.
There's women as well, people who new technology, young people
from the from the technology computer uh apologists why called university.

(28:18):
A lot of these people who knew modern technology went
into the jungle too, go into councle to train and
be able to overthrow the men online government. So there
was 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

(28:40):
and back down, up and down until we got to
the training plan. It could happen here as a production
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(29:02):
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