The Hoplite

PKC Glock with 3D-printed frame seized in Sydney, Australia

G. Hays & N.R. Jenzen-Jones The New South Wales Police force have charged a 32-year-old man in Sydney, Australia with firearms offences following a raid on a Newtown home on 22 September 2020. During the raid, a Glock-type self-loading pistol assembled using some 3D-printed components was seized along with a 3D printer, additional 3D-printed firearm

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ARES releases Research Report 11: Cartridges of Caracas

Armament Research Services (ARES) is pleased to announce the release of Research Report No. 11, Cartridges of Caracas: The illicit trade in small-calibre ammunition in Venezuela’s capital. Research Report 11 adds an analysis of ammunition to the information presented in Research Report 10, which looked a the online trade of small arms and light weapons

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Firearms Seized from Venezuelan Smugglers in Florida

Matthew Moss On 15 August 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers took two Venezuelan nationals into custody at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida. The two men were about to depart aboard a private jet loaded with a cache of firearms and ammunition. As a recent ARES report into the illicit online

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Firearm with 3D-printed frame recovered following police shooting in California

G. Hays & N.R. Jenzen-Jones On 18 June 2020, at approximately 1752 local time, 18-year-old Andres Guardado was fatally shot by a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) after allegedly drawing a firearm. The shooting took place in the 400 block of Redondo Beach Boulevard, in the unincorporated Gardena area, outside Los

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Multiple 3D-printed Firearms Seized in Sydney, Australia

G. Hays On Tuesday 11 August 2020, police in New South Wales, Australia executed a search warrant on a home in the Sydney suburb of St Marys following a yearlong investigation into the manufacture and supply of 3D-printed firearms to criminals across Sydney’s west. At the home, investigators arrested a 29-year-old man who was charged

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ARES releases Research Report 10: Black & Grey

Armament Research Services (ARES) is delighted to announce the release of Research Report No. 10, Black & Grey: The Illicit Online Trade of Small Arms in Venezuela. The culmination of a long-running investigation, Research Report 10 examines a new and thriving segment within Venezuela’s black-market arms trade, which has proliferated primarily through social media and

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Greek Elviemek prototype CS grenade

Kristóf Nagy & Paulos Skontzos Riot control agents (RCA)—colloquially described as ‘tear gas’—were introduced to the Hellenic Police in the 1960s, following the experience of members of their designated riot control units, Monades Apokatastasis Taksis (‘Units for the Reinstatement of Order’; MAT), who experienced the potential of such agents during training courses in the United

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Early Colt SP1 self-loading rifle in Venezuela

Pedro Pérez & Jonathan Ferguson An early Colt SP1 (Sporting Purpose model 1) rifle was recovered from a criminal group in Venezuela in the early hours of 21 November 2019.  A task force composed of personnel from Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas Penales y Criminalísticas (‘Scientific Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps’; CICPC) and Comando Nacional Antiextorsión

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Recoilless Weapons in Confined Spaces

Ryan Scheiblein Recoilless weapons are direct-fire guns distinguished by a system of operation in which propellant gases (or another counter-mass such as a powder or liquid) are expelled from the rear of the barrel in order to offset the recoil generated by forward momentum of the projectile. Many recoilless weapons have smoothbore barrels; however, several

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Polymer 3D-printed barrel successfully tested

G. Hays Following on from the release of the FGC-9 (see ARES Research Report No. 8 for details), development in the area of 3D-printed firearms components has been rapidly progressing. Recently, this was expressed in the testing of another novel semi-automatic firearm, in this case a .22 LR AR-style ‘pistol’ featuring a barrel entirely printed

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