Spent some time going down a rabbit hole on the FGC-9 this week. Whatever your politics on this, the engineering decisions alone are worth understanding — because they reveal exactly where the gaps are in how most countries regulate firearms.

The FGC-9 was built from the ground up to require no commercially manufactured or legally regulated firearm components under European Union law. Every pressure-bearing metal part can be sourced from a hardware store or fabricated in a kitchen.

This is the part that keeps regulators up at night. Most gun control frameworks target the serialized part — the receiver, the barrel, the NFA-regulated component. The FGC-9 was designed specifically around that assumption and then engineered to sidestep it entirely. You're not beating the law on a technicality here; you're rendering the regulatory chokepoint irrelevant by design.

Rather than requiring a machined commercial barrel — the component most likely to be regulated or tracked — the FGC-9's barrel is produced through electrochemical machining (ECM)... literally salt water.

I've spent time at the reloading bench trying to understand chamber pressures and barrel metallurgy well enough not to blow up a case. The idea that you can rifle a steel tube using salt water and household current and then chamber 9mm out of it is genuinely remarkable from a materials standpoint. Whether it holds up over a thousand rounds is a different conversation — but for the use case it was designed for, it doesn't need to.

Anti-junta rebel forces began manufacturing the MkII and MkII Stingray in small workshops and forward bases close to frontlines... fighters used the FGC-9 in hit-and-run ambushes on government forces, with the explicit tactical goal of capturing conventionally manufactured, higher-powered weapons from junta soldiers.

That's a tactically coherent doctrine — use what you can make to take what you can't. A 9mm carbine isn't the end state; it's the entry ticket. I've seen guys at club matches run PCC in USPSA and debate whether 9mm is "enough gun" for 25-yard steel. These fighters are answering that question in a very different context.

The release package included not just the print files but thorough, step-by-step construction documentation described by one source as comparable to an IKEA assembly booklet.

The IKEA comparison is doing a lot of work there — but the point is real. Complexity has always been the friction that kept improvised weapons marginal. Luty's SMG plans existed for decades and never scaled because the machining skill floor was too high. Dropping that floor to "can follow illustrated instructions" changes the math entirely.

For those of you who've worked with PCC builds or done any home gunsmithing — where do you think the actual skill floor is for something like this, and does the answer change how you think about the regulatory conversation?

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Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team