Philip Luty

Philip A. Luty (1965 - 8 April 2011 at Tinshill) was an English author, activist, and gunsmith

Life

Philip Luty grew up on a farm in West Yorkshire, England. He campaigned for the free possession of firearms and published instructions on self-built fully automatic weapons that can be produced by simple metalworking. Luty understood his work as a protest against the British government's prohibition of full and semi-automatic weapons. Luty was charged with illegal arms construction in the late 1990s and sentenced to four years in prison.In the United States, the organisation Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) campaigned for Luty's release.

In 2009, another charge was made after an armed anti-terrorist unit searched Luty's home in May 2009. Luty was subsequently tried for violating the Terrorism Act 2000. In particular, he was accused of "creating records that could be of use to a person who wants to commit or prepare a terrorist attack". Also, he had a collection of tubes "screwed together make an object from which a cartridge can be unloaded with a bullet." On 8 April 2011, Luty died after a prolonged, serious illness of cancer. The ongoing criminal case was ended because of his death.

He had also been the prime suspect in a campaign of harassment against a local charity and property developer in Cookridge from 2006 to 2009. He was arrested for criminal damage incidents but was released due to a lack of evidence. The Canadian magazine Vice sees in Philip Luty a predecessor of Cody Wilson: "Despite the decades and thousands of miles separating them, the extremists Luty and Wilson are sharing the same conviction: the possession or the ability to produce firearms is a fundamental right that allows citizens to remain strong against their government."

After Luty's death, the Libertarian Party published a funeral notice on their homepage ″Sad to announce the death of Philip A Luty. If you don't know who he was, he was repeatedly persecuted by the authorities and was arrested by armed British police and thrown into jail for nine weeks for writing a book." And the notice ends with the warning: "Don’t download anything from his website or they might come for you too..." . Luty's weapons, which have been labelled as being illegally built, have been found in raids in the West Bank, US suburbs, and South America.

Miscellaneous

National Firearms Centre

Two copies of the Luty SMG 9mm Parabellum are part of the collection of the British National Firearms Centre (NFC) and are exhibited in Leeds at the Royal Armouries Museum. The National Firearms Centre goes back to the English Charles I, who set up a weapons workshop in the Tower of London in 1631 and started to build a state-owned firearms collection.

Publications

• P.A. Luty: Expedient Homemade Firearms – The 9 mm Submachine Gun. Paladin Press, 1998, ISBN 9780873649834
• P.A. Luty: A Threat to Freedom of Speech in England. The Libertarian Enterprice, no 313, 3 April 2005