[from WIRED magazine, link to the article at the bottom ]
This is my ghost gun. To quote the rifleman’s creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine. It’s called a “ghost gun”—a term popularized by gun control advocates but increasingly adopted by gun lovers too—because it’s an untraceable semiautomatic rifle with no serial number, existing beyond law enforcement’s knowledge and control. And if I feel a strangely personal connection to this lethal, libertarian weapon, it’s because I made it myself, in a back room of WIRED’s downtown San Francisco office on a cloudy afternoon.
I did this mostly alone. I have virtually no technical understanding of firearms and a Cro-Magnon man’s mastery of power tools. Still, I made a fully metal, functional, and accurate AR-15. To be specific, I made the rifle’s lower receiver; that’s the body of the gun, the only part that US law defines and regulates as a “firearm.” All I needed for my entirely legal DIY gunsmithing project was about six hours, a 12-year-old’s understanding of computer software, an $80 chunk of aluminum, and a nearly featureless black 1-cubic-foot desktop milling machine called the Ghost Gunner.
The Ghost Gunner is a $1,500 computer-numerical-controlled (CNC) mill sold by Defense Distributed, the gun access advocacy group that gained notoriety in 2012 and 2013 when it began creating 3-D-printed gun parts and the Liberator, the world’s first fully 3-D-printed pistol. While the political controversy surrounding the notion of a lethal plastic weapon that anyone can download and print has waxed and waned, Defense Distributed’s DIY gun-making has advanced from plastic to metal. Like other CNC mills, the Ghost Gunner uses a digital file to carve objects out of aluminum. With the first shipments of this sold-out machine starting this spring, the group intends to make it vastly easier for normal people to fabricate gun parts out of a material that’s practically as strong as the stuff used in industrially manufactured weapons.
In early May, I got a Ghost Gunner, the first of these rare CNC mills loaned to a media outlet, and I tried it out. I’m going to give away the ending: Aside from a single brief hardware hiccup, it worked remarkably well. In fact, the Ghost Gunner worked so well that it may signal a new era in the gun control debate, one where the barrier to legally building an untraceable, durable, and deadly semiautomatic rifle has reached an unprecedented low point in cost and skill.
But the Ghost Gunner represents an evolution of amateur gun-making, not a revolution. Homebrew gunsmiths have been making ghost guns for years, machining lower receivers to legally assemble rifles that fall outside the scope of American firearms regulations. In fact, when we revealed the Ghost Gunner’s existence last year, the comments section of my story flooded with critics pointing out that anyone can do the same garage gunsmithing work with an old-fashioned drill press.
I could hardly judge the fancy new CNC mill in WIRED’s office without trying that method too. Or for that matter, Defense Distributed’s previous trick, building gun parts with a 3-D printer. Before I realized exactly what I was getting into, I determined to try all three methods in a ghost-gun-making case study. I would build an untraceable AR-15 all three ways I’ve heard of: using the old-fashioned drill press method, a commercially available 3-D printer, and finally, Defense Distributed’s new gun-making machine.
The Ingredients of a Ghost Gun
Almost no one builds a ghost gun from scratch, and I didn’t either. The shortest path to building an untraceable AR-15 requires only that you build one relatively simple component yourself, a part that’s become the focus of a fierce gun control controversy: the lower receiver.
US gun regulations have focused on the lower receiver because it’s the essential core of a gun: It holds together the stock, the grip, the ammunition magazine, and the upper receiver, which includes the barrel and the chamber where the cartridge is detonated. As Doug Wicklund, senior curator at the NRA museum explained to me, the lower receiver always has carried the serial number because it’s the part that remains when the others wear out and are replaced. Like the frame of a bicycle or the motherboard of a computer, it’s the nucleus of the machine around which everything else is constructed.
It’s worth noting that buying an AR-15 in the US isn’t hard. But the privacy-minded—as well as those disqualified from gun purchases by criminal records or mental illness—can make their own lower receiver and purchase all of the other parts, which are subject to nearly zero regulation. I ordered every part of my AR-15 but the lower receiver from the website of Ares Armor, a Southern California gun seller that doesn’t require any personal information beyond a shipping address. If I wanted to hide my purchases from my credit card company, I could have paid in bitcoin—Ares accepts it.
There’s even a way to anonymously buy that highly regulated lower receiver—almost. Like many gun vendors, Ares sells what’s known as an “80 percent lower,” a chunk of aluminum legally deemed to be 80 percent of the way toward becoming a functional lower receiver. Because it lacks a few holes and a single precisely shaped cavity called the trigger well, it’s not technically a regulated gun part.
Machining the last 20 percent myself with a CNC mill or drill press would allow me to obtain a gun without a serial number, without a background check, and without a waiting period. I wouldn’t even have to show anyone ID. Law enforcement would be entirely ignorant of my ghost gun’s existence. And that kind of secrecy appeals to Americans who consider their relationship with their firearms a highly personal affair that the government should keep out of.
Controversy swelled around ghost guns when John Zawahri, an emotionally disturbed 23-year-old, used one to kill five people in Santa Monica in the summer of 2013. Even so, they haven’t been outlawed; buying or selling a ghost gun is illegal, but making one remains kosher under US gun control laws. California state senator Kevin Deleon introduced a bill to ban ghost guns last year, following the Santa Monica mass shooting. Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it a few months later.
But as the shouting match over ghost guns gets louder, few of the shouters have actually tried to make one. Even fewer have tried to test how the evolution of a new set of digital “maker” tools is changing that gun control question.
So over the course of one strange week in WIRED’s office, that’s what I set out to do. Here’s how it all went down...............
( if you are interested in all the details.... here is link to the full article: http://www.wired.com/2015/06/i-made-an-untraceable-ar-15-ghost-gun/ )
This is my ghost gun. To quote the rifleman’s creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine. It’s called a “ghost gun”—a term popularized by gun control advocates but increasingly adopted by gun lovers too—because it’s an untraceable semiautomatic rifle with no serial number, existing beyond law enforcement’s knowledge and control. And if I feel a strangely personal connection to this lethal, libertarian weapon, it’s because I made it myself, in a back room of WIRED’s downtown San Francisco office on a cloudy afternoon.
I did this mostly alone. I have virtually no technical understanding of firearms and a Cro-Magnon man’s mastery of power tools. Still, I made a fully metal, functional, and accurate AR-15. To be specific, I made the rifle’s lower receiver; that’s the body of the gun, the only part that US law defines and regulates as a “firearm.” All I needed for my entirely legal DIY gunsmithing project was about six hours, a 12-year-old’s understanding of computer software, an $80 chunk of aluminum, and a nearly featureless black 1-cubic-foot desktop milling machine called the Ghost Gunner.
The Ghost Gunner is a $1,500 computer-numerical-controlled (CNC) mill sold by Defense Distributed, the gun access advocacy group that gained notoriety in 2012 and 2013 when it began creating 3-D-printed gun parts and the Liberator, the world’s first fully 3-D-printed pistol. While the political controversy surrounding the notion of a lethal plastic weapon that anyone can download and print has waxed and waned, Defense Distributed’s DIY gun-making has advanced from plastic to metal. Like other CNC mills, the Ghost Gunner uses a digital file to carve objects out of aluminum. With the first shipments of this sold-out machine starting this spring, the group intends to make it vastly easier for normal people to fabricate gun parts out of a material that’s practically as strong as the stuff used in industrially manufactured weapons.
In early May, I got a Ghost Gunner, the first of these rare CNC mills loaned to a media outlet, and I tried it out. I’m going to give away the ending: Aside from a single brief hardware hiccup, it worked remarkably well. In fact, the Ghost Gunner worked so well that it may signal a new era in the gun control debate, one where the barrier to legally building an untraceable, durable, and deadly semiautomatic rifle has reached an unprecedented low point in cost and skill.
But the Ghost Gunner represents an evolution of amateur gun-making, not a revolution. Homebrew gunsmiths have been making ghost guns for years, machining lower receivers to legally assemble rifles that fall outside the scope of American firearms regulations. In fact, when we revealed the Ghost Gunner’s existence last year, the comments section of my story flooded with critics pointing out that anyone can do the same garage gunsmithing work with an old-fashioned drill press.
I could hardly judge the fancy new CNC mill in WIRED’s office without trying that method too. Or for that matter, Defense Distributed’s previous trick, building gun parts with a 3-D printer. Before I realized exactly what I was getting into, I determined to try all three methods in a ghost-gun-making case study. I would build an untraceable AR-15 all three ways I’ve heard of: using the old-fashioned drill press method, a commercially available 3-D printer, and finally, Defense Distributed’s new gun-making machine.
The Ingredients of a Ghost Gun
Almost no one builds a ghost gun from scratch, and I didn’t either. The shortest path to building an untraceable AR-15 requires only that you build one relatively simple component yourself, a part that’s become the focus of a fierce gun control controversy: the lower receiver.
US gun regulations have focused on the lower receiver because it’s the essential core of a gun: It holds together the stock, the grip, the ammunition magazine, and the upper receiver, which includes the barrel and the chamber where the cartridge is detonated. As Doug Wicklund, senior curator at the NRA museum explained to me, the lower receiver always has carried the serial number because it’s the part that remains when the others wear out and are replaced. Like the frame of a bicycle or the motherboard of a computer, it’s the nucleus of the machine around which everything else is constructed.
It’s worth noting that buying an AR-15 in the US isn’t hard. But the privacy-minded—as well as those disqualified from gun purchases by criminal records or mental illness—can make their own lower receiver and purchase all of the other parts, which are subject to nearly zero regulation. I ordered every part of my AR-15 but the lower receiver from the website of Ares Armor, a Southern California gun seller that doesn’t require any personal information beyond a shipping address. If I wanted to hide my purchases from my credit card company, I could have paid in bitcoin—Ares accepts it.
There’s even a way to anonymously buy that highly regulated lower receiver—almost. Like many gun vendors, Ares sells what’s known as an “80 percent lower,” a chunk of aluminum legally deemed to be 80 percent of the way toward becoming a functional lower receiver. Because it lacks a few holes and a single precisely shaped cavity called the trigger well, it’s not technically a regulated gun part.
Machining the last 20 percent myself with a CNC mill or drill press would allow me to obtain a gun without a serial number, without a background check, and without a waiting period. I wouldn’t even have to show anyone ID. Law enforcement would be entirely ignorant of my ghost gun’s existence. And that kind of secrecy appeals to Americans who consider their relationship with their firearms a highly personal affair that the government should keep out of.
Controversy swelled around ghost guns when John Zawahri, an emotionally disturbed 23-year-old, used one to kill five people in Santa Monica in the summer of 2013. Even so, they haven’t been outlawed; buying or selling a ghost gun is illegal, but making one remains kosher under US gun control laws. California state senator Kevin Deleon introduced a bill to ban ghost guns last year, following the Santa Monica mass shooting. Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it a few months later.
But as the shouting match over ghost guns gets louder, few of the shouters have actually tried to make one. Even fewer have tried to test how the evolution of a new set of digital “maker” tools is changing that gun control question.
So over the course of one strange week in WIRED’s office, that’s what I set out to do. Here’s how it all went down...............
( if you are interested in all the details.... here is link to the full article: http://www.wired.com/2015/06/i-made-an-untraceable-ar-15-ghost-gun/ )
. IMHO, what we need is better legislation dealing with people using/misusing guns (ie: come down hard on people using guns for crimes), not more criminalizing of people owning guns for legitimate purposes.
