![]() Then there was the drilling itself-which, it would turn out, is not as easy as it looks on the Internet. ![]() Before I'd even begun, I realized I had the wrong sort of vise, and we had to drive an hour and drop $80 to pick up another one. ![]() Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it a few months later.Īs the drill bit chewed into the block, I tasted fine aluminum dust between my teeth.Īll that planning and spending, it turned out, couldn't compensate for my utter lack of even high-school-level shop skills. California state senator Kevin Deleon introduced a bill to ban ghost guns last year, following the Santa Monica mass shooting. 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. 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.Ĭontroversy 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. Law enforcement would be entirely ignorant of my ghost gun’s existence. ![]() 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. Making one remains kosher under US gun control laws. 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.īuying or selling a ghost gun is illegal. Like other CNC mills, the Ghost Gunner uses a digital file to carve objects out of aluminum. 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. 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 20 when it began creating 3-D-printed gun parts and the Liberator, the world’s first fully 3-D-printed pistol. 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. Still, I made a fully metal, functional, and accurate AR-15. I have virtually no technical understanding of firearms and a Cro-Magnon man’s mastery of power tools. 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. 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. To quote the rifleman's creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
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