These guns are self-assembled and. Ghost guns, I'd also have to say that the number is very low. Criminals have chosen a life of crime because they are too lazy to work and building a ghost gun is work. To get away with a crime, criminals look for completely untraceable guns. Enter the “ghost” gun: an exact replica with a fake serial number and no ballistic. I Made an Untraceable AR- 1. 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.
AR15 80% Percent Lower Receiver. The Ghost Guns Flagship Billet AR15 80% Lower Receiver - is a step above. 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- 1. 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 1. Ghost Gunner. The Ghost Gunner is a $1,5. CNC) mill sold by Defense Distributed, the gun access advocacy group that gained notoriety in 2. 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- 1. 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. All the components of my AR- 1. The shortest path to building an untraceable AR- 1. 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. My AR- 1. 5’s homemade lower receiver. 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- 1. 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 “8. Because it lacks a few holes and a single precisely shaped cavity called the trigger well, it’s not technically a regulated gun part. Making one remains kosher under US gun control laws. Machining the last 2. 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 2. Santa Monica in the summer of 2. 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. The drill press, jigs and vise I used in my first attempt to finish an 8. Unsurprisingly, this portion of my gunsmithing experiment didn’t go well. Step one: Acquire a drill press, a massive stand- alone drill meant to cut the aluminum features out of my 8. One $2. 50 rental fee later, two colleagues helped me haul a drill nearly 6 feet tall down to our building’s loading dock, a dark and chilly concrete space occupied by a pair of large Dumpsters. I’d paid Ares $9. I use with the drill press to do the job. I paid another $1. I tried to mill and drill precise shapes. All that planning and spending, it turned out, couldn’t compensate for my utter lack of even high- school- level shop skills. Before I’d even begun, I realized I had the wrong sort of vise, and we had to drive an hour and drop $8. Then there was the drilling itself—which, it would turn out, is not as easy as it looks on the Internet. I reviewed my lower- receiver drilling basics on You. Tube one last time, put on latex gloves and eye protection, screwed the steel jigs around my slug of aluminum, tightened the clamps, and hit the chunky green power button. As the drill bit chewed into the block, I felt a rush of excitement and tasted fine aluminum dust between my teeth. The bit threw off metal shavings and left behind a gleaming, polished crater. But my elation faded as I realized how badly I was mangling the trigger well. No matter how hard I cinched it down, the vise shuddered constantly, moving the aluminum piece. The holes I was cutting veered off until they were practically diagonal. When I switched to the end mill to clean up the spaces between the pits I’d created, I found they were mostly at different depths: The drill bit had somehow moved up and down, and I hadn’t noticed. The bottom of the cavity I’d made began to resemble the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, the massive machine protested loudly, shaking like a train about to derail. Throughout this ordeal, WIRED video producer Patrick Farrell, a former bike mechanic who probably could have offered helpful advice, watched me struggle from behind his camera with a restrained smirk. The unwritten rule: I was in this alone. I kept at it for five and a half hours. Then the head of the drill press—the part that holds the bit, which I’d later learn is called the “chuck”—fell off. I had no idea whether this was supposed to happen as a kind of fail- safe, or if I had destroyed an expensive piece of equipment rented with Farrell’s credit card. I screwed the chuck back in, and after a few more minutes of metal- on- metal violence, it dropped off again. I had nothing to show for my labor but a sad metal block scarred by a maze of crooked channels. Well, that and a left hand bristling with tiny aluminum shards where my latex glove had split. A 3- D printed lower receiver on the print bed of a Makerbot Replicator. It felt like the elevator was a time machine shortcutting about a century of technological progress. I plugged in the 3- D printer, followed a series of delightfully idiotproof instructions, and in minutes was test- printing a tiny white coffee table. Soon I was ready to start making gun parts; no obscure You. Tube instruction videos, calipers, jigs, or aluminum splinters required. I found the blueprint for a printable, reinforced AR- 1. The Pirate Bay. It was one of dozens of gun parts available for download in the rogue Bit. Torrent repository’s “physibles” section, a part of the site presciently created in 2. In fact, the file I downloaded had been created by Defense Distributed in 2. State Department threatened to prosecute the group’s staff for weapons- export- control violations. It took a few minutes to torrent the lower receiver file. I opened it in Makerbot’s printing application, centered it on the app’s digital representation of the machine’s print bed, and clicked print. The printer’s motors began to whir, and within seconds its print head was laying out extruded white plastic in a flat structure that vaguely resembled the body of a semiautomatic rifle.
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