Wired Revisits ‘Ghost Guns’ Following Luigi Magione, Still Shocked Their Legal

When Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I expected a massive push for federal “ghost gun” regulations. It seemed inevitable. I mean, a high-profile murder using a 3D-printed firearm? How could it not?

And yet, it didn’t. It seemed the anti-gunners were too busy celebrating the murder of a human being they disliked to bother calling for regulations. There were some, but they were mostly overlooked.

It really tells you a lot about these people, if we’re being honest.

Still, I expected it, and it seems Wired hasn’t forgotten its earlier fearmongering about the legality of making one’s own firearm. Instead, the writer who made a thing about it all those years ago decided to look at it again.

In the decade since I built my first ghost gun, several states have passed laws that would now make that experiment a felony. In New York, it’s now illegal to make a gun without a serial number. In New Jersey, even sharing printable gun files is forbidden. In California, where I made my AR-15, it’s now against the law to so much as sell a 3D printer “used solely or primarily for manufacturing firearms.”

Yet at the federal level, the legal regime around ghost guns remains far patchier. In 2022, the Biden-era Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) did ban “kits” designed to let anyone quickly make a ghost gun from the kind of 80 percent completed part I used in 2015. Gun advocates fought back, but the case was finally settled in March with a United States Supreme Court decision upholding the ban.

Despite that years-long legal battle, the ATF’s ban always applied only to components “readily convertible” into a gun. It says nothing about 3D-printed ghost gun frames fabricated out of thin air and spools of plastic filament.

All of that meant that the only real legal hurdle to my experiment in 3D printing a Glock-style ghost gun was a flight from New York to New Orleans, where a gun range on the east edge of the city had agreed to host me and my WIRED video colleagues as we built and test-fired the weapon. James Reeves, the owner of that range as well as a lawyer and gun-focused YouTuber, assured me that it would all be fully above board, so long as I was only making my ghost gun for my own use and not selling it or transferring it to anyone else. “It’s a free country down here in the great state of Louisiana,” Reeves said.

In fact, by removing an even easier way to circumvent gun control laws, the Supreme Court ruling on ghost gun kits may have only made 3D-printed guns more appealing, says Nick Suplina, a former prosecutor who now works as a gun control advocate at the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. Between 2016 and 2022, 70,000 ghost guns were found at crime scenes, according to the ATF, many of them likely made from kits. Now that the kits have been banned, Suplina says, 3D printing may be the next best thing for those seeking to build a firearm without encountering any gun control laws.

“You now have this huge marketplace of people who really want untraceable, unserialized firearms with no questions asked,” Suplina says. “They’re going to turn to 3D-printed guns and those that can supply them. 3D-printed guns are about to have their moment.”

Suplina can make that claim all he wants, but that’s his own biases getting in the way.

In the very next paragraph, the Wired writer outlines how much the parts he’d accumulated cost. It was over $1,100, well more than you’d pay for a brand new Glock or Smith & Wesson M&P. Economies of scale are a thing, after all. To be sure, part of this was that the author used parts recommended by YouTuber and 3D-printed gun influencer Print Shoot Repeat, or PSR. 

Because PSR recommended them, they’re probably pretty good parts, which tend to come with a higher price tag. Yet the cost of printing these guns, then making a profit off of them, means they’re not going to be super affordable for your average street thug.

Meanwhile, a stolen semi-auto may only run a few hundred dollars.

Since there are hundreds of thousands of them on the black market, if not millions, those are still going to be a lot more common among the criminal underclass.

The author then talks about the suppressor that Magione allegedly used in his assassination, and talks about the legality of printing one of those–he couldn’t do it, for example, Reeves had to handle that process entirely–and then he talks about the legality and how people do bad things with firearms like this, especially as PSR talks about being able to make these with some anonymity.

But don’t 3D-printed ghost guns offer that same anonymity and privacy to actual dangerous people who might otherwise not be allowed to obtain a deadly weapon, even in America? “I don’t love that people commit crimes and kill each other with guns. But we live in a country that’s relatively free,” PSR responded. “Freedom is, ultimately, dangerous.”

Damn right.

Freedom isn’t peaceful. Freedom isn’t necessarily pleasant and non-confrontational. Freedom is ugly and messy. Some people will abuse what’s available to do horrible things, things that aren’t permitted, but that they do anyway. If someone breaks the laws that absolutely everyone can agree are good and just, like those against robbery and murder, what good do regulations on other things do to thwart them?

Freedom can be dangerous, but I’ll take the dangers of freedom over any of the alternatives.

I don’t know that the author really understood that. He didn’t grok it, most likely.

Instead, the whole thing is about how he made the gun Mangione allegedly used and broke no laws in the process, but the truth of the matter is that Mangione wouldn’t have been stopped by a ban on privately made firearms. He could have bought a firearm at a local gun store without an issue. He likely made the gun because he worried about traceability–something he didn’t actually need to, as he didn’t drop the weapon after allegedly firing, and there’s no way for the police to trace a gun that isn’t in their possession anyway.

Yes, making these things is legal. So what?

The problem is that people seem to find that shocking.