Cody Wilson, famous for making and popularizing the first
3D-printed plastic handgun (I
profiled him at length in Reason‘s December 2013
issue), and his group Defense Distributed today debuted their
latest provocation aimed at making gun possession easier, cheaper,
and most importantly more outside the totalizing view of the
state.
Wilson and his team were inspired by
a proposed law that passed the California House and Senate but
which Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed yesterday. The law, known as the
“ghost gun” bill, would have banned guns without serial numbers
filed with the government of any sort, as well as forcing those who
do make homemade weapons to go through new procedures and
background checks and getting federal Department of Justice
approval before doing so.
Essentially, the bill would ban making a gun that the state
didn’t know about and mark. (Nick Gillespie
blogged about the ghost gun bill here last
month.)
The LA Times
reported Brown’s surprisingly sensible statement on vetoing the
bill, pushed forward by Democratic state Rep. Kevin de
Leon: “I appreciate the author’s concerns about
gun violence, but I can’t see how adding a serial number to a
homemade gun would significantly advance public safety.” Exactly
right, Gov. Brown.
To show exactly how right Brown was, and to educate any other
state legislature that might contemplate following in de Leon’s
footsteps, Wilson and his Defense Distributed team launched a
website today called GhostGunner.net.
Through it they are selling a tabletop milling machine which
can, quoting from their
FAQ, “manufacture any mil-spec 80% AR-15 lower receiver that
already has the rear take down well milled out. ….Lowers with
non-mil-spec trigger guards that are otherwise mil-spec are also
compatible. Defense Distributed recommends using the 7075 Ares
Armor Raw 80% Lower AR-15 Billet.”
Wilson launched the project in response to de Leon’s bill, to
“the rhetoric developed out of California of
detectability as the norm, of the observability of everything to
the modern state. This guy de Leon defined as a ‘ghost’ something
not intelligible to the state and that’s a perfect way of talking
about it. So this device will cut aluminum and it’s good at
finishing an 80 percent lower receiver for an AR-15 in under an
hour.” (Roughly, the ATF declares any lower receiver that is
more than 80 percent complete as an actual gun subject to
all regulations on actual guns.)
Wilson waited to see what Brown would do with the bill
before publicly launching; he’s convinced that had they gone live
this time yesterday that Brown’s office might have been scared into
signing the ghost gun bill that Brown instead vetoed.
Wilson has always, as detailed in my 2013 profile, seen
his actions as a complicated dance of reactions to what his
controlling opponents do, and he generally understands what they
will then do in reaction to him. “We decided
we have to give them that world they are about
with [de Leon’s ghost gun bill], to create the problem they are
talking about, to give that problem to them,” Wilson
says.
Laws like de Leon’s, Wilson thinks, offer a “preferred
regulatory landscape that’s predicated on all the things that the
digital manufacturing revolution” has made easier by an order of
magnitude, not being as easy to get around as they
actually are. Wilson just wants to remind controllers they don’t
live in the world they think they live in, a world where a mere law
will actually stop something they perceive as a problem: someone
having a tool of self-defense about that is not visible and
regulatable by the state.
The Ghost Gunner website FAQ has further technical details on
how the tabletop device works, and this comment on the current
legality of using it:
Semi-automatic firearms, including the AR-15 lower receivers,
are generally legal to manufacture for private individuals per US
federal law Title 18 do not require serialization or other maker’s
marks. However, some states/municipalities restrict either the
manufacture of certain firearms, or, more recently, the personal
manufacture of a firearm with a 3D printer and/or CNC machine. DD
makes no claim regarding local manufacturing legality; lower
receiver files provided by Defense Distributed might require
special licensing to manufacture and/or possess.Under federal law, manufacturing a firearm for contemplation of
future sale without an FFL is prohibited. Without a manufacturing
FFL, you should manufacture firearms for personal use only. There
are methods to legally transfer ownership of personally
manufactured firearms, but they do not apply when the original
manufacturing intent is to build a firearm for commercial or
non-personal use. Recent ATF determinations have signaled that
allowing others use of your CNC equipment may itself constitute
manufacturing, therefore Defense Distributed advises GhostGunner
owners to neither print firearms for other individuals, nor allow
other individuals to use their GhostGunner to manufacture
firearms.
You can pre-order the device for
$1199 now (the earlier $999 price already sold out), and they
promise holiday delivery.
Andy Greenberg at
Wired wrote
about it this morning. Excerpt that nicely sums up
why making a homemade “lower receiver” for a rifle is such a big
deal:
A lower receiver is the body of the gun that connects its stock,
barrel, magazine and other parts. As such, it’s also the
rifle’s most regulated element. Mill your own lower receiver
at home, however, and you can order the rest of the parts from
online gun shops, creating a semi-automatic weapon with no serial
number, obtained with no background check, no waiting period or
other regulatory hurdles.
Greenberg also quotes Wilson explaining why he’s moved from
plastic 3D weapons to metal milled ones in his latest project:
[Wilson’s] switch from 3-D printing to CNC milling metal
makes the ubiquitous creation of usable, lethal weapons one
step more practical . “3-D printing [guns] was about signaling
the future. This is about the present,” he says. “You can use this
machine today to create something to the standards you’re used
to…The gold standard of the gun community is metal.”
The promotional video for the project, in classic Wilson style,
uses only the words of Rep. de Leon and an ATF agent and the music
of Satie, and features the look of an arty horror flick to both
scare the squares and hep the aware to the fact that no matter what
the state thinks it can do to stop you from owning guns, ingenuity
and technology and indomitable will can get around their efforts.
(Favorite touches: the glowing pig mask over a light fixture, and
the mixture of a shadowy figure reading in a dark room with the
Ghost Gunner and a gun on a table):
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