The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has renewed the debate over "ghost guns," according to some news reports. More accurately, the usual control freaks are using the killing as a convenient hook on which to hang their authoritarian arguments. While there's plenty to find horrifying in this crime, that alleged murderer Luigi Mangione made his weapon using a 3D printer isn't one of them, no matter that a few people see in the act an opportunity to advance restrictive legislation.
"The homemade handgun and suppressor that police say was used in last week's killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive is intensifying the debate over the growing presence of such firearms in the U.S.," Cameron McWhirter, Jacob Gershman, and John West reported for The Wall Street Journal.
"The Maine Gun Safety Coalition is asking state lawmakers to ban ghost guns after an untraceable firearm was used by the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter," added AnnMarie Hilton of the Maine Morning Star.
Hilton clarified that "firearms known as 'ghost guns' do not have a serial number as they are usually constructed at home with a kit or with the assembly of separate pieces. They could also be made with a 3D printer."
'Ghost Guns': Misunderstood and Resistant to Regulation
Mentions of 3D-printed firearms seem to set people off, as if printers spit out guns like Star Trek replicators. So does the word "kit," creating the impression that people go on Amazon, order packages of gun parts, and assemble working firearms as if they're putting together flat-packed shelving units. I ran into that misconception when I showed a home-built AR-15 to friends. They asked, "So you just put together a kit?" and were astonished to learn the project required drilling and milling in my workshop.
Kits package together some unregulated parts. But the mechanism that makes a gun go "bang" is regulated and must either pass through the same channels as a commercially manufactured firearm or else be constructed from scratch or from unfinished blanks. That's not necessarily difficult, but it means there's really no magic legislative wand that can be waved to make DIY guns disappear.
After the high-profile assassination of a political figure in 2022, Reuters' Ju-min Park and Daniel Leussink reported, "the man suspected of killing former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe with a hand-made gun on Friday could have made the weapon in a day or two after obtaining readily available materials such as wood and metal pipes, analysts say. The attack showed gun violence cannot be totally eliminated even in a country where tough gun laws mean it is nearly unheard of for citizens to buy or own firearms."
The weapon the assassin used in Japan was a crude but effective two-shot firearm that looked more like an old-fashioned zip gun than the 3D-printed pistol used to kill Thompson. But while not pretty, it was just as effective.
In 2019, TheFirearmBlog published a retrospective pointing out that during the zip gun heyday in the 1950s, "a mechanically inclined youngster might upon obtaining ammunition, most often widely available .22 rimfire, find that such rounds will fit into a section of suitably sized steel tubing, often a section of the salvaged car radio antenna. From then on it is a simple matter of fabricating a means of striking the rear of the cartridge while ensuring the entire assembly is held firmly together." The article included photographs of homemade firearms discovered in the tightly controlled confines of prisons, crafted by inmates from found materials including pipes and plumbing fittings.
DIY Guns Have Existed as Long as Firearms
A 2018 Small Arms Survey report on improvised and craft-produced weapons noted that such "weapons have been manufactured for as long as firearms have existed, typically by hand or in small workshops." Among the weapons manufactured by craft producers, the authors noted, are "mortars, recoilless guns, and grenade launchers."
Revisiting the subject last year in the context of Europe, Small Arms Survey noted that evolving technologies make it much easier to share plans for privately manufactured firearms and to create sophisticated devices at home without specialized skills.
"If production technologies continue to improve and proliferate, [privately made firearms] will increasingly erode the effectiveness of export controls and other key elements of national and international small arms control regimes, and may eventually pose an existential threat to these regimes," warned the authors.
The production technologies referenced in the report included 3D printing, as well as CNC machining, in which computer programs guide tools. But at least as important is the internet itself, which allows enthusiasts to share designs, techniques, and experience. That eases the development of plans for sophisticated firearms that are highly resistant to government restrictions.
In September, Lizzie Dearden and Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote for The New York Times about the worldwide proliferation of designs for the FGC-9, a partially 3D-printed weapon that can "be built entirely from scratch, without commercial gun parts, which are often regulated and tracked by law enforcement agencies internationally."
As one expert told the reporters: "Now you have something that people can make at home with unregulated components. So from a law enforcement perspective, how do you stop that?"
You Can't Stop the Signal
You can't stop that. That's always been the motivation of those who design and build what have variously been called "improvised," "craft-produced," and "privately manufactured" firearms and are now referred to in the U.S. as "ghost guns." People make their own guns because they want them and somebody in power seeks to prevent them from possessing weapons. The result has inevitably been people who arm themselves in defiance of the law, using whatever tools and materials are available.
The murder of Brian Thompson would have been no less horrible if the weapon was a legally purchased firearm, a knife, an incendiary device, a club, or any other of the many means of destruction humans have historically wielded against one another. The fault lies with the criminal, not the tool.
And people, being clever and defiant towards authority, will always gain access to forbidden objects that they want, including weapons. They'll do so even if they have to manufacture them at home.
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