// THE VERGE — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Are you ready for what it takes to stop ghost guns?
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
New laws in California and New York might stop anyone from 3D printing guns — and create entirely new kinds of surveillance.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
In the summer of 2024, former Army National Guard member Andrew Scott Hastings spent a sweaty afternoon carefully packing boxes with parts he made using his 3D printer. These weren’t novelty figurines or replacement Ikea pieces. The boxes were instead filled with a handful of homemade firearm lower receivers and more than 100 “switches,” small devices capable of converting a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic weapon. Their intended recipients, federal prosecutors allege, were al-Qaida operatives.
Months later ATF agents busted two men in Colorado Springs for allegedly using 3D printers to churn out hundreds of illegal machine gun conversion devices as a part of a DIY black market. To avoid detection the duo allegedly stuffed their products into Lego boxes and shipped them to buyers across the country.
There was, however, no recent case that thrust 3D-printed guns — a type of untraceable “ghost gun” — back into the public consciousness quite like the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Suspected gunman Luigi Mangione, then 26, allegedly shot Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel using a partially 3D-printed Glock-style frame and a 3D-printed silencer, otherwise known as a suppressor, the latter of which would otherwise require months of federal paperwork to obtain legally.
3D-printed guns have been around for over a decade. Cody Wilson, a self-described crypto anarchist, created the first functional printed firearm in 2013, and lawmakers and courts have tussled with how to rein them in ever since. Those efforts largely targeted the gun files themselves and the websites that hosted them, but courts have (with some exceptions) repeatedly treated gun code as a form of protected speech, frustrating gun control advocates at every turn. Though many states have passed laws specifying who can print or share gun files, they are notoriously difficult to actually enforce.
Today, almost anyone with a printer, internet access, and enough patience can browse file-sharing sites and attempt to make their own gun.
But a new volley of legislation progressing in California and New York aims to shake up that stalemate by moving regulation from the files to the machines themselves, requiring 3D printers to employ blueprint scanning “print blocker” software that, in theory, would detect gun files and stop the print before it starts. It’s essentially taking the long-running debate over online content moderation and translating it to the physical world.