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The Ghost Gunner has been updated to allow the CNC milling of a much more popular and accessible form of firearm: a handgun:
For the past five years, Cody Wilson has applied every possible advance in digital manufacturing technology to the mission of undermining government attempts at gun control. First he created the world's first 3-D printed gun, a deadly plastic weapon anyone could print at home with a download and a few clicks. Then he started selling a computer-controlled milling machine designed to let anyone automatically carve out the body of an untraceable AR-15 from a semifinished chunk of aluminum, upgrading his provocations from plastic to metal. Now his latest advance in home firearm fabrication allows anyone to make an object designed to defy the most basic essence of gun control: A concealable, untraceable, and entirely unregulated metal handgun.
On Sunday, Wilson's gun rights advocacy group, Defense Distributed, announced a new release of software for his computer-controlled milling machine known as the Ghost Gunner. The new code allows the 1-foot-cubed tabletop machine—which uses a spinning bit to carve three-dimensional shapes with minute precision—to not only produce untraceable bodies of AR-15s but to carve out the aluminum frame of an M1911 handgun, the popular class of semiautomatic pistols that includes the Colt 45 and similar weapons. Wilson says he plans to follow up soon with software for producing regulation-free Glocks and other handgun models to follow.
Wilson's goal now, he says, is to do for small arms what Defense Distributed did for AR-15s when it first released the $1,500 Ghost Gunner milling machine exactly three years ago to the day: Give people the ability to make a lethal weapon at home with no regulation whatsoever.
This story came out before the mass shooting in Las Vegas, on the third anniversary of the initial release of the Ghost Gunner, just in case you were wondering.
Also at Ars Technica:
"It's a certain type of person who builds and enjoys an AR-15—that's a lot of gun, and most people don't feel the need to have a big ol' battle rifle," Wilson says. "But we believe lots of people are interested in the conversation about an untraceable, concealable handgun. It's been on the roadmap the whole time for this project. It's just always been a question of how we get there, and it ended up being very, very difficult—kinda like the brass ring of the project, if you will."
Previously: FedEx Refuses to Ship Defense Distributed's Ghost Gunner CNC Mill
Man Who Used CNC Mill to Manufacture AR-15 "Lowers" Sentenced to 41 Months
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:17PM (38 children)
This guy Wilson is an ideologue.
He's basically trolling, as I do not see his efforts leading in any practical way to guns for those who "need" them. Way too expensive.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:48PM (16 children)
Is it? This CNC mill has been priced at $1200 to $1775 today [ghostgunner.net] (including $100 shipping). CNC mills can easily go for $2k+.
How large/expensive of a block of aluminum is needed to make one handgun?
How much more value would "you" assign to an "untraceable" handgun?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:58PM (8 children)
Well, the other matter is that sure, to make one gun, the Ghost Gunner is quite pricey. However, what happens when you want to make 10-20 to arm your neighborhood? As far as I'm aware, with Nevada and Texas law (maybe others, and IANAL), this would be legal, as third party sale of used guns is allowed without any paperwork required. Even if you can't sell them, you can rent out time on your machinery so they could make their own, which obviously accomplishes the same end.
Heck, this machine could be purchased for a maker space and end up being potentially cheaper than just buying the guns by the time you've milled about 20-50 guns. And as was pointed out, they're untraceable (or at least, harder to trace). For better or worse, that's value added for many people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:18PM
I forgot to mention that the cost could be spread over multiple guns. As for the maker/hackerspace getting one, it seems plausible. You can use it to mill other stuff. You could slap a sticker over the Ghost Gunner logo to avoid offending someone's sensibilities.
https://www.midweststeelsupply.com/store/7075aluminumplate [midweststeelsupply.com]
I plugged 1.5" x 5" x 9" in and got about $50. Not sure if those measurements are correct but eh. The AR-15 80% lowers are sold for $65 on the Ghost Gunner site, and a Wired writer made the AR-15 lower receiver for $80.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:57PM (5 children)
In the USA each person can legally make up to three unregistered firearms per year, so long as you don't sell them before two years from the date of manufacture. Any more than that, or if you sell them sooner, and the BATF will conclude that you made them for the purpose of sale, which is not legal without a firearms manufacturer license. If you, your spouse, and your multiple children each make three, that's a fair number.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @09:00PM (4 children)
I smell an arbitrary restriction in violation of the Second Amendment.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 03 2017, @10:09PM
That isn't a matter of law; as with many things in the US it's a matter of precedence. That's where the BATF decided to draw the line between "making for personal use" and "manufacturing", since "obviously" no "reasonable person" would want to make more than three per year for personal use.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:16AM (2 children)
Flamebait? Come on mods - it isn't flamebait, despite the fact that I disagree with AC.
The second amendment guarantees our right to own and to bear arms. One phrase, "well regulated militia" stands out. Obviously, if I can build and keep three guns per year WITHOUT any regulation, then in a few years, I can have a real arsenal. Basically, the regulation only separates the hobbyist from a commercial operation. If I'm building ten guns per year, or a hundred, then I'm probably selling them for profit.
You can argue the number as being arbitrarily low - it might be reasonable to set the number at twelve. But it is also reasonable to presume that high volume production indicates a commercial operation, and gubbermint reserves the right to regulate and tax commerce. You're not going to get around that taxation thing by citing the second amendment, unless and until Colt, Browning, S&W, and others get around it.
As has been pointed out already - if i can build 3, my wife can make 3 of her own, and each of my sons can make 3 each, that's fifteen firearms for my home alone. They can sit in a safe for three years, then we can give them away, sell them, or whatever the hell I want to do with them. Obviously, this isn't going to make us rich, but it's a decent supplement to our incomes. 0 sales the first year, 0 sales the second year, 15 sales the third year, 15 sales the fourth year, and on it goes. We probably can't get what Colt gets for their firearms, but we don't have as much invested as Colt does either. The market value of our firearms will probably depend on the brand of parts we put into the frames - I MIGHT get $400 each for them, more likely nearer $300.
Of course, if a lot of people are using these printers, the value will be even lower. Flooding the market tends to do that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:05PM (1 child)
are you actually defending the pieces of shit at the at fucking f? are you such a bootlicker that you can't see that that agency has no business even existing, never mind it's blatant crimes against america? disgusting.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 05 2017, @01:04AM
Think. Don't act all fucking emotional, THINK.
I pointed at commerce, which government claims all rights and authority to control. No one has successfully challenged government's claim on that score. If government has the right and authority to control commerce - especially interstate commerce - then, yes, they can put limits on the amounts of items you can produce before you must get all the business licenses and crap to go into business.
How does that defend the ATF, exactly? Next, you'll claim that I have defended all of the asinine decisions that the IRS has ever made, based on the same post.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 03 2017, @11:54PM
Knowing every stop in the road from factory to user's hands is not all that useful really. More than likely the last tracked sale will be a legal one (because paperwork defines legal) and the next sale/transfer/lost/stolen/barter will be undocumented, yet not provably illegal. The best you get is word of mouth.
But for any of that police have to already have captured the weapon. They will/may still be able to match breach face to spent casing, recovered bullet to rifled barrel. These can all be swapped out by Joe Sixpack, and anyone with ability to do a little smith work would have no problem changing the signature of key parts.
(if you load your own, and fire a hot load in your cases, recover, reload lighter rounds, and fire them in a different gun, chances are matching that breach face to those casings is impossible. Not even to the most recent weapon - especially for light loads. Of course the FBI would probably invoke some voodoo science [latimes.com] as they have in the past [wikipedia.org] to trace it via mitochondrial DNA deposits).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:24PM (6 children)
The Ghost Gunner isn't a general-purpose CNC mill. So far, it doesn't produce anything from a block of aluminum -- it only performs the last few operations to convert a nearly-finished receiver from legally "not a gun" to "gun".
The nearly-finished blanks are commonly called "80% receivers" (google that for images, and compare to finished receivers), as the remaining work is supposedly 20% of the total machining work; however, the actual law (and its interpretation by BATF, the agency that enforces firearms laws) says nothing about percentages, and the real percentage of work remaining varies by firearm design, and by how creative the company making them has gotten in approaching completion while skirting the line that makes it legally a gun.
Could the Ghost Gunner be programmed to machine receivers from 0% ("block of aluminum")? Almost certainly, given a firearm design that suits its capabilities. The AR-15 and 1911, however, are poor choices -- many of the machining operations likely exceed its travels or require more rigidity. Keep in mind that neither of these guns was ever designed to be milled from solid barstock, they were both made from forgings, and of the features left to be machined, some were designed for production methods other than milling (like magazine wells, which are typically produced by broaching). If I were looking for a commercially-available gun design to build in a dinky mill like the Ghost Gunner, I'd look at something like the Kel-Tec P11, which is actually produced on CNC mills, and designed for that method of production. (Other options might include some of Kel-Tec's other handguns, and knockoffs/similar designs like the SCCY, Cobra, Ruger LCP, etc.)
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:37PM (1 child)
https://www.ammoland.com/2017/03/ghost-gunner-2-gun-making-machine-review/ [ammoland.com]
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @06:51PM
Yeah, and it's great that they don't restrict things any further, but you're still stuck with the mechanical limitations of something designed around finishing 80% receivers.
I'm a machinist, and I use general-purpose CNC mills daily. The ones we have are much bigger, but I've seen a few tabletop general-purpose mills as well, and none of them look like the Ghost Gunner. You design things one way for general purpose machining; a different way for only doing light finish operations on near-net blanks with mass-produced fixturing.
I'll admit I've never seen a Ghost Gunner in person (I'd have bought one, except I already have access to real machines at work for personal projects), but from the pictures and videos I've seen, neither the work envelope nor the rigidity look like what I'd expect in a tabletop CNC mill. It may well be more rigid than it looks, but I'm pretty sure the work envelope is exactly what it looks like, and it's very limited because of the choice to make the enclosure serve as the machine base. It's designed for a purpose, and it's a pretty good design for that purpose, but it's just not general-purpose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:46PM (2 children)
Someone on Soylent news wrote this?
This forces me to breach the question, if one is a trained machinist, what need for all this CNC trollery?
If you know what broaching is, you probably understand "button rifling", though I prefer "cut".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:56PM
If you're a trained and equipped machinist, the Ghost Gunner doesn't do much for you. On the other hand, if you're a trained machinist whose employer doesn't let you use shop tools for personal projects, it just might be more practical than a used bridgeport and a place to keep it.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:25AM
A real machinist might have a little fun with the thing, testing it's limits, and seeing what he can get it to do. Hell, a Daytona race car driver can have a little fun with some old beater converted into a dune buggy, right? Or, experienced bikers might spend the day riding scooters with his relatives.
Maybe there's no real "value" in any of that, but sometimes it's fun to tinker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @10:23PM
Using a near-net process makes more sense to me. It's good enough for Boeing aircraft parts.
The first step is to make a crude part with excess material. The second step is to machine it down to what you want. I think Boeing's motivation was to reduce metal waste, but it also lets you take advantage of 3D printing's ability to create interior cavities while still having some of the surfaces be nicely machined.
An affordable way to create the near-net part would be a lost-wax process, or rather lost-plastic. You 3D print, coat with a clay/ceramic slurry, bury in fine sand, cook out the plastic, pour in molten metal, let cool, then clean off the crud. Another way, as used by Boeing, is to 3D print with wire.
The resulting near-net part is nearly what you need, but with rough surfaces. Grind some of those down (only the ones that matter) to have a completed part.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:54PM
You assume everyone who needs a gun but doesn't have one simply can't afford it. That isn't always the case. Also, his efforts seem to be directed at the possibility of further regulation, wherein normal methods of acquiring a gun may no longer be available.
That all said, yes. If all you want is a Colt .45 or an AR-15 in America these days, you're definitely better off just going to the store. In most states that doesn't require a license (MA is the exception I'm aware of...not sure how the SCOTUS has let them get away with that law, but it stands for now).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fishybell on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:59PM (1 child)
Not trolling, advertising.
This is America, and the only thing more important than guns is money.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 03 2017, @06:33PM
Insightfully sad but true?!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:07PM (17 children)
I see things a bit differently.
- "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
In modern times I think our approach towards security is incredibly flawed. The TSA has turned flying into a nightmare, has had hundreds of agents arrested for abusing their position, and has caught exactly 0 terrorists. We're constantly sacrificing our personal privileges and freedoms in society for the sake of staving off threats that are not only rare, but in reality practically unstoppable. Consequently, I think it's time we start looking at things differently. Guns are terrifying. How absurd is it that a single man was able to murder 50 and injure hundreds from hundreds of feet away? But on the other hand that could have been an even bigger disaster had he used explosives, or a vehicle, or any of a countless number of other methods of harming people in mass.
Even though I'm not much of a gun person, I see turning guns into something that cannot be controlled is something that ideally may help us, as a society, begin to look at things differently. The reason mass shootings happen is not because of guns but because there are ever more people ready and willing to kill each other in mass. Why is this? America has had widespread access to guns for centuries. In fact they used to be vastly more readily available. Yet mass shootings are a contemporary thing. What is driving people to do these things? I'm fairly certain Mr. Paddock was not big Marilyn Manson or first person shooter fan. What has changed so much in our society and caused such divisiveness among people? This should be the question on everybody's mind. But we're like the fool seeing a man pointing to the stars while we stare at the hand.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:40PM (5 children)
> America has had widespread access to guns for centuries. In fact they used to be vastly more readily available.
> Yet mass shootings are a contemporary thing.
We ran out of Indians and Black to shoot unnoticed.
It's only been a century and a half since we invented reliable repeating guns/rifles. before that, it was hard to do mass shootings without people running away too fast or fighting back during reload. The market popularity of high-capacity semi-auto is a much more recent improvement on random losers' ability to mow down people.
And God, dads and small-town neighbors stopped preventing people from doing dumb things.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @06:34PM (4 children)
Again, is it really appropriate to blame the weapon? Killers like John Allen Muhammed [wikipedia.org] drove around with his accomplice and killed people with a single rifle aimed out a nook in the trunk. They killed 17 people. Back 'in the day' this would have been far easier as sophisticated forensics, air surveillance, infrared technology, radio communication, etc simply did not exist. Rifles capable of killing people from far away certainly did though. In spite of this, crimes of this sort did not exist. What has changed so much?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 03 2017, @07:01PM (3 children)
The first mass shooting happened in 1949. Search for "Walk of Death" perpetrated by Howard Unruh. He walked around Camden NJ and killed 13 people, most were targets he planned to kill for over a year.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 03 2017, @09:21PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres [wikipedia.org]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:59AM
I think the motivations there are crystal clear. It's like comparing these attacks to Israel/Palestine. They are in no way comparable. In one the motivation and purpose is generally very clear. In this, people seem increasingly happy to just kill other people mostly at random.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:42AM
Not really executed (no pun intended) by one individual, are they?
Next on the list of moving goal posts: Buchenwald & Auschwitz ?
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 03 2017, @06:37PM
You can go down in history on social media and CNN!!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @07:03PM (4 children)
Especially the "safety" part, if they are manufacturing an M1911 entirely in aluminum. More of a toy than an actual firearm.
When did this idea that gunsmiths only did modifications and repairs, rather than building entire guns, start?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 03 2017, @07:07PM
Better aluminum than plastic.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @07:48PM (2 children)
They're not -- they're making the frame out of aluminum, but the slide, barrel, and all the small parts are purchased separately, and presumably steel.
And an aluminum-framed 1911 is probably not as durable as a steel-frame, but it's far from the exploding toy an all-aluminum one would be.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:31AM (1 child)
That IS a question in my mind: Just how durable IS an aluminum framed 1911? Initially, it kinda scared me. But, when you think about it, it's a lot less scary. It's going to work, until the machining starts to wear, then it going to start jamming, and the jamming will get progressively worse. But, with all the innards made of steel, the thing isn't going to just blow up in your face, even when it's completely worn out. I suppose you could MAKE it blow up, but then, you can MAKE the genuine article blow up if that's what you want.
(Score: 1) by Chrontius on Wednesday October 04 2017, @11:05AM
Alloy-framed 1911s are not hard to find. Handled one by Kimber a few months ago.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 03 2017, @10:16PM (4 children)
They aren't. For example, there were a number of mass shootings leading up to the US Civil War between pro-slavery and abolitionist sides throughout the US, but concentrated in the Midwest where conditions encouraged such conflicts (following the Compromise of 1850 and further policies along the same lines). And any shooting incident where four or more people are injured or killed indiscriminately is informally considered a mass shooting (there's plenty of tales in the US of such violence over the centuries, from crime, ideological or ethnic conflict, clan feuds, corruption, riots, etc).
What has changed in recent times is both an increase in the ability of people to kill others with fire arms, higher populations, and much more prominent reporting and visibility of such events. For example, prior to 1865, the US had less than a tenth the population of the current US. That means that even at current rates of mass shootings per capita, they would have them a tenth as often or less. For example, it is claimed [cnn.com] that through the first half of the year, there were 136 mass shootings of this sort. A similar rate in the US prior to the Civil War in 1861 would be far lower, around a dozen incidents for the entire country.
The reporting of such incidents would be severely diminished since one would be unlikely to hear of such a shooting incident, unless they happened to be close by or the tale were particularly sordid and spread to newspapers in major cities via messenger or telegraph. For example, the Mountain Meadows massacre [wikipedia.org] which was a mass shooting attack by a large party of Mormons and local Indians killed 120-140 men, women, and children in 1857. No one attempted to punish anyone for the attack until around 1874.
That incidentally would be a greater mass shooting that any modern one.
Finally, there's the matter of technology and population density. To get the situation of the Las Vegas shootings one would need hand-carried automatic weaponry (already pushing forward the date that this could happen to the early 20th Century) and a large public crowd with enough background noise to cover up gunfire (pretty much the latter half of the 20th Century onward for the venue that the shooting happened at).
To summarize, I don't think there's anything actually special about current times when it comes to mass shootings. It's more feasible technologically, and there's more people overall than the past. And in the US, the past has often been quite violent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:16AM (3 children)
Again, I don't think you are seeing the point. This was not a conflict between Indians and Settlers, Abolitionists and Slavers, or anything of the sort. Things like that would be comparable to, for instance, the current Israel-Palestine situation. This is civilians killing other civilians mostly at random with no apparent goal or purpose.
Many countries in the world have relatively high gun ownership. These include Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Iceland, Germany, and so on. Their per capita rates do not compare to the US but that's largely just because in the US we have a culture of gun owners tending to own many guns, which is something relatively unique. Anyhow, the point being these countries are obviously not exactly plagued by the sort of random gun violence that the US faces.
And using CNN as a source is about as logical as using FoxNews, Breitbart, or MSNBC as sources.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @11:48AM
As were many of the examples I mentioned.
Then maybe you ought to stop doing that? Right after you stop beating your wife and threatening Algeria with nuclear destruction.
If someone is interested in talking about that, I'm willing to as well. My take however is that the number one way to reduce so-called "random gun violence" is to legalize most recreational drugs and non-victim crimes (like prostitution), not knee-jerk a reduction of freedom every time something bad happens.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:59AM (1 child)
Your explanation for the USA's high murder rate is that too many people own several guns rather than just one?
The fact that virtually no civilians in Europe own handguns seems more salient, no?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @02:49PM
He's referring to firearms per capita, not murders per capita.