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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: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:44PM (8 children)
Banning things is on a fast path to being impossible. The ability to manufacture 'on demand' is growing and will only improve. This is a CNC milling machine, others have made guns with 3d printing of metals. As things become software fed into universal 'printers' that more and more people will own it will make regulating possession of things all but impossible unless they drop a full police state on the printers, which ain't happening. You can use one unregulated machine to make more machines. And we all know any attempt to restrict access to the input files will be futile. If The Mouse, with all its resources and determination, can't stop its products from appearing online before they can release them, good luck stopping a plan for a firearm from lurking on the darknet.
The FCC is still pretending it isn't facing the same problem with software defined radios.
No I don't have any answers, but denying the reality of what is going to happen is pointless. Tech relentlessly marches on, we either become Amish or learn to deal with it.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:13PM (4 children)
Try to get a modern printer without yellow-dot serialization built in.
They will drop the full police state onto 3D printers. They will require state-signed software. They will make every attempt to regulate this.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:25PM
IIRC there are already libre 3D printers, and likely CAD software as well.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @05:30PM
The yellow-dot serialisation is based on compliant manufacturers.
Nothing prevents you from building your own printer - and any attempt to regulate that in the US would fall at the first judge that laughed it out of court. Would it be identical to, say, a top-of-the-line Xerox? No. Doesn't matter. The use case that they desperately claim is their reason (forensics around counterfeit cash) simply doesn't cover all cases for printing.
Worse yet, this is the sort of regulation that would fall under strict scrutiny. Given that the right to keep and bear arms has been identified as a fundamental, enumerated, individual right, there's a clear path to using both the first and the second amendment to prevent the government from preventing private individuals from building their own mills, and using them as they see fit. Or even just machine shops.
But I'm sure you're about to explain how licensing and regulating machine shops to the point of banning private ownership is going to happen any year now ...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 03 2017, @06:49PM
The problem with controlling 3d printers is that they can be used to partially replicate themselves. They can print upgrades and replacement parts for themselves.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday October 04 2017, @12:07AM
> Try to get a modern printer without yellow-dot serialization built in.
I know one, she's a monochrome laser printer. If I spot a yellow dot i'll get suspicious.
but seriously, what if you suck the yellow ink out the cartridge and replace it with water, or maybe nitroglycerine for the lulz?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 03 2017, @09:27PM (1 child)
The obvious counter to this, is that a mass-surveillance police state is rapidly developing. If everything you say and do is monitored, having the means to make a banned item doesn't actually let you do so, unless you can reliably fend off a SWAT team.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @10:23PM
CELLDAR
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:40AM
Well said.
Washington DC delenda est.