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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, 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 ?
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