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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the gotta-have-guns dept.

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.

M1911 pistol.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:46PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:46PM (#576767)

    Someone on Soylent news wrote this?

    which typically produced by broaching).

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @08:56PM (#576768)

    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

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:25AM (#576893) Journal

    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.