A gun-technology pioneer says he’s seeing a “huge explosion” in sales of a machine that allows people to make their own untraceable AR-15-style rifles in response to the national debate on gun control.
Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson, maker of the Ghost Gunner auto-milling machine, says sales doubled in February after the Valentine’s Day massacre at a Florida high school, where 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz stands accused of murdering 17 people with an AR-15.
During the first five days of March, sales took another leap after President Trump endorsed tighter background checks and a higher national age limit for gun purchases. From March 1-5, the open-source nonprofit sold as many machines, nearly 200, as it usually does in a month.
“This is a machine that allows you to make a ton of ARs, and people actually do it. I’m shocked. It’s like an obsession for some people,” said Wilson, a 30-year-old self-described free market anarchist whose organization’s previous rate of sales would bring in a few million dollars a year.
“I think it’s very, very good that someone can make 12 ARs for themselves. That’s a real political capability,” he said.
Wilson said he believes a “very conservative” estimate would be that 25,000 to 30,000 AR-15s are in circulation because of his machine, the first generation of which was introduced in 2014. Sometimes, he’s contacted by authorities, he said, after the machines have changed hands.
Wilson’s Ghost Gunner exploits a loophole in gun control laws that require federally licensed dealers to conduct background checks on people who purchase AR-15 lower receivers, but only when the part is more than 80 percent complete. Lower receivers house an AR-15’s trigger and magazine port. Other gun parts are available without a background check.
The microwave-sized Ghost Gunner machine costs $1,675, and 80 percent finished AR-15 lowers are available from many sources, with Defense Distributed asking $65 for the part. Anyone can buy the machine and the partially finished part without government permission. The machine finishes the drilling needed to make the lower receiver work, and can be configured for engraving.
It’s always been legal to manufacture guns, Wilson says, and the machine simply makes it possible without specialized knowledge. He scoffs at the notion he’s inviting restrictions on the sale of unfinished lowers, saying blocks of aluminum could still be milled.
Although the Ghost Gunner is best known for making AR-15s, it can also finish parts for other guns, including handguns and the AR-308, another style of semiautomatic rifle. Its software and hardware designs are open source, meaning freely available to use, review, and revise.
“There’s always this as an escape valve. The more Massachusetts and the Fourth Circuit and California and Washington — the more they implement these kind of restrictions [on guns], the more people turn to manufacturing,” Wilson said, referring to state laws and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s 2017 ruling that the Second Amendment does not cover AR-15s, upholding Maryland’s ban on various assault weapons. The Supreme Court declined to review the ruling.
Wilson said customers fall into a few general groupings. About a third never use the machine and simply have it for theoretical future use. About 20 percent are registered gun manufacturers who use the tool because it’s cheaper than other options. And then, there’s a diverse grab-bag of gun enthusiasts, quirky hoarders, and politically motivated clients.
Californians make up about a third of Ghost Gunner buyers, he said. A 2016 state law there that takes effect in July bans the manufacture of “ghost guns” without a serial number, meaning makers will need to first apply for a serial number and undergo a background check before lawfully making a gun.
Wilson said he’s glad to see Trump appoint judges who are deferential to gun rights, but says there are many “partial communist victories” with state gun-control laws and unfavorable court rulings. He said do-it-yourself gun milling seems to grow in relation to efforts to restrict guns.
“The machine will live many different lives,” he said of the Ghost Gunner. “It continues to float around the market [and] who knows where they end up. … You’ve created a new mobile constellation of gun manufacturing out there because of this machine.”
Free speech allows DIY guns?
Although Wilson’s gun-milling machine sales have been brisk and unfettered by the authorities, he’s been fighting a legal battle since 2013 for the right to share 3-D printing files for a gun called the Liberator, which drew massive global attention with 100,000 downloads in two days.
The State Department forced Wilson, then a 25-year-old law student, to stop circulating the files, claiming the blueprint constituted an unallowed arms export by virtue of being accessible to foreigners.
“The implications of this are outrageous; there is nothing that you could theoretically publish and say that the government couldn’t come in and claim were an export,” said prominent Second Amendment attorney Alan Gura, who is representing Wilson.
Wilson lost bids for a preliminary injunction in district court and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. A three-judge appeals court panel split in a 2-1 vote against Wilson. Five of 14 judges on the appeals circuit voted to rehear that ruling, and four of them signed a strongly worded dissent that said “[t]he panel opinion’s flawed preliminary injunction analysis permits perhaps the most egregious deprivation of First Amendment rights possible: a content-based prior restraint.” The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal, but the case continues.
In ruling for the State Department, the three-judge panel leaned on a national security justification for a temporary speech ban. The two majority-decision judges wrote: “The fact that national security might be permanently harmed while Plaintiffs-Appellants’ constitutional rights might be temporarily harmed strongly supports our conclusion that the district court did not abuse its discretion in weighing the balance in favor of national defense and national security.”
The struggle to un-gag the Liberator, which Wilson said is a flimsy firearm appropriately viewed as a proof of concept, has returned to district court, where there was a status hearing last week. Gura expects a ruling this year, likely without a trial. Gura said he’s optimistic about an anticipated appeal, as the appeals court didn’t reach the merits last time.
“If you have the right to keep it, you have the right to make it,” Gura said, and in order to make the weapons people have the right to discuss manufacturing techniques.
“This is primarily a First Amendment case, because we we’re talking about information,” Gura said. “There is always the danger you can put science to an illegal purpose. You can learn chemistry and make a bomb or illegal drugs, you can learn something about physics and make a nuclear weapon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t share scientific knowledge.”
Wilson said the State Department may have slowed progress on 3-D guns, but that he is, as far as he knows, the only person told to take down blueprints. He said he’s upset that his lead in the field has been erased, and that the Liberator has been eclipsed by far more useful designs, such as the single-shot Songbird that uses a rubber band to fire the gun’s hammer.
“You probably would hear more about this if any of this was officially allowed,” Wilson said. “But if you’re a 3-D printing nut and a gun nut, you’re not scared.”
Right now, 3-D printers are expensive, as is making gun-control workarounds. Andrew Baker, founder of the 3-D-printing firm Veloforge, told the Washington Examiner in October that making a bump stock out of nylon would cost around $2,000 and take 52 hours to print.
Wilson said bump stocks aren’t even worth discussing, as a belt loop is well-known to serve the same purpose in making semi-automatic weapons fire more rapidly. But he said advances in 3-D printing material may make various printable items more widespread in the future.
“Some of the printables are going to be better than the stuff you can mill. It’s going to go back and forth and over time is probably going to influence the evolution of the gun,” he said.
Gura, who won landmark Supreme Court rulings on gun rights in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, said he wouldn’t take a case he doesn’t believe he can win.
“Scientific information is something we are entitled to share and learn from. The government would have to show if it wants to restrict the sharing of software that there is some imminent threat to national security,” Gura said.
“The reality is speech is always scary to people,” he added. “From time immemorial, governments have tried to ban speech, and there’s always a scary reason to ban it. There’s never a bland, mundane reason for banning speech. The government’s reasons for banning speech are always dramatic, and they always say there’s an urgent reason.”
