In case you 3D print a body of a Glock-style pistol, then you should buy the remainder of the components off the web and assemble it, and you’ve got a gun that could be a ghost gun. An nameless, totally personal, deadly weapon.
Zoë Schiffer: Once we get again, we’ll get into the small print of how Andy really made and assembled the ghost gun. However for now, we’ve to go to interrupt.
Welcome again to Uncanny Valley. Okay, Andy, I need to get into the gun meeting course of. Speak to me in regards to the level from printing, to ordering the components, to really placing it collectively.
Andy Greenberg: The printing is certainly the best half in 2025. You actually can obtain these recordsdata, these CAD recordsdata for gun frames from a bunch of various open supply web sites run by principally opponents of gun management. Then put them into some software program and click on print, and 13 hours later, on this case I had two excellent Glock-style frames. It was actually outstanding how highly effective the 3D printer, and low cost it was, that I used to be utilizing.
The meeting is so much trickier. That’s as onerous as ever. It is like assembling a really small piece of Ikea furnishings. There’s a whole lot of hammering little pins into place, and assembling the set off mechanism, and all of it has to suit into this small cavity within the body. It took me greater than an hour to do, and I used to be being guided on this course of by a 3D-printed gun aficionado. He calls himself Print, Shoot, Repeat, who was actually useful and affected person about it. However I feel that for individuals who know what they’re doing, this takes 15 or 20 minutes—
Zoë Schiffer: Wow.
Andy Greenberg: —to assemble, after you have some apply at it.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay. Then you definately shot the gun. What occurred? How had been you feeling at that second on the gun vary?
Andy Greenberg: Effectively, earlier than I even shot it, there’s this unimaginable second if you’re constructing a gun. It seems like this attention-grabbing, slightly technical course of, like making a mannequin airplane or one thing. Then unexpectedly, I am getting this slide onto the body after which it clicks into place. Then you definately see for the primary time that you simply even have a gun in your fingers, that it is a deadly weapon. The way in which that you need to deal with a gun in your fingers is so completely different from a group of gun components. Out of the blue, it is this deadly weapon, you need to watch out the place you level it. It is a actually dramatic second. It was for me, anyway.
Zoë Schiffer: There was that ultimate half within the meeting the place you placed on a silencer, like allegedly Luigi Mangione had on his gun, proper?
Andy Greenberg: Proper. Luigi Mangione, in his backpack allegedly had a 3D-printed silencer too, which is a really new phenomenon, even within the 3D-printed gun world. We constructed that, too. We 3D-printed a silencer. That really is one half that is completely different. It is a felony for me to 3D-print a suppressor, a silencer because it’s identified. We did have an precise licensed gunsmith, the proprietor of the vary that we had been about to check that, who pushed print in that case and helped us to construct that silencer. When Luigi Mangione allegedly did that, he would have been breaking the regulation. I’d have been too, if not for having a gunsmith on-hand to assist us out.