I 3D-Printed Luigi Mangione’s ‘Ghost Gun’

This is the gun used

in the most high-profile assassination in recent memory.

Well, it's not actually the literal gun

Luigi Mangione allegedly used to kill

United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.

[gun firing]

But it is the exact model of firearm,

and we made it with just a 3D printer

and some parts ordered off the internet.

Some people call this a ghost gun

because no government agency

has any record of its existence.

I didn't get a background check or show ID.

No gun control at all.

I'm Andy Greenberg.

I investigate the strange, dark, and subversive corners

of the internet for Wired.

This is Hacklab. I made Luigi Mangione's gun.

As a journalist, I've covered the digital

DIY gun-making scene since the beginning.

In 2013, I was there for the very first test

of the first fully 3D-printed gun, The Liberator.

A couple of years later,

I even built an untraceable AR-15 ghost gun

in Wired's office...

[gun firing]

to test just how far the tech had come.

That was 10 years ago.

Then when Luigi Mangione was arrested

in an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's late last year,

I wrote a news piece about the gun found in his backpack.

According to the DIY gunsmiths I spoke to,

it seemed to be a Chairmanwon V1,

a tweak of a popular partially 3D-printed

Glock-style design known as the FMDA 19.2.

An acronym that stands for the Libertarian slogan

Free Men Don't Ask.

So, I wanted to know how easy is it for someone

to build a deadly and untraceable weapon like this now.

Has the law finally caught up with the reality

of ghost guns.

To find out, I decided to make one.

So I went to Arabi, Louisiana to a gun range

outside New Orleans owned by James Reeves,

an attorney and a popular YouTuber.

[gentle music]

James. Nice to meet you.

Our experiment here that we're trying to do

is to actually 3D-print Luigi Mangione's gun,

just like he did.

Allegedly. Allegedly. Thank you.

But my question for you first as a lawyer is,

is all of this actually legal?

Totally legal, but it depends on the purpose.

So if you're making a firearm for yourself,

there's no prohibition in the Gun Control Act of 1968

that would prevent you from making a gun for yourself.

If you're making it for someone else,

if you're selling them, distributing,

totally different story.

You've gotta have a license.

A lot of states have made this illegal,

but here in Louisiana, like, we're still good to go?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, free country down here

in the great state of Louisiana.

Over the years, the US government has certainly tried

to regulate 3D-printed and other kinds of ghost guns.

After Cody Wilson released printable files

for The Liberator online,

the government ordered his company,

Defense Distributed, to take them down.

By 2018, Cody Wilson briefly won a legal fight

to repost them on his website

but multiple states sued, shutting it down again.

Then in 2022, the Biden administration

really tightened regulations, requiring serial numbers

and background checks for ghost gun kits,

commercially available packages of parts, which are designed

to make it easy to finish and assemble a working gun.

That led to legal challenges, which were settled in March

with a Supreme Court decision

upholding those new regulations.

But if you're not using one of those kits,

it's really only state laws that restrict making ghost guns,

and they vary really widely.

New York enforces strict rules on self-made guns,

requiring serial numbers on the receivers.

California even prohibits the sale of 3D printers

if they're intended to make a gun.

But for the rest of the United States in between,

including Louisiana, where we are now,

it's still essentially the wild west for DIY firearms.

While the legal battle has gone back and forth,

the technology has just kept relentlessly advancing.

Since the first 3D printed gun parts began to surface online

in 2012 and 2013, we've seen an explosion

of digital DIY firearms,

fully or partially printable rifles, AR-15s,

and even fully-automatic printable machine guns.

And thanks to a very committed community

of online gunsmiths,

many of whom are bent on defeating gun control,

that evolution is still continuing.

The first step to building the gun

allegedly used by Mangione was easy.

I found the gun plans online in minutes.

Certain file-sharing sites are packed

with DIY firearm blueprints,

detailed instructions, everything.

In states like California or New Jersey,

parts of this gun printing process,

even sharing the files is illegal.

But in Louisiana, no such law.

In fact, according to US gun control laws,

only one component,

known as the frame of a Glock-style pistol,

is considered the gun.

If I make that part myself, say, with a 3D printer,

and I combine it with commercially-bought components

for the rest of the weapon,

I can basically circumvent all regulations.

So, armed with a shopping list and a credit card,

we ordered everything we needed.

A 3D printer, plastic filaments, and household products

like epoxy were all just a few clicks away

on sites like Lowe's or Amazon.

And the more specialized components were available on sites

that sell gun parts, just not the guns themselves.

A few days later, every ingredient I needed

to make Mangione's gun arrived in the mail

for the grand total of $1,144.67 plus shipping.

And that includes the price of the 3D printer.

This is like Christmas Day.

[tense music]

This looks like a slide, very much like an obvious gun part.

Kind of crazy that you can just order this.

So it's kind of like a very interesting

and fun technical challenge.

But I keep having to remind myself

not only that we're making a lethal weapon

but that I'm also potentially retracing the steps

of an alleged murderer who carried out exactly this process.

3D printers work by extruding heated plastic filament

through a nozzle, layer by layer,

to slowly create the object.

We're going to print two frames just to be sure.

Printing these two frames will take about 13 hours,

which is pretty quick.

Back when Cody Wilson, a pioneer in the DIY gun movement,

printed The Liberator, the original one-shot

100% 3D-printed pistol in 2013, 3D printers were much slower

and the materials were pretty unreliable

by comparison and cracked easily.

When Cody Wilson tested that first-ever 3D-printed gun,

he was concerned that it might blow up in his hands.

He even used the string to pull the trigger

for the first time.

To some degree, I'm still a little worried about that,

to be honest.

DIY gun fails are still pretty common.

When I made an AR-15 in Wired's office in 2015,

a gunsmith warned me the frame of the gun

that I had made wouldn't be reliable enough

and recommended I use an aluminum lower receiver I'd made

with a computer-controlled milling machine instead.

We're about to see how much that question

of reliability has changed over the years.

Okay. Let's get started.

Hopefully, this whole experiment

will literally blow up in my face.

[intriguing music] [machine whirring]

The next morning I returned to check

on the 3D-printed frames.

[curtain whirring and clanking]

This is pretty wild.

Like, these things look like actual gun parts.

So this looks like a big block,

but all of this is support structure

that just holds up the top of the frame here.

So once I crack this off...

Oh, yeah.

I don't need to even clean anything

out of this internal cavity here.

This just looks almost like commercially made.

It's so clean on the inside.

It's just really impressive

what a 3D printer can do today overnight.

So the frame is done. Now it's time to assemble this gun.

I know from experience that it's tricky

assembling a gun from scratch.

There are lots of little pieces,

and, to be honest, I have no idea what I'm doing.

So that's why I've reached out to a DIY gun expert

and YouTuber who calls himself Print Shoot Repeat.

He prefers to keep his face covered

to preserve his anonymity.

So, what do you think of this 3D-printed 9 millimeter frame?

It looks beautiful. It's very excellent print quality.

[Andy] So, how do we get started?

[PSR] So, do you see that hole there?

I saw the hole at the bottom. Yeah.

So you are a 3D-printed gun aficionado.

What is it about these things that appeals to you?

I think the thing I like the most about it,

aside from exercising your Constitutional rights,

which is awesome, but you're able to make guns

that you can't buy.

There are these really cool, intricate neat designs

that people create and test that you can make

that you actually can't purchase in a store,

but also to be anonymous and private with your gun-making.

But there's also this element to 3D-printed guns

that somebody who's mentally ill or a felon

or Luigi Mangione can, you know, fabricate their own gun

and go out and commit a crime with it.

I mean, how do you feel about that?

Freedom is ultimately dangerous.

There's no way to stop people from hurting each other,

unfortunately.

I don't love that people commit crimes

and kill each other with guns,

but they are designed for killing.

I'm not going to deny that.

But we live in a country that is relatively free

when it comes to a lot of our laws,

and especially the Second Amendment.

It is kind of remarkable the precision of this.

It seems like a commercial piece.

Yeah, the design of this particular pistol

was so good in 2020

that it's still the go-to Glock-style frame.

It's open-source, and designers can take the raw blueprint

of this thing and then add their own tweaks to it.

If you really were like a lone wolf killer

trying to make this thing alone in your garage,

where would you learn this?

Or if you were just someone who was into building guns

and not a lone wolf killer, but there are assembly videos,

particularly the sites where you download some the files.

But it's a lot of trial and error.

The slide to me is like shocking to even look at.

It's like, I can't believe

this is just a component of a gun.

And so it's just strange that, like, the regulated part

is not the part that holds the rounds.

Yep. That's per the ATF.

The ATF decided that. So, thanks ATF.

This can be challenging,

because what can happen is the rear rails

sometimes don't line up perfectly.

Yep. Now pull it back as hard as you can.

Now let it go.

All right. Now we got our gun.

And just make sure you don't point it at anyone. [laughs]

[Andy] I see the empty chamber.

[PSR] Yep.

And now we're going to put in one of these magazines.

And which one do you think we should use?

What I found on the evidence photograph,

there was two magazines.

One was a Glock 17 magazine, which holds 17 rounds,

versus a Glock 19 magazine.

This is a Magpul PMAG.

This one had jacketed hollow points in it.

Going off that, I would say we should stick this one in.

This is essentially Luigi Mangione's gun,

but we're still missing one component.

Yes. Critical component. Which is the suppressor.

[PSR] Exactly.

[Andy] Suppressors, also known as silencers,

have been highly regulated under the National Firearms Act

since 1934.

And 3D-printing one without a certain kind

of gun-making license would be a serious felony.

Since James has that license, he's going to do it for us.

[James] So it's quite a process to legally own

and possess a suppressor.

The second you print out a suppressor at home,

felony, prison.

So it's a very serious deal.

3D-printed suppressors are a relatively new phenomenon.

And the technology to make ones

like the FTN suppressor allegedly found on Mangione

has come a long way in a very short time.

So the suppressor is printing,

and it looks like it's going to take

another three and a half hours.

Yeah, it smells a little bit

like a burning vacuum cleaner.

When this is done,

we actually have to fill out a couple set of federal forms.

[Andy] After a few more hours of 3D-printing,

we had our suppressor.

We wrapped it in hockey tape,

just as Luigi Mangione allegedly did.

So I think we're now ready

to put this thing together, right?

Yeah, go right ahead. Thread it on.

Once I screwed it onto the barrel of our gun,

we had the complete configuration

he was accused of using as a murder weapon.

This thing just got at least like twice as scary.

Before heading to the range to test it,

I wanted to get the gun control side of the story.

So I spoke to Nick Suplina at the nonprofit

Everytown for Gun Safety.

3D guns are a whole new ballgame.

I think 3D-printed guns are about to have their moment.

I've covered this world of 3D-printed guns since 2013.

And back then I wrote about this believing it was

kind of a science fictional future phenomenon.

And I do not think this is a future problem.

ATF estimated that between 2016 and 2022

over 70,000 ghost guns were recovered

at crime scenes across the country.

The technology has really come of age.

The printers are better, the materials are better,

and the designs are better.

[Andy] There are models of gun

that have come out in the last few years.

These almost fully 3D-printed semi-automatic rifles

that truly look like something out of science fiction

that are really powerful and really accurate.

One of the things that has developed

over the last decade or more is a community of creators

and sharing designs and improving upon each other's designs.

And a lot of that are values that creators,

I think, really can embrace.

But we can't lose sight that this is about firearms.

You have a right to personal protection.

But when you're purposefully creating firearms

that are flooding communities with illegal firearms

that are used in crimes,

and when we're innovating to make them harder to regulate,

you have to ask yourself the question,

just how serious is this community about doing their part

to protect the community?

I mean, we have seen already that you can actually have most

of the parts of the firearm be fully 3D-printed.

That is the state of the art right now.

And that is going to be the next chapter

of the ghost gun problem in this country.

[intriguing music]

I might look calm on the surface.

But to be honest, I'm sweating a little bit.

It's a strange moment when this kind of abstract

and technical series of steps finally comes together

and you remember that you've created something

really powerful and quite dangerous,

in fact, the exact gun that appears to have killed a man

on the streets of Manhattan last year.

So for this first shot,

I'm going to just hold it to the side from the hip,

just in case this slide flies off the 3D-printed frame

and goes backwards at a high speed.

Moment of truth.

[gun firing]

Wow.

How'd we do? Intact? Totally flawless. Yeah.

Nice. Decently quiet for supersonic ammunition as well.

Well, let's load it up again.

All right.

[gun cocking]

[gun firing]

[gun cocking]

[trigger clicking]

[gun cocking]

I don't know. Let's see.

[trigger clicking]

Another misfire.

So, I guess what's happening here is that the suppressor

is preventing it from cycling properly.

Yes, what's happening is the slide's coming forward,

but probably not quite enough to strike the primer

and then cause a detonation down range.

But we did get a couple there,

so I want to kind of give it a shot

and see if I can break it in a little bit.

As we saw in CCTV camera video,

he was going like this after every shot

hitting the back of the slide, like you did correctly.

But I want to actually see if this is going to function

without the suppressor attached.

[Andy] Let's do that. Let's take it off.

[PSR] Okay.

In a normal semi-automatic Glock,

the upper part of the gun, known as its slide,

which retracts with every shot, resets the trigger

and loads a new round into the chamber.

In the video of Thompson's murder, the gun allegedly fired

by Mangione appears not to have function.

That's a result of the suppressor attachment

preventing that rechambering.

And yet the CEO killer in the CCTV video didn't panic

or stop to diagnose his ghost gun's apparent malfunctioning.

He reacted quickly racking the gun, shooting it,

and racking again as if he knew exactly

how the weapon he had made would perform.

Had the assassin practiced with his gun

at a range to break it in,

had he in fact engaged in exactly the type

of troubleshooting we were doing right now...

[PSR] Not everything works,

and so you gotta do a little bit of filing sometimes.

We've done a little bit of modifications.

We're going to see if it runs semi-automatic.

[gun firing]

[Andy] You take it for a spin.

Yeah.

[intriguing music] [gun firing]

It's so close now.

[gun firing]

Oh, there we go.

[gun firing] Oh, there it is. Yep.

[Andy] Here you can see that,

when we take off the suppressor,

the gun functions as a truly semi-automatic firearm.

All right, let's try the suppressor.

Let's do it. We got the suppressor on.

We made some modifications to the barrel and the slide.

[gun cocking]

Hopefully it'll run.

[gun firing]

[gun cocking]

[gun firing]

[gun cocking]

[gun firing]

[gun cocking]

You were manually racking it,

but just like we saw in the video

of Brian Thompson's killing.

And to be clear, like, the thing that we had to file

was not the 3D-printed part.

It was this kind of slightly crappy commercial part.

I imagine that, for allegedly Mangione himself,

he probably had similar kind of hiccups

and then probably did take a file to it at some point.

Indeed.

And it seemed like he knew that it was going to malfunction

in the way that we just saw

and was ready for that malfunction to happen.

Right.

In my hands is the gun

that allegedly killed CEO Brian Thompson.

The same Glock-style pistol, same parts, same suppressor.

As I squeezed the trigger and racked the gun

in the exact same way the killer allegedly did,

I felt the same explosive recoil he would have,

and it drove home the disturbing realization

that our experiment in building

a lethal uncontrollable weapon had been a success.

[intriguing music]

What kind of law or regulation

do you actually imagine could get a grip on this issue?

The key part of this is to make breaking the law harder.

And the way you make breaking the law harder

is to focus on the 3D printers and the sort of firmware

and software that make them work.

We've been here before with money counterfeiting,

and the software companies, like the Adobes of the world,

detect whether you are trying to print currency.

You can't do it.

We're starting to have conversations with the folks

behind these printing companies that are like,

Yeah, we can detect it

and we can stop our printer from printing.

I can already imagine the incredible backlash

to any effort to kind of put DRM on 3D printers

or try to just restrict computers,

essentially, that people own.

I'm in the business of trying to save lives,

and the fact of the matter is gun violence

is the number one killer of children and teens

in this country.

And there's lots of room for legal ownership,

for even maybe legal printing.

But the idea that we're going to sort of sit this one out

because the crypto-anarchists have won

is not going to happen.

And they're going to find that those of us

in the gun safety debate have a lot of fight in us as well.

[intriguing music]

I've successfully made a ghost gun. Now I have a problem.

I can't legally take back to New York, where I live,

and I can't legally leave it here in Louisiana

or give it to someone else either.

So I'm going to turn in the parts I made

to the local police.

Hopefully they're not going to ask too many questions.

I think we've proven that a dozen years

after I first started writing about 3D-printed guns,

it's actually easier than ever before to use digital tools

to build a deadly weapon with total privacy

and impunity in most of the United States

despite every effort by gun control advocates.

Until that changes

and as 3D-printing technology keeps getting better,

it's safe to say we're going to see

more ghost guns in the world and more people,

like a certain CEO killer, ready to use them.

[bright electronic music]