WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg has been reporting on ghost guns for more than a decade. He first used a 3D printer to assemble a gun in 2015, and he says that today’s process is not only faster but cheaper. We talk to Andy about how he legally printed the same gun Luigi Mangione allegedly used in the alleged killing of the United Healthcare CEO last year, and whether US law is keeping up with the technology of 3D-printed guns.
You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Andy Greenberg on Bluesky at @agreenberg. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- We Made Luigi Mangione’s 3D-Printed Gun—and Fired It
- Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
- The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: This is Zoë. Before we start, I want to take a chance to remind you that we really want to hear from you. If you have a tech-related question that’s been on your mind or a topic that you wish we’d cover in the show, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. If you listen and enjoy the episodes, please, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. It honestly does help other people find us.
Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED director of business and industry Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, WIRED built and tested a 3D-printed pistol, the exact same model of the gun that Luigi Mangione allegedly used in the brutal killing of a health care CEO last year. Untraceable and often built entirely in private, those guns remain legal in some parts of the country due in part to a loophole in the US federal gun control laws. Today we hear about the process of creating a ghost gun, how those laws have evolved over time, and what future regulations may come. I’m joined today by Andy Greenberg, a senior writer at WIRED.
Andy, welcome to the show.
Andy Greenberg: Glad to be here. Thanks.
Zoë Schiffer: Andy, you’ve been reporting on ghost guns for a long time, and you started out this story with a question. Has the law in the United States actually caught up with the technology? I guess I wanted to start by asking you that same question. Has it?
Andy Greenberg: Well, the short answer is no. Even as the technology to make these so-called ghost guns and in particular 3D-printed guns has gotten more powerful, more practical, far, far, cheaper, the law has really lagged behind. It’s opened up this space between the technology and the law that has allowed people to make their own guns at home in total privacy and anonymity more easily than ever.
Zoë Schiffer: I remember you saying that the first guns took hours and hours and hours. Now they still take half a day, but it’s a lot less time.
Andy Greenberg: It’s definitely faster. I printed two gun frames in 13 hours for this experiment.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow.
Andy Greenberg: That’s probably just a little bit faster than it was 10 years ago, when I first … I should say 10 years ago, I made an AR-15 ghost gun in WIRED’s San Francisco office.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh.
Andy Greenberg: Three different ways. One of those ways was trying to 3D-print the body of the gun known as the lower receiver of an AR-15. For the Glock-style pistol that Luigi Mangione allegedly used, it’s called the frame. I was able to compare how this technology has changed and how well it works to make a gun back then in 2015 and then now. Yes, it’s faster, but it’s also just much better. And 3D printers are much, much cheaper.
That’s perhaps the biggest thing of all. The 3D printer that I used back in 2015 to make the body of an AR-15 cost almost $3,000 alone. The entire ingredient list for my experiments in making allegedly Luigi Mangione’s ghost gun was $1,144 or so, plus shipping.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow.
Andy Greenberg: That includes the cost of the printer, which was about $650. That’s an enormous drop in price that has made this much more accessible to people, and just a much more practical way to try to obtain one of these guns in a fashion that completely circumvents all US gun control.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, completely. Before we go further on, I think it would be helpful if you explain for the audience what exactly is a ghost gun. What is the loophole that allows these guns to be made?
Andy Greenberg: Well, a ghost gun is this term that was originally used by gun control advocates, but now has actually been picked up by a lot of gun proponents as well. It basically means a gun that is homemade that has no serial number, and therefore is not registered with any government agency. You don’t have to get a background check or show anyone ID. No gun control of any kind to obtain it. In that sense, it’s a ghost.
The notion really is that you make just the parts of the gun that are regulated under US law, and then you can buy the rest of it off the internet or from stores, or whatever. And assemble it at home.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, yeah. Now we see why it’s called a loophole. That’s a pretty serious one. I want to actually go off-script, because I’m curious how you approached the story. But honestly, when I was reading it, I was like, “How the hell did Andy convince our lawyers to let him build not one, but multiple guns in the WIRED office?” I want to know how those initial conversations actually went.
Andy Greenberg: Well, the trick was in 2015 that I didn’t ask anybody.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, right.
Andy Greenberg: I just did it.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, right, right.
Andy Greenberg: In 2025, that turns out to be a lot harder, and we had to ask a lot of lawyers. We had to have an armorer on set, and a medic, and a special firearms specialist lawyer vet this. Then of course, I spoke to lawyers for the piece as well to make sure that what we were doing was legal. And also, to sketch out US gun control in 2025 and this gaping hole in it for homemade guns.
Zoë Schiffer: One of the things we’re talking about is what you just mentioned, what has changed since you first started covering the space. You mentioned that the first time you built a 3D-printed gun, you did it in the WIRED office in San Francisco. This time, you actually went to Louisiana. Can you tell me about why that was important? What has changed on the regulatory side?
Andy Greenberg: Well, on some level, US law is trying to catch up with this problem, really at the state level mostly. 3D-printing a gun in New York is illegal unless you obtain a serial number for it. That’s the same now in California too. My experiment in San Francisco would now be totally illegal. That’s the case in 15 US states, that there are some laws around ghost guns.
In fact, there was a ban under Biden from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on ghost gun kits. These premade kits that allow anybody to finish a Glock-style frame or an AR-15 lower receiver from a plastic, or polymer, or even metal part with just a few tools in a matter of minutes. Those kits are not illegal according to the ATF. There was a Supreme Court ruling just in March upholding that ban.
Part of what I was trying to find out here is, despite a Supreme Court ruling, what’s seen as a big crackdown on ghost guns, is this still possible to do legally with a 3D printer? And it is. The Supreme Court ruling basically said you can’t sell parts that are readily convertible into a ghost gun, but it didn’t say anything about creating one out of thin air and some plastic filaments out of empty space, which is really what a 3D printer does. What we did in Louisiana, where there is no state law around this, remains a wide-open loophole in the law, if you can call it that.
If you 3D-print a frame of a Glock-style pistol, then you can buy the rest of the parts off the internet and assemble it, and you have a gun that is a ghost gun. An anonymous, fully private, lethal weapon.
Zoë Schiffer: When we get back, we’ll get into the details of how Andy actually made and assembled the ghost gun. But for now, we have to go to break.
[break]
Zoë Schiffer:Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Okay, Andy, I want to get into the gun assembly process. Talk to me about the point from printing, to ordering the parts, to actually putting it together.
Andy Greenberg: The printing is definitely the easiest part in 2025. You really can download these files, these CAD files for gun frames from a bunch of different open source websites run by basically opponents of gun control. Then put them into some software and click print, and 13 hours later, in this case I had two perfect Glock-style frames. It was really remarkable how powerful the 3D printer, and cheap it was, that I was using.
The assembly is a lot trickier. That is as hard as ever. It’s like assembling a very small piece of Ikea furniture. There’s a lot of hammering little pins into place, and assembling the trigger mechanism, and it all has to fit into this small cavity inside of the frame. It took me more than an hour to do, and I was being guided in this process by a 3D-printed-gun aficionado. He calls himself Print, Shoot, Repeat, who was really helpful and patient about it. But I think that for people who know what they’re doing, this takes 15 or 20 minutes—
Zoë Schiffer: Wow.
Andy Greenberg: —to assemble, once you have some practice at it.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. Then you shot the gun. What happened? How were you feeling at that moment at the gun range?
Andy Greenberg: Well, before I even shot it, there is this incredible moment when you’re building a gun. It feels like this interesting, a little technical process, like making a model airplane or something. Then all of a sudden, I’m getting this slide onto the frame and then it clicks into place. Then you see for the first time that you actually have a gun in your hands, that it’s a lethal weapon. The way that you have to treat a gun in your hands is so different from a collection of gun parts. Suddenly, it’s this lethal weapon, you have to be careful where you point it. It’s a really dramatic moment. It was for me, anyway.
Zoë Schiffer: There was that final part in the assembly where you put on a silencer, like allegedly Luigi Mangione had on his gun, right?
Andy Greenberg: Right. Luigi Mangione, in his backpack allegedly had a 3D-printed silencer too, which is a very new phenomenon, even in the 3D-printed gun world. We built that too. We 3D-printed a silencer. That actually is one part that’s different. It’s a felony for me to 3D-print a suppressor, a silencer as it’s known. We did have an actual licensed gunsmith, the owner of the range that we were about to test that, who pushed print in that case and helped us to build that silencer. When Luigi Mangione allegedly did that, he would have been breaking the law. I would have been too, if not for having a gunsmith on-hand to help us out.
Zoë Schiffer: Then it started to jam a little bit. Or I don’t know the correct term, but it did malfunction, right?
Andy Greenberg: Yeah, it did jam and it misfired several times. We reloaded it and I fired it a bunch more times. It would fire, and then misfire, and fire, and misfire. We did a bunch of troubleshooting, but ultimately we did get it working as a full semi-automatic handgun that could really empty a whole magazine worth of rounds.
Zoë Schiffer: You also pointed out that Brian Thompson’s alleged killer—their gun also malfunctioned. It looked like, from the videos, that they had practiced a fair amount because they were totally unperturbed by the experience that you had, where the gun jammed, and then you had to troubleshoot, and then keep going.
Andy Greenberg: Right. Once we had gotten the gun working as a real semi-automatic, then we put the silencer on, our 3D-printed silencer. The silencer, based on the way that it attaches to the muzzle, it does actually prevent the slide from getting its full range of motion. It no longer actually worked as a true semi-automatic weapon. I had to, every time I pulled the trigger, pull back the slide, rack the gun as they say, which ejects a casing and pushes a new round into the chamber, ready to be fired. You have to manually rack it each time.
But when I looked at the surveillance video of allegedly Luigi Mangione killing Brian Thompson, or whoever that was in that video, you can see that they do exactly that. They pull back the slide with every shot. In fact, they seem to be fully prepared to do that. They don’t hesitate at all. It was this eerie feeling of realizing that we had arrived at exactly the place where Brian Thompson’s killer did. It was this very unnerving feeling of realizing that I was carrying out exactly the same process, I was going through exactly the same sensations of recoil, and racking, and firing again that I was seeing in this actual murder video.
Zoë Schiffer: Talk to me about what proponents of ghost guns say. Why are they for this untraceable and potentially really dangerous technology?
Andy Greenberg: I think there’s a whole range of people who are interested in ghost guns and 3D-printed guns. Cody Wilson, the creator of the first fully 3D-printed gun, I was there in 2013 when he fired for the first time the Liberator, this fully plastic, fully 3D-printed one-shot pistol. He wants to destroy the state. He’s a full-on radical Libertarian who believes that actually making gun control impossible, but demonstrating that it is fundamentally impossible. He can use that as a lever to show that “all government is impossible.”
But then you talk to somebody like Print, Shoot, Repeat, who was the one who helped us out in this experiment. He’s also a real advocate for 3D-printed guns. But he told me, “I like this because I like the idea of being able to make my own guns at home. You can experiment with the process, and build guns that are not commercially available, and do it with full anonymity and privacy.” I did ask him, “Doesn’t that also pose a real risk? Doesn’t the ability for anybody essentially to make a gun at home with anonymity and privacy mean that they can use it to commit a crime?” He, like a lot of gun advocates I think in general, his answer was, “Well, freedom is dangerous,” and that’s the American way, essentially.
Zoë Schiffer: I was really struck by that in your work. That it really felt like their POV was the occasional outburst of violence is the cost of freedom in this country, which is a very different way of seeing the world. My last question is just where do you think this is all heading? What does 3D printing and the way the technology has developed since you first started covering this space tell us about our ability to regulate guns in the United States?
Andy Greenberg: Well, it’s just definitely clear that the law in this country is not keeping up with technology on this issue. That’s a running theme probably of this podcast and everything we do at WIRED. But it’s very visible. I feel like this is almost a parable about the ways that technology runs ahead of the law, especially in this country. And especially in a country where people love to defy the law and break the law. This is one example where Americans, it’s the American way to try to have more guns than even our very meager gun control laws would allow us.
For me, as someone who’s covered 3D-printed guns since 2012, it just strikes me that this topic caught up and even ran ahead of me in my reporting. I used to think of this as some future threat that I was describing in this science fictional way. Now it’s definitely a present threat. In fact, it took me by surprise in December 2024, when a 3D-printed gun was used allegedly in this massively high-profile murder. I don’t know. It’s a future shock, as Alvin Toffler would call it. Where it’s like, “Wow, we are in that future now.” This is a particularly scary one.
Zoë Schiffer: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’ll share our recommendations for what to read on Wired.com this week.
[break]
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry. I’m joined today by WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg. Before we take off, Andy, tell our listeners what they need to read on Wired.com today.
Andy Greenberg: Well, this ghost gun story is part of the Rogue’s package as we’re calling it, all about people on the edge of the law and breaking the law in interesting ways. There’s another story in that package that I thought was incredible, written by my colleague Evan Ratliff. It’s about the Zizians, this group that went in an extremely irrational direction—became actually this violent militant group. It’s a remarkable piece about their evolution and how they came to do truly horrifying criminal things.
There’s also this idea in the piece that has just haunted me in the weeks since I read it. It’s called Roko’s basilisk. It’s something that rationalists and AI people talk about. Which is this notion that, if there is going to be a superintelligent AI in the future, it might punish people who were aware that it could be created and didn’t work to create it.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s just so weird and scary.
Andy Greenberg: It just really bothers me that there’s this idea that’s so dangerous you can’t even think about it.
But I would also say that I have a piece in this Rogue’s package also coming out tomorrow that I’ve been working on for about a year and a half, about at one point the dark web’s biggest dealer in DMT, this incredibly potent psychedelic that he made in secret labs across the western half of the US. I hope you’ll check that out, too.
Zoë Schiffer: I am very excited for that one. DMT is a big topic of discussion in California these days.
I have another recommendation. I feel like the topic of this podcast has been very, at least to me, and I understand I have my own biases here, a bleak vision of the future. But we also have this interview that our fantastic reporter Kate Knibbs did with Jay Graber, the head of Bluesky. She lays out a vision of the future of the social web that I actually found extremely uplifting.
I thought it was interesting, because Jay uses a lot of the language that you hear from the cutting-edge tech VCs and executives, but she does it in a way that feels completely different from the future that these other people and a lot of the men lay out. I really found her words compelling, and I think everyone should read it.
That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about AI in schools and a big question we’re having. Is using this technology cheating?
Kyana Moghadam and Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Greg Obis mixed this episode. Pran Bandi was our New York studio engineer. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.
