I’d sincerely recommend everyone to read his manifesto and think about it a little bit.
A minor correction, 3D printed guns are fairly reliable nowadays when made in a way such that all pressure bearing parts are made with metal/factory made regular parts
Yeah was gonna comment this. There are totally functional 9mm machine pistols with everything made from printed and standard hardware store parts.
Yeah chiming in here to agree, 3D printed guns are now nearly identical in performance to other polymer based guns (like Glocks for instance).
I think it was also clarified that the gun was a Glock with 3d printed lower, which is basically a normal Glock with different plastic.
The lower / reciever / frame is the part of a semi auto handgun that has the serial number, as this is the part that is legally considered ‘the firearm’.
If you 3d print the lower, you can just buy every other part, often without a background check, in many instances without any ID at all, and assemble the gun around your 3d printed lower.
What makes something a ghost gun is that it does not have a serial number that can be tied back to a purchaser, who would have had to be ID’d / NICS checked or w/e.
What makes it a ghost gun is not that it is entirely made of plastic that wouldn’t show up on a xray or something, its that it is untraceable to a point of origin if you have the gun and nothing else to go on.
The other way people do this is by destroying the etched in serial number.
…
I haven’t actually heard it confirmed that Luigi only had 3d printed the lower, though for a normal person, that would probably be the easiest way to assemble a ghost gun.
But, he’s an engineering graduate.
Its possible he did ‘3d print’ many other components by using metal machining tools.
That functionally is a ghost gun in the US because only the lower is registered. Everything else is off the shelf, theoretically untraceable bits.
You just 3d print the lower reciever, most modern handguns use injection molded plastic for this part, and a good 3d printer (and operator) can get a pretty decent result.
But its not just the ‘pressure bearing’ parts that cannot easily be 3d printed.
Almost everything else still has to be either purchased or very, very carefully assembled by hand with skill and machining tools.
Here’s a Glock 40:
Its basically a pretty bad idea (impossible with springs) to try to replace any of the metal parts with 3d printed plastic, many more parts than the barrel and slide are made of metal, and many of those parts could easily fail, even after mag worth of ammo or less, and completely brick the weapon.
People who make or sell 3d printed weapons still have to include a parts kit (or shopping list) with the stuff you can’t 3d print… with the exception of weapons that fire basically .22 or smaller cartidges, and those ones that actually are all 3d printed plastic are not going to survive very many shots.
