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This time he works for Wired:
So, he went from his state of residence in New York to CA (San Francisco, of course) to build a gun. Isn't that a federal felony? Frankly, I'd love to see him prosecuted, if that's the case. They advocate for tougher and more moronic gun laws - well, let them learn how easy it is to break one without even realizing you did anything wrong.
Some excerpts:
He tried to make the lower using a drill press, a 3D printer, and, finally, using the Ghost Gunner CNC mill appliance. He then bought the rest of the parts from Ares. He then assembled it, fired it, liked it, and... got outraged that it's not prohibited, and decided to surrender it to the police, so that it's "under law enforcement awareness and control", being the good little subject that he is.
So, he went from his state of residence in New York to CA (San Francisco, of course) to build a gun. Isn't that a federal felony? Frankly, I'd love to see him prosecuted, if that's the case. They advocate for tougher and more moronic gun laws - well, let them learn how easy it is to break one without even realizing you did anything wrong.
Some excerpts:
I Made an Untraceable AR-15 ‘Ghost Gun’ in My Office—And It Was Easy
Exorcising My Ghost Gun
The day after that shooting field trip, I had a flight home to New York. Taking my ghost gun on a plane—legally, three ghost guns, in fact, since I had created three lower receivers—seemed unwise. I couldn’t leave them in WIRED’s office in San Francisco either, because that might count as legally transferring ownership of the unserialized guns, which is a felony. I considered destroying them with a hacksaw, but regulations posted online by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms seem to demand that a lower receiver be destroyed with a blowtorch, removing enough metal that it can’t possibly be welded back together.
So instead I decided to surrender my three lower receivers to the local police. I disassembled my AR-15 and left a large box containing all of the parts except the lower receivers on my editor’s chair. Then I walked down the street to the police station in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood and told the lady at the front desk I wanted to hand over some firearm components. She gave me a puzzled look and asked me to sit down.
Forty minutes later, two cops emerged from a door and asked what I was doing there. I explained and showed them the three lower receivers. They examined them with expressions that were simultaneously quizzical and bored. I asked them if it was common to see AR-15 lower receivers like these: homemade, with no serial numbers. “I’ve never seen this before,” one of them said.
The cops gave me a handwritten receipt for the three weapons I’d turned in, as if to definitively show that these were no longer outside of law enforcement’s awareness or control: They now had a number. Then they took my lower receivers behind their locked door and I said goodbye to my ghost gun.
When this story published, the Ghost Gunner still sat in a storage room of WIRED’s office a few blocks away. It’s ready to make another lower receiver at any time. And Defense Distributed has already sold more than a thousand of their gun-making boxes, each one a tiny, easy-to-use, anarchic rifle factory.
In other words, to paraphrase the rifleman’s creed again, this ghost gun was mine. But there will be many like it.
The day after that shooting field trip, I had a flight home to New York. Taking my ghost gun on a plane—legally, three ghost guns, in fact, since I had created three lower receivers—seemed unwise. I couldn’t leave them in WIRED’s office in San Francisco either, because that might count as legally transferring ownership of the unserialized guns, which is a felony. I considered destroying them with a hacksaw, but regulations posted online by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms seem to demand that a lower receiver be destroyed with a blowtorch, removing enough metal that it can’t possibly be welded back together.
So instead I decided to surrender my three lower receivers to the local police. I disassembled my AR-15 and left a large box containing all of the parts except the lower receivers on my editor’s chair. Then I walked down the street to the police station in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood and told the lady at the front desk I wanted to hand over some firearm components. She gave me a puzzled look and asked me to sit down.
Forty minutes later, two cops emerged from a door and asked what I was doing there. I explained and showed them the three lower receivers. They examined them with expressions that were simultaneously quizzical and bored. I asked them if it was common to see AR-15 lower receivers like these: homemade, with no serial numbers. “I’ve never seen this before,” one of them said.
The cops gave me a handwritten receipt for the three weapons I’d turned in, as if to definitively show that these were no longer outside of law enforcement’s awareness or control: They now had a number. Then they took my lower receivers behind their locked door and I said goodbye to my ghost gun.
When this story published, the Ghost Gunner still sat in a storage room of WIRED’s office a few blocks away. It’s ready to make another lower receiver at any time. And Defense Distributed has already sold more than a thousand of their gun-making boxes, each one a tiny, easy-to-use, anarchic rifle factory.
In other words, to paraphrase the rifleman’s creed again, this ghost gun was mine. But there will be many like it.
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