A person of interest has been identified in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. Police say they found a “ghost gun” made with a 3D printer on the man, who has been charged in Pennsylvania with weapons, forgery and other crimes. The use of this type of firearm – whether made with a printer or bought online as a kit and assembled at home – has grown increasingly common in the past decade in part because they don’t have serial numbers and can’t be traced by authorities.
Here’s how they have gone from a pastime of gun enthusiasts and tinkerers to an increasing part of US gun violence – and the subject of a major supreme court case.
What is a ‘ghost gun’?
“Ghost gun” is a term broadly used to describe firearms that are bought as incomplete frames and receivers, two primary components of a firearm, and can be turned into functional guns by assembling it with other parts that can be ordered separately.
Their colloquial name is based on their virtual invisibility in the eyes of law enforcement. Before 2022, gun kits could be sold without serial numbers or being registered and buyers didn’t have to meet minimum age requirements or pass a background check to get one shipped to them.
3D printers have also been used to build fully functional guns, gun parts and accessories.
They first came to prominence as a gunsmithing tool in the early and mid-2010s after Cody Wilson, a major proponent of 3D printed and ghost guns, founded Defense Distributed, which offers the digital schematics needed to make a gun.
While an Obama-era law that sought to stop the distribution of these files was upheld in 2019, ambiguity around their legality means the schematics can still be found online.
How long have ghost guns been around?
Once a niche hobby among gun enthusiasts, do-it-yourself gun kits have been around since the 1990s. But since the early 2010s, they have been increasingly used in high-profile shootings.
In California, where cities and state officials have filed lawsuits against kit makers and outlawed the sale of kits, several high-profile shootings have been tied to ghost guns in the past decade.
Homemade guns were used in a 2013 mass shooting in Santa Monica, a 2014 bank robbery in Stockton and a shooting spree in rural Tehama county that killed six in 2017. In 2019, a 16-year-old killed two students and injured three others before killing himself with a ghost gun at a school in Santa Clarita.
The next year, as protests over police violence filled city streets, Steven Carrillo used a homemade machine gun to shoot two security guards at a federal building in Oakland and a sheriff’s deputy in an ambush in Santa Cruz.
And in 2022, a man who was barred from owning a gun because of a domestic violence restraining order used a ghost gun to shoot and kill his three daughters, a man who was supervising their visitation and then himself. These cases have heightened awareness of ghost guns and helped police realize that these are unique weapons – not just guns with their serial numbers filed off.
Still, the number of ghost guns that have been recovered by police has only grown. In 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confiscated 25,785 ghost guns in the US compared with 1,629 in 2017, according to data from the US Department of Justice and the ATF.
Are ghost guns legal to own?
While buying and building a ghost gun is legal at the federal level, they have become more tightly regulated during the Biden administration.
In 2022, the ATF created a new rule that put certain elements of ghost gun kits in the same legal category as traditional firearms and required companies that sell kits to add serial numbers to incomplete frames and receivers and conduct a background check on prospective buyers. It also requires federally licensed gun dealers to keep records on ghost gun kit sales until they go out of business.
This action, however, was quickly decried by kit makers, second amendment activists and attorneys who mounted legal challenges to the rule, who argued that the ATF overstepped its authority.
This legal fight is now the subject of the Garland v VanDerStok case currently before the supreme court, for which oral arguments were heard on 8 October, with the justices signaling a willingness to uphold the ATF’s regulations.
