When the New York City Police Department caught up with the man accused of killing UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, they found him with multiple fraudulent IDs and a 9mm “ghost gun,” according to authorities.
What is a ghost gun? Since the rise of 3D printers in the early 2010s, these untraceable firearms have become more and more common in American criminal cases.
Yet because these weapons have no serial numbers, it’s basically impossible to know how many have been sold, how many are in circulation, and the number used in crimes.
We don’t know much about the weapon that police believe may have been used to gun down Brian Thompson outside his Manhattan hotel last Wednesday.
When police detained 26-year-old Luigi Mangione he was “in possession of a ghost gun that had the capability of firing a 9mm round, and a suppressor,” NYPD Chief of Detective Joseph Kenny at a press conference Monday.
Kenny added that the weapon “may have been made on a 3D printer.”
If true that would be one of many. Last year, the US Department of Justice announced that requests from local police forces to trace ghost guns used in crimes had risen by more than 1,000 percent since 2017, from 1,629 reports to an astounding 19,273.
A ghost gun is a homemade firearm that bears no serial number, meaning it cannot be traced back to its original buyer if it is used in a crime.
It has always been possible to build such guns, but 3D printing has made it easier than ever before, and blueprints to do so are widely circulated on the internet.
Until recently, a quirk in US firearms laws made it unclear whether these sorts of guns could even be regulated.
Under the Gun Control Act of 1968, anyone who wants to manufacture guns for sale or distribution must put a serial number on every weapon they produce. The 1993 Brady Act added a requirement for background checks on prospective gun buyers.
But traditionally, the requirements pertained to the existence of a “frame or receiver” – ie, the overall chassis of the gun into which all other components are integrated – that made a gun a gun.
This led to numerous companies selling built-it-yourself firearm kits containing all the components that make up a gun, except for the “frame.” These were legally considered mere gun parts, rather than actual guns, and therefore not subject to the same controls.
Users could then utilize tools or a 3D printer to complete the kit by building their own receiver or frame, creating a usable and untraceable gun.
