Mangione’s ghost gun: Are 3D printed weapons turning America into the Wild West?

For decades, America's detectives have made breakthroughs in crime using gun traces. A homicide investigator typically uses ballistics and serial numbers of weapons checked via a vast network of gun shop records, manufacturer IDs and crime databases.

But those sleuthing tactics are fast becoming old-school science as a new era of weapons increasingly hits the nation's streets: untraceable 3D-printed guns and silencers like the ones found this week on suspected killer Luigi Mangione. And as the price of 3D printers continue to drop ? Amazon sells some models for $300 or less ? their availability will attract more attention from criminals, experts told USA TODAY.

The "ghost gun" and silencer found in the suspected United Healthcare CEO killer’s backpack at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s were made using a 3D printer plus readily available metal parts, according to Altoona Police.

“It was only a matter of time before one of these was used in a high-profile shooting,” said David Pucino, legal director at the gun violence prevention group Giffords Law Center.

Mangione’s homemade firearm ? which prosecutors linked Wednesday to shell casings at the scene of Brian Thompson’s murder ? is just the latest example of a troubling and growing trend around the nation of criminals using 3D-printed guns.

The weapons, just a novelty a decade ago, have become an untraceable menace in the crime world. Arrests related to 3D-printed guns have tripled in recent years; federal officials recovered more than 25,000 homemade guns in 2022 alone. And as the quality of 3D printers rise as prices fall, the trend shows no signs of stopping, threatening to make America a veritable Wild West of untraceable weapons, according to experts, former police officers and the White House.

More: Supreme Court discusses omelets when debating whether 'ghost guns' can be regulated

Most of the laws regulating ghost guns are a patchwork of state rules, although President Joe Biden pledged this year to change that. Biden established an Emerging Firearms Threats Task Force with an executive order in September aimed assessing and combating the dangers posed by unregistered 3D-printed guns.

Ghost guns becoming increasingly easy and cheap to produce

“It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” Felipe Rodriguez, longtime professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told USA TODAY. “Now you're creating monsters basically in the dark. ... You're creating these machines out of nowhere that are causing death.”

Rodriguez, a retired detective sergeant, proudly recalls the busts his New York Police Department unit made on gun smugglers ferrying arms into the city along Interstate 95, or the “Iron Pipeline,” as officers called it.

Today, there's a whole new pipeline: the information highway. Rodriguez said 3D printers are bound to make the problem of illegal guns much worse.

“NYPD has been proactive but how do you stop people using a 3D printer,” Rodriguez said. “It really has changed a lot when it comes to firearms.”

Printing guns at home also eliminates the typical middlemen of manufacturers and sellers that investigators use to trace a gun back to a suspect, he said.

“I’m at the point that I don't know what they’re going to create next,” Rodriguez said. “Are we going to see some plastic grenades?”

The answer is yes. The U.S. military unveiled its own 3D-printed grenade launcher, the Rambo, in 2017 and fired a 3D-printed grenade with it, according to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center.

"This demonstration shows that ... 3D printing has a potential future in weapon prototype development, which could allow engineers to provide munitions to soldiers more quickly," the Army agency wrote.

Guns like the one found on Mangione are relatively cheap and easy to make. Ghost Guns, a popular site for the technology, sells a 3D printer starter kit for about $300 that includes the blueprints for a .22 caliber pistol and filament ? the material the printer uses. The machine works by printing successive layers of plastic filament that harden to form a design.

Guns are just one of the many potential weapons the machines can print. They can be used to make "sears," or switches to convert guns into automatic weapons, grenades and even bombs.

Mangione’s gun was a Glock-style Gen3 G19 printed frame with an aftermarket metal slide, according to popular 3D printing YouTuber Print Shoot Repeat. Many 3D printed gun plans are only for the nylon fiber frame of the pistol and still need the “upper” mechanical parts to function.

Altoona police found the polymer pistol affixed with a metal slide and threaded barrel in Mangione’s backpack, according to the criminal complaint. The parts are available online for a few hundred dollars.

Gun rights advocates have defended 3D printing as the latest iteration of an American tradition among owners of making firearms at home.

Taylor Rhodes, a spokesman for the National Association for Gun Rights, called the practice of making homemade guns “a cherished tradition among gun owners.”

“Attempts to regulate or ban homemade firearms are just the tip of the iceberg in a larger agenda to dismantle our rights,” Rhodes wrote in a statement. “Proposals like prohibiting online sales of gun parts and forcing serialization on every component are thinly veiled attacks designed to discourage lawful gun ownership and erode our freedoms.”

It’s unclear whether Mangione printed or assembled the gun himself or obtained it from a third party. Federal law requires licensed gun sellers to sell only firearms, and some parts, that have a serial number.

1,000% increase in ghost guns recovered by ATF

Printing a gun in 2024 is a far cry from what it was years ago when the machines could cost thousands of dollars and the legality of making a gun was unclear. Today some states have bans in place, but halting the practice is difficult because people can legally buy the printers and the materials to create a gun.

For instance, in 2019, a man who was barred from having firearms because of a domestic incident was found with a 3D-printed AR-15 and a list of lawmakers' addresses, according to federal officials. The man defended possessing a gun by saying he didn't "buy" it but "built" one.

The proliferation of the technology has been followed by an explosion of crimes involving ghost guns, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Law enforcement agencies recovered about 1,600 ghost guns in 2017, according to the federal agency. That number shot up to over 25,000 by 2022, a nearly 1,500% increase.

Altoona police arrested Mangione for carrying a firearm without a license, among other charges. But the 3D-printed gun itself wasn’t illegal in Pennsylvania. Just 15 states have adopted policies regulating ghost guns, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

The homemade silencer is illegal to possess without obtaining a tax stamp under the National Firearms Act, stamping the device and registering it with the ATF.

Arrests related to 3D-printed guns have increased sharply as well, according to 3Dprint.com, an industry publication. The number of arrests tripled from 2020 to 2022, 3Dprint reported. Most of the arrests were in the U.S.

Some recent arrests and crimes linked to the guns:

• Police investigating gang activity recovered a trove of 3D-printed gun parts and printers from a Detroit teenager in September. The 14-year-old was arrested on gun charges.

• A Maryland man is on the run after police went to his house in response to a domestic assault incident in November and discovered 80 firearms, including 3D-printed guns. The suspect, Jerod Adam Taylor, is barred from having firearms because of prior convictions.

• New York City police arrested three people, including two minors, for 3D-printing guns at a day care facility in 2023. "You've got an 18-year-old in his room, 3D printer. He's not making little robotic toys, he's making guns," Mayor Eric Adams said. "That should be scary to everyone."

• In Mississippi, a man was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison last year for converting semi-automatic weapons into machine guns using switches he made from 3D printers.

• An Ohio man was sentenced to three years in prison for using a 3D-printed switch on his Glock. Federal prosecutors said he fired in self-defense but still broke the law by owning the switch. Except in very limited circumstances, possession of a switch is illegal, because the National Firearms Act classifies the switch itself as a machine gun, prosecutors said.

3D arsenals of grenades, bombs and machine gun switches

Guns and silencers are just part of the arsenal 3D printers can produce. Others are grenades, bombs and switches to convert pistols into machine guns.

In June, federal officials launched "Operation Texas Kill Switch," a statewide operation to target machine gun conversion devices, also known as switches or auto-sears. The switches – which prosecutors said can be made within minutes using a standard 3D printer – have been used in shootings across several cities, including Houston, Sacramento and Washington.

“We’re here to talk about a roughly one-inch piece of plastic. It looks innocuous enough, a little like a LEGO or a k’nex block. But this 1-inch piece of plastic is killing people,” said Leigha Simonton, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. “Machine gun conversion devices can turn Second Amendment-protected firearms into illegal weapons of war and petty criminals into brutal killers. We cannot have our streets turned into war zones."

A standard 3D printer can make about 100 plastic switches in 72 hours, according to the ATF. And a switch-equipped gun can fire shots faster than the standard M-4 machine gun issued to U.S. soldiers.

Fighters in Ukraine have even used the printers to make bombs, according to reporting by the Economist.

Will Mangione case be a turning point?

Print Shoot Repeat, the YouTuber who identified the CEO shooter’s gun, worries about the effect the shooting could have on hobbyists.

“It’s going to be pretty devastating potentially for gun laws going forward with 3D-printed firearms,” he said in his video on the gun. "Are they going to try to make DIY firearms completely illegal?”

Pucino, of the Giffords Law Center, said a shooting like the one Mangione is accused of was inevitable, given the lack of widespread regulation.

There are a few ways government could slow the spread of 3D printed guns, Pucino said. People printing guns should be required to have a license; the printers should detect when they’re making a gun part and respond accordingly; or the government could regulate the computer code used to print guns, he suggested.

But he fears such actions would be only a Band-Aid.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” he said.

Contributing: Minnah Arshad

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Experts: Luigi Mangione case could usher in new era of 3D gun crime