If you 3D print a frame of a Glock-style pistol, then you can buy the rest of the parts off the internet and assemble it, and you have a gun that is a ghost gun. An anonymous, fully private, lethal weapon.
Zoë Schiffer: When we get back, we’ll get into the details of how Andy actually made and assembled the ghost gun. But for now, we have to go to break.
Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Okay, Andy, I want to get into the gun assembly process. Talk to me about the point from printing, to ordering the parts, to actually putting it together.
Andy Greenberg: The printing is definitely the easiest part in 2025. You really can download these files, these CAD files for gun frames from a bunch of different open source websites run by basically opponents of gun control. Then put them into some software and click print, and 13 hours later, in this case I had two perfect Glock-style frames. It was really remarkable how powerful the 3D printer, and cheap it was, that I was using.
The assembly is a lot trickier. That is as hard as ever. It’s like assembling a very small piece of Ikea furniture. There’s a lot of hammering little pins into place, and assembling the trigger mechanism, and it all has to fit into this small cavity inside of the frame. It took me more than an hour to do, and I was being guided in this process by a 3D-printed gun aficionado. He calls himself Print, Shoot, Repeat, who was really helpful and patient about it. But I think that for people who know what they’re doing, this takes 15 or 20 minutes—
Zoë Schiffer: Wow.
Andy Greenberg: —to assemble, once you have some practice at it.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay. Then you shot the gun. What happened? How were you feeling at that moment at the gun range?
Andy Greenberg: Well, before I even shot it, there is this incredible moment when you’re building a gun. It feels like this interesting, a little technical process, like making a model airplane or something. Then all of a sudden, I’m getting this slide onto the frame and then it clicks into place. Then you see for the first time that you actually have a gun in your hands, that it’s a lethal weapon. The way that you have to treat a gun in your hands is so different from a collection of gun parts. Suddenly, it’s this lethal weapon, you have to be careful where you point it. It’s a really dramatic moment. It was for me, anyway.
Zoë Schiffer: There was that final part in the assembly where you put on a silencer, like allegedly Luigi Mangione had on his gun, right?
Andy Greenberg: Right. Luigi Mangione, in his backpack allegedly had a 3D-printed silencer too, which is a very new phenomenon, even in the 3D-printed gun world. We built that, too. We 3D-printed a silencer. That actually is one part that’s different. It’s a felony for me to 3D-print a suppressor, a silencer as it’s known. We did have an actual licensed gunsmith, the owner of the range that we were about to test that, who pushed print in that case and helped us to build that silencer. When Luigi Mangione allegedly did that, he would have been breaking the law. I would have been too, if not for having a gunsmith on-hand to help us out.