- 5/24/2025
How easy has it become for someone to build a deadly, and untraceable weapon? With nothing more than a 3D printer and parts ordered online, WIRED Senior Writer Andy Greenberg remade the exact same gun allegedly used in one of the most high-profile assassinations in recent memory. This is HACKLAB: I Made Luigi Mangione’s Gun.
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00:00This is the gun used in the most high-profile assassination in recent memory.
00:04Well, it's not actually the literal gun. Luigi Mangione allegedly used to kill
00:08United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But it is the exact model of firearm and we
00:13made it with just a 3d printer and some parts ordered off the internet. Some
00:17people call this a ghost gun because no government agency has any record of its
00:20existence. I didn't get a background check or show ID. No gun control at all.
00:25I'm Andy Greenberg. I investigate the strange dark and subversive corners of
00:29the internet for Wired. This is Hack Lab. I made Luigi Mangione's gun. As a
00:34journalist, I've covered the digital DIY gun making scene since the beginning. In
00:392013, I was there for the very first test of the first fully 3d printed gun, the
00:44Liberator. A couple of years later, I even built an untraceable AR-15 ghost gun in
00:48Wired's office to test just how far the tech had come. That was 10 years ago.
00:53Then, when Luigi Mangione was arrested in an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's late
00:57last year, I wrote a news piece about the gun found in his backpack. According to
01:02the DIY gunsmiths I spoke to, it seemed to be a Chairman Wan V1, a tweak of a
01:07popular partially 3d printed Glock style design known as the FMDA 19.2, an
01:13acronym that stands for the libertarian slogan, free men don't ask. So I wanted
01:18to know how easy is it for someone to build a deadly and untraceable weapon like
01:23this now? Has the law finally caught up with the reality of ghost guns? To find
01:28out, I decided to make one. So I went to Araby, Louisiana to a gun range outside New
01:34Orleans owned by James Reeves, an attorney and a popular YouTuber.
01:38James, nice to meet you. Our experiment here that we're trying to do is actually
01:423d print Luigi Mangione's gun just like he did. Allegedly. Allegedly, thank you. But my
01:48question for you first as a lawyer is, is all of this actually legal? Totally
01:53legal, but it depends on the purpose. So if you're making a firearm for
01:57yourself, there's no prohibition in the Gun Control Act of 1968 that would
02:01prevent you from making a gun for yourself. If you're making it for
02:05someone else, if you're selling them, distributing, totally different story.
02:08You've got to have a license. A lot of states have made this illegal, but here in
02:12Louisiana, like we're still good to go. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, free
02:16country down here and the great state of Louisiana. Over the years, the US
02:20government has certainly tried to regulate 3d printed and other kinds of
02:24ghost guns. After Cody Wilson released printable files for the Liberator online,
02:28the government ordered his company, Defense Distributed, to take them down. By
02:322018, Cody Wilson briefly won a legal fight to repost them on his website, but
02:36multiple states sued, shutting it down again. Then in 2022, the Biden
02:39administration really tightened regulations, requiring serial numbers and
02:42background checks for ghost gun kits. Commercially available packages of
02:46parts which are designed to make it easy to finish and assemble a working gun.
02:49That led to legal challenges, which were settled in March with the Supreme
02:52Court decision upholding those new regulations. But if you're not using one
02:56of those kits, it's really only state laws that restrict making ghost guns, and
03:00they vary really widely. New York enforces strict rules on self-made guns, requiring
03:05serial numbers on the receivers. California even prohibits the sale of 3d
03:09printers if they're intended to make a gun. But for the rest of the United States in
03:12between, including Louisiana, where we are now, it's still essentially the Wild West
03:16for DIY firearms. While the legal battle has gone back and forth, the technology has
03:21just kept relentlessly advancing. Since the first 3d printed gun parts began to
03:25surface online in 2012 and 2013, we've seen an explosion of digital DIY firearms.
03:30Fully or partially printable rifles, AR-15s, and even fully automatic printable machine guns.
03:37And thanks to a very committed community of online gunsmiths, many of whom are bent on
03:42defeating gun control, that evolution is still continuing. The first step to
03:46building the gun allegedly used by Mangione was easy. I found the gun plans
03:50online in minutes. Certain file sharing sites are packed with DIY firearm blueprints,
03:55detailed instructions, everything. In states like California or New Jersey, parts of this gun printing
04:00process, even sharing the files is illegal. But in Louisiana, no such law. In fact,
04:05according to US gun control laws, only one component known as the frame of a
04:10Glock-style pistol is considered the gun. If I make that part myself, say with a 3d
04:14printer, and I combine it with commercially bought components for the rest of the
04:18weapon, I can basically circumvent all regulations. So armed with a shopping list
04:23and a credit card, we ordered everything we needed. A 3d printer, plastic filaments, and
04:28household products like epoxy were all just a few clicks away on sites like Lowe's or Amazon.
04:33And the more specialized components were available on sites that sell gun parts, just not the
04:37guns themselves. A few days later, every ingredient I needed to make Mangione's gun arrived in the
04:43mail for the grand total of $1,144.67 plus shipping. And that includes the price of the 3d printer.
04:50This is like Christmas Day. This looks like a slide, very much like an obvious gun part. Kind of crazy that you can just order this.
05:01So it's kind of like a very interesting and fun technical challenge. But I keep having to remind myself,
05:06not only that we're making a lethal weapon, but that I'm also potentially retracing the steps of an alleged
05:11murderer who carried out exactly this process. 3d printers work by extruding heated plastic filament
05:17through a nozzle layer by layer to slowly create the object. We're going to print two frames, just to be
05:23sure. Printing these two frames will take about 13 hours, which is pretty quick. Back when Cody Wilson,
05:28a pioneer in the DIY gun movement printed the Liberator, the original one shot 100% 3d printed pistol in 2013,
05:353d printers were much slower and the materials were pretty unreliable by comparison and cracked easily.
05:40When Cody Wilson tested that first ever 3d printed gun, he was concerned that it might blow up in his
05:45hands. He even used a string to pull the trigger for the first time. To some degree, I'm still a little
05:50worried about that, to be honest. DIY gun fails are still pretty common. When I made an AR-15 in Wired's
05:55office in 2015, a gunsmith warned me the frame of the gun that I had made wouldn't be reliable enough
06:01and recommended I use an aluminum lower receiver I'd made with a computer controlled milling machine
06:05instead. We're about to see how much that question of reliability has changed over the years.
06:10Okay, let's get started. Hopefully this whole experiment will literally blow up in my face.
06:21The next morning, I returned to check on the 3d printed frames.
06:24This is pretty wild. Like these things look like actual gun parts. So this looks like a big block,
06:38but all of this is support structure that just holds up the top of the frame here. So once I crack this off...
06:44Oh yeah. I don't need to even clean anything out of this internal cavity here. This just looks almost
06:54like commercially made. It's so clean on the inside. It's just really impressive what a 3d printer can do
06:59today overnight. So the frame is done. Now it's time to assemble this gun. I know from experience that it's
07:06tricky assembling a gun from scratch. There are lots of little pieces and to be honest, I have no idea
07:11what I'm doing. So that's why I've reached out to a DIY gun expert and YouTuber who calls himself
07:16Print Shoot Repeat. He prefers to keep his face covered to preserve his anonymity. So what do you think of
07:21this 3d printed 9mm frame? It looks beautiful. It's very excellent print quality. So how do we get started?
07:28So do you see that hole there? I saw the hole at the bottom, yeah. So you are a 3d printed gun
07:34aficionado. What is it about these things that appeals to you? I think the thing I like the most
07:39about it, aside from exercising your constitutional rights, which is awesome, but you're able to make
07:44guns that you can't buy. There are these really cool, intricate, neat designs that people create
07:49and test that you can make that you actually can't purchase in a store, but also to be anonymous and
07:56private with your gun making. But there's also this element to 3d printed guns that somebody
08:01who's mentally ill or a felon or Luigi Mangione can, you know, fabricate their own gun and go out
08:07and commit a crime with it. I mean, how do you, how do you feel about that? Freedom is ultimately
08:11dangerous. There's no way to stop people from hurting each other, unfortunately. I don't love that
08:16people commit crimes and kill each other with guns, but they are designed for killing. I'm not going to
08:21deny that. But we live in a country that is relatively free when it comes to a lot of our
08:27laws and especially the second amendment. It is kind of remarkable the precision of this. It seems
08:31like a commercial piece. The design of this particular pistol was so good in 2020 that it's
08:38still the go-to Glock style frame. It's open source and designers can take the raw blueprint of this
08:44thing and then add their own tweaks to it. If you really were like a lone wolf killer trying to make
08:49this thing alone in your garage, where would you learn this? Or if you were just someone who's into
08:53building guns and not a lone wolf killer, but there are assembly videos, particularly like the sites
08:58where you download some of the files, but it's a lot of trial and error. The slide to me is like
09:02shocking to even look at. It's like, I can't believe this is just a component of a gun. So it's just
09:06strange that like the regulated part is not the part that holds the rounds. Yeah, that's per the ATF.
09:12The ATF decided that, so thanks ATF. This can be challenging because what can happen is
09:18the rear rails sometimes don't line up perfectly. Yep. Now pull it back as hard as you can. Now let
09:23it go. All right, now we got our gun and just make sure you don't point it at anyone. I see the empty
09:28chamber and now we're going to put in one of these magazines. Which one do you think we should use?
09:33What I found on the evidence photograph, there was two magazines. One was a Glock 17 magazine,
09:37which holds 17 rounds versus a Glock 19 magazine. This is a Magpul P mag. This one had jacketed hollow
09:43points in it. Going off that, I would say we should stick this one in. This is essentially Luigi
09:48Mangione's gun, but we're still missing one component. Yes, critical component. Which
09:53is the suppressor. Exactly. Suppressors, also known as silencers, have been highly regulated
09:58under the National Firearms Act since 1934. And 3D printing one without a certain kind of gun
10:03making license would be a serious felony. Since James has that license, he's going to do it for us.
10:08So it's quite a process to legally own and possess a suppressor. The second you print out a suppressor,
10:15home, felony, prison. So it's a very serious deal. 3D printed suppressors are a relatively new
10:20phenomenon. And the technology to make ones like the FTN suppressor allegedly found on Mangione
10:25has come a long way in a very short time. So the suppressor is printing and it looks like it's going
10:30to take another three and a half hours. Yeah, it smells a little bit like a like a burning vacuum
10:36cleaner. When this is done, we actually have to fill out a couple set of federal forms. After a few more
10:43hours of 3D printing, we had our suppressor. We wrapped it in hockey tape just as Luigi Mangione
10:48allegedly did. So I think we're now ready to put this thing together, right? Yeah, go right ahead,
10:53thread it off. Once I screwed it onto the barrel of our gun, we had the complete configuration he
10:57was accused of using as a murder weapon. This thing just got at least like twice as scary.
11:02Before heading to the range to test it, I wanted to get the gun control side of the story. So I spoke
11:06to Nick Ciprina at the non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety. 3D guns are a whole new ball game. I think
11:123D printed guns are about to have their moment. I've covered this world of 3D printed guns since
11:162013. And back then, you know, I wrote about this believing it was kind of a science fictional
11:22future phenomenon. I do not think this is a future problem. ATF estimated that between 2016 and 2022,
11:29over 70,000 ghost guns were recovered at crime scenes across the country. The technology has
11:34really come of age. The printers are better, the materials are better, and the designs are better.
11:40There are models of gun that have come out in the last few years. These almost fully 3D printed,
11:45semi-automatic rifles that truly look like something out of science fiction that are really
11:50powerful and really accurate. One of the things that has developed over the last decade or more
11:56is a community of creators sharing designs and improving upon each other's designs. And a lot of
12:00that are values that creators, I think, really can embrace. But we can't lose sight that this is about
12:07firearms. You have a right to personal protection. But when you're purposefully creating firearms that
12:14are flooding communities with illegal firearms that are used in crimes, and when we're innovating to
12:20make them harder to regulate, you have to ask yourself the question, just how serious is this
12:25community about doing their part to protect the community? I mean, we have seen already that you can
12:30actually have most of the parts of the firearm be fully 3D printed. That is the state of the art right
12:36now. And that is going to be the next chapter of the ghost gun problem in this country.
12:47I might look calm on the surface, but to be honest, I'm sweating a little bit. It's a strange moment
12:51when this kind of abstract and technical series of steps finally comes together. And you remember
12:57that you've created something really powerful and quite dangerous. In fact, the exact gun that appears to
13:02have killed a man on the streets of Manhattan last year. So for this first shot, I'm gonna just hold
13:07it to the side from the hip, just in case this slide flies off the 3D printed frame and goes backwards
13:13at a high speed. Moment of truth. Wow. How'd we do? Intact? Totally flawless, yeah. Nice. Decently quiet for
13:23uh, supersonic ammunition as well. Well, let's load it up again. All right.
13:38I don't know. Let's see.
13:42Another misfire. So I guess what's happening here is that the suppressor is preventing it from cycling
13:48properly? Yes. What's happening is the slide's coming forward, but probably not quite enough to strike the
13:52primer and then cause a detonation downrange, but we did get a couple there. So I want to kind of
13:57give it a shot and see if I can break it in a little bit. As we saw in DCT camera video, he was
14:02going like this after every shot, hitting the back of the slide like you did correctly. But I want to
14:06actually see if this is going to function without the suppressor attached. Let's do that. Let's take it
14:10up. Okay. In a normal semi-automatic Glock, the upper part of the gun, known as its slide, which
14:16retracts with every shot, resets the trigger and loads a new round into the chamber. In the video of
14:22Thompson's murder, the gun allegedly fired by Mangione appears not to have functioned. That's
14:27a result of the suppressor attachment preventing that rechambering. And yet the CEO killer in the
14:32CCTV video didn't panic or stop to diagnose his ghost gun's apparent malfunctioning. He reacted
14:37quickly, racking the gun, shooting it, and racking again as if he knew exactly how the weapon he had
14:42made would perform. Had the assassin practiced with his gun at a range to break it in? Had he in fact
14:48engaged in exactly the type of troubleshooting we were doing right now. Not everything works. So you
14:53got to do a little bit of filing sometimes. We've done a little bit of modifications. We're going to
14:56see if it runs semi-automatic.
15:01You take it for a spin.
15:07It's so close now. Oh, there we go. Oh, there it is. Yep.
15:12Here you can see that when we take off the suppressor, the gun functions as a truly semi-automatic
15:17firearm. All right, let's try the suppressor. Let's do it. We got the suppressor on. We made
15:20some modifications to the barrel and the slide. Hopefully it'll run.
15:26You were manually racking it, but just like we saw in the video of Brian Thompson's killing. And to be
15:40clear, like the thing that we had to file was not the 3D printed part. It was this kind of slightly
15:44crappy commercial part. You know, I imagine that for allegedly Mangione himself, he probably had
15:50similar kind of hiccups and then probably did take a file to it at some point. Indeed. And it seemed like
15:55he knew that it was going to malfunction in the way that we just saw and was ready for that
16:00malfunction to happen. Right. In my hands is the gun that allegedly killed CEO Brian Thompson. The
16:05same Glock-style pistol, same parts, same suppressor. As I squeezed the trigger and racked the gun in the
16:12exact same way the killer allegedly did, I felt the same explosive recoil he would have. And it drove home
16:18the disturbing realization that our experiment in building a lethal, uncontrollable weapon had been a
16:25success. What kind of law or regulation do you actually imagine could get a grip on this issue?
16:33The key part of this is to make breaking the law harder. And the way you make breaking the law harder
16:40is to focus on the 3D printers and that sort of firmware and software that make them work. We've been
16:47here before with money counterfeiting. And the software companies like the Adobe's of the world detect
16:53whether you are trying to print currency. You can't do it. We're starting to have conversations
16:59with the folks behind these printing companies that are like, yeah, we can detect it and we can
17:03stop our printer from printing. I can already imagine the incredible backlash to any effort to kind of
17:11put DRM on 3D printers or try to just restrict computers essentially that people own.
17:17I'm in the business of trying to save lives. And the fact of the matter is gun violence is the number one
17:24killer of children and teens in this country. And there's lots of room for legal ownership, for even
17:30maybe legal printing. But the idea that we're going to sort of sit this one out because the crypto anarchists
17:36have won is not going to happen. And they're going to find that those of us in the gun safety debate have a lot of
17:42fight in us as well. I've successfully made a ghost gun. Now I have a problem. I can't legally take
17:48it back to New York where I live. And I can't legally leave it here in Louisiana or give it to
17:53someone else either. So I'm going to turn in the parts I made to the local police. Hopefully they're
17:58not going to ask too many questions. I think we've proven that a dozen years after I first started
18:03writing about 3D printed guns, it's actually easier than ever before to use digital tools to build
18:09a deadly weapon with total privacy and impunity in most of the United States, despite every effort
18:14by gun control advocates. Until that changes, and as 3D printing technology keeps getting better,
18:19it's safe to say we're going to see more ghost guns in the world and more people like a certain
18:25CEO killer ready to use them.
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