Glock Pistols Manufacturing on 3D Printers!

Part of the gun that the police believe was used to kill the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare was made by a 3D printer using a popular design found online.

[ABS News Service/14.12.2024]

At first glance, the gun in the police photographs — the one the authorities believe Luigi Mangione used to kill the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare — appears to be a Glock-19, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol used by military forces, police officers, civilians and criminals all over the world.

But upon closer inspection, it is clear that the weapon was not factory-made, but was at least partially produced by a 3D printer. The giveaways are subtle: The Glock logo is absent from the pistol’s grip, where it would ordinarily be imprinted, and the angle of the grip is peculiar. Indentations on the grip, known as stippling, are patterned in such a way that the gun’s “fingerprint” can be directly linked to a unique free-to-download 3D-printed design known as the FMDA 19.2 Chairmanwon Remix.

A gun designer who contributed to the pistol’s design and asked to be identified only by his online pseudonym, Chairmanwon, because he does not want to be linked to the case, said he was shocked when he saw photographs of the pistol, which circulated worldwide on social media last weekend. Chairmanwon acknowledged in a post on X that the pistol was his design, but later deleted the post.

Homemade firearms have existed for centuries, and fully 3D-printed firearms have been around since 2013, made and used largely by hobbyists in the United States. Laws governing homemade 3D-printed firearms vary by state. At the federal level, the Biden administration has proposed regulating components used in homemade guns as firearms. More than 25,000 privately made firearms were recovered in “domestic seizures” in 2022, according to the Department of Justice.

In some countries with strict gun laws, these 3D-printed weapons, which can be difficult to detect and trace, are being used increasingly in crimes, leaving law enforcement agencies struggling to stop their proliferation.

If the gun based on the Chairmanwon design was indeed the one used to kill the executive, Brian Thompson, outside a Manhattan hotel on Dec. 4, it would cast an uneasy spotlight on 3D-printed firearms, as the first known use of such a gun in a high-profile killing.

“It’s already reoriented things,” said Cody Wilson, the founder and director of the gun rights group Defense Distributed.

The relatively small community that is focused on 3D-printed firearms is populated by Second Amendment and tech enthusiasts, many of whom are designers or engineers in their day jobs. Mr. Wilson noted that the killing was being “celebrated” by some people in 3D-printed gun circles.

Quotations from Mr. Mangione’s note to officials are being used in advertising for the Gatalog, a group that publishes designs for 3D-printed guns and accessories online, including a predecessor design to that of the gun the police found with Mr. Mangione. In the ad, blocky text from Mr. Mangione’s note is overlaid on his mug shot: “TheGatalog.com. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience.”

Mr. Wilson has filed a lawsuit against the Gatalog, accusing the group of laundering money and stealing business from Defense Distributed. With “3D guns, you’re always a victim of your success,” said Mr. Wilson, a divisive pioneer in the field who faced charges in 2018 for sexually assaulting a minor.

In general, 3D-printed firearms fall largely into three categories. There are fully 3D-printed guns, like the Liberator pistol, an early design released in 2013 that was quickly attacked by the State Department for export violations; these are made of plastic and use few metal parts. The second category, known as hybrid designs, are made of 3D-printed components as well as off-the-shelf parts that are not otherwise related to firearms. The third category — which includes the Chairmanwon Remix — are commonly called kit guns.

For kit guns, “you’re printing the frame of a Glock or the lower receiver of an AR-15, and everything else is, you know, normally commercially available firearms components,” Charimanwon said.

The pistol recovered from Mr. Mangione was not made up entirely of 3D-printed parts; it had metal components as well. Those include the slide — the top portion of the gun — and the barrel, which appeared in the photos to be threaded, allowing a suppressor or silencer to be attached. The pistol’s magazine, which can often carry more than 10 cartridges and retails for around $25, appeared to have been store-bought.

Chairmanwon said that 3D-printed “ghost guns” were not easy to obtain. He said he was surprised by the high-profile nature of the killing and by the fact that the suspect was an Ivy League master’s graduate with a tech background.

The only difference between his Remix design and earlier versions, Chairmanwon said, was that he had figured out how to get a 3D printer to put stippling onto the pistol’s handgrip. The rest of the design is known as the FMDA DD 19.2, which was first released in 2021 and took its name from the designer’s username, FreeMen DontAsk. Stippling is often put on 3D-printed gun grips afterward using a soldering iron or laser.

Homemade 3D-printed Glock frames were unreliable until online retailers began selling metal rails that could be inserted to the printed frame so that the firearm’s slide could cycle when fired. With the rails installed, such a gun can typically stand up to the firing of a few hundred rounds or more before stresses start to show in the frame, depending on how fast the weapon is fired.

“Three-D-printed weapons can be fabricated and assembled by individuals with little or no technical expertise,” said Matt Schroeder, a senior researcher for the Small Arms Survey. “Three-D-printed weapons have not yet supplanted factory-built weapons in criminal circles, but if and when they do, we will have to completely rethink our approach to small arms control.”