SOF Interview: “Ghost Guns: Hobbyists, Hackers, and the Homemade Weapons Revolution?”
Soldier of Fortune Mag/Q&A with Mark Tallman
- Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a Professor of Homeland Security & Emergency Management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Before that, I taught at the Centers for the Study of Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at Colorado State University-Pueblo, and I was a project manager for the University of Denver’s “Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research.” I’ve also been a private security and emergency planning consultant for about 12 years.
- Would you describe your book, “Ghost Guns: Hobbyists, Hackers, and the Homemade Weapons Revolution?” On sale: August 31, 2020 / Praeger
It’s a wide-spectrum deconstruction of this much-hyped issue of “Ghost Guns” in America and around the world. It covers the evolution of gunmaking technologies, historic laws and modern legal trends, and some realistic implications for security, policing, and armed conflict, while trying to separate the authentic issues from the media hype.
As many readers probably know, independent gunmaking has been a longstanding practice in America and in many other countries. If we define “do-it-yourself (DIY)” guns as firearms made outside the modern factory environment, then all guns prior to the 19th century were “DIY.” People have been making guns for a thousand years. Before industrialization, almost all guns were crafted artisanally. DIY gunmaking re-popularized in the last couple decades in a modernized form. I examine some reasons behind that. I also look at some of the political and civil liberties implications of trying to combat DIY gunmaking. Ultimately, I argue that the countermeasures needed to seriously combat illegal gunmaking would be so invasive that it could become its own Pandora’s Box from the standpoint of eroding civil liberties or decreasing political trust.
In researching for the book, I interviewed dozens of subject matter experts in law, law enforcement, the defense and security industries, the firearms industry, the tech sector, the DIY firearm and “maker” cultures, and I spoke with political advocates on different sides of the issue. I certainly have my own editorial views that come out in parts of the book, but I also tried to be civil toward all viewpoints, and factually accurate as possible. Some media reporting on this issue has been well-researched, but a lot of it has been tabloid stuff. The ghost gun phenomenon involves many misconceptions. Ultimately, I wanted to provide accurate information and varying viewpoints, and let readers decide what they think.
- So, what is a “Ghost Gun?”
There are many styles of DIY firearms. “DIY” just means “do-it-yourself,” so it could be anything manufactured outside the factory environment. There are primitive “zip guns” like slam fire pipe guns or other unsophisticated designs. “Expedient” firearms are designed to be made with commonplace tools and materials and minimal machining. “Component builds” like the “80%” frame and receiver builds, have become quite popular. There are “converted” guns that involve gunlike items that can be altered to fire live rounds. “Deactivated” guns are rendered inert for display purposes, but sometimes those guns can be “reactivated.” “Crypto” guns, like pen guns, or cane guns, or cell phone guns, are meant to look like innocuous objects. There are digitally-fabricated guns, such as 3D printed or CNC-milled firearms, but that only refers to the manufacturing technique—with digital fabrication you can build a huge diversity of firearm components with industry precision. “Craft” guns usually refers to firearms made in conflict zones or developing nations. Depending on tools, materials, and skillsets, these range from very primitive to extremely well crafted. And of course, there’s a subculture of expert artisanal makers in mainstream industry who make very fine collector’s pieces.
All those terms I just mentioned are actually more precise than the term that’s been embraced by media, which is “ghost” guns. Like many things in gun debate, the term is intrinsically politicized. It was used occasionally in the 1990s, but really popularized after Cody Wilson and his Texas-based company Defense Distributed began a provocative marketing campaign to hype their home gunmaking tools and digital firearm designs a few years ago. Wilson became notorious for arguing that homemade “ghost” guns would invalidate gun control. Meanwhile, some Democratic politicians hyped the same idea to argue for new restrictions. Both sides fixate on the fact that DIY gunmaking is a way to get firearms without the typical background checks, traceable serial numbers, or registration procedures. Both sides are basically correct on that point, but they have totally different interpretations of whether it’s a good or bad thing.
Years ago, some DIYers and industry people I spoke with really didn’t like this “ghost gun” term. If I mentioned “ghost” guns they’d circle the wagons. Some hobbyists were crying foul because home gunmaking was rarely associated with crime or targeted for regulation in the past, but was now thrust into the national debate as a scary new loophole. Generally, most American DIYers are pretty responsible people. However, some crime is inevitable when you’ve got a way for felons or mentally unstable people to potentially get guns, and more criminals were going to try it when you’ve got this massive rise in media interest around DIY as a quote-unquote “loophole.”
The media hype became a feedback loop. First, mainstream media learned that people were making their own guns. Of course, people were already making their own guns, but in the post-9/11 era a lot more people got into it, and the AR platform really popularized as a DIY project, and you start getting more media coverage with a sinister tone. Cody Wilson and some other DIY provocateurs stepped in and embraced the “ghost gun” term because they correctly ascertained that they could exploit the scare stories as free advertising for their gunmaking tools, components, and digital design projects.
As this feedback loop intensified, the concept popularized outside its original consumer base, and more component suppliers opened shop to feed consumer interest. And as public knowledge of DIY gunmaking widened, inevitably there were going to be criminals and mentally unstable people who catch on, and then police started to pay more attention, and in some jurisdictions we started seeing more criminal cases involving DIY products. A rise in criminal cases feeds back into the media loop, so consumer interest increases as the controversy ramps up. Then, the more incidents happen with DIY guns, the more calls for regulating them.
Perversely, calls for more regulation may motivate more people to build. It’s similar to the politically-driven purchasing cycles we see with conventional firearms. We’ve been in that feedback loop with active shootings and the gun debate more generally. There are researchers making compelling arguments that sensational media coverage of active shootings increases the copycat effect. So, when active shootings occur, media covers it in ways that increase the probability of additional shootings, while also calling for greater regulation. Consequently, consumers buy more guns because coverage of shootings elevates their concern about personal security, and the simultaneous call for new regulation causes people to hurry and get guns before hypothetical new regulations hit.
We’ve seen that pattern during the COVID pandemic and recent protests too. Firearm acquisitions have been off the charts because people are concerned about security and the potential for a rise in crime or civil instability, while also expecting more gun regulation as a result of the emergency or as a consequence of upcoming elections. This probably wouldn’t shock readers who have operated in conflict environments, but people make more preparations for their own security when they sense that the state can’t guarantee security. In the COVID era, a lot of people appear to be getting guns in stereotypical “blue” jurisdictions. My research found some indicators that DIY builds have had considerable appeal in “blue” states as well. The media’s focus on home gunsmithing as a new front in the gun debate has actually backfired in some respects, because it probably attracted lots of people to build guns who wouldn’t have done it otherwise, and it motivated DIYers to come up with new techniques to make it harder to control.
I attribute the media’s embrace of “ghost guns” to the same incentives that encourage media to focus on fear and conflict across the board. Fear and conflict get eyeballs, and eyeballs get money. DIY also fits into a stereotypical narrative about right-wing anarcho-libertarian gun nuts resisting any type of regulation, and some DIY spokespeople really embraced their role as trolls in that fable. So, “ghost guns” are an easy way to introduce a scary idea and then editorialize for broader gun control. But if homemade guns are only a problem because we don’t have enough laws against them, that doesn’t explain their popularity among criminals, armed groups, extremists, and sometimes normal citizens in countries that already restrict it. Lots of countries have significant production and trade of craft guns. In most of those places, it’s already illegal.
And obviously, saying all homemade guns are “ghost” guns is simplistic. Some jurisdictions have processes to legally register and serialize homemade guns, which means they aren’t really “ghost” guns if the maker complies with the requirements. However, I am skeptical that these laws will be very effective at reducing crime. Media often hypes the idea that homemade guns are more dangerous because they’re untraceable, but this bypasses the elephant in the room, which is that most guns are already “ghost” guns from a criminal investigative standpoint.
- I think I see where you’re going, but would you elaborate on what you mean when you say “most guns are ghost guns?”
Well, a majority of civilian-owned guns in America and around the world, are already unregistered. In conflict zones, old AKs and SKSs materialize like magic, disappear, and pop up again in different conflicts. Guns and ammo can last for decades or even a century if you maintain them. Conflict guns may be trafficked so many times to so many places, stripped and rebuilt with new components or furniture. Just because the receiver’s got markings from some old Eastern Bloc factory in the 1960s doesn’t mean you can press a button and stop that trade.
Domestically, there are other challenges. The majority of gun crimes in America are committed by “prohibited possessors.” These folks have disqualifying records, so they’ll fail background checks at licensed retailers. Numerous surveys suggest that most gun criminals don’t acquire weapons through those formal channels with background checks or licensing. They mostly get guns informally through theft, borrowing, or “straw purchases” where somebody with a clean record buys retail, and resells to prohibited buyers. Now, it’s true that legal gun buyers sometimes commit gun crimes, like with domestic scenarios, active shootings, or dumb hothead situations. These things do happen, but they’re a minority of illegal shootings, and those offenders aren’t usually caught by tracing the serial numbers either. They’re usually caught red handed, don’t have an escape plan, or don’t expect to survive. So, I’m skeptical that many of those offenses would be deterred because the weapons are traceable after the fact. Serial numbers can be useful for mapping out illegal trafficking and identifying stolen guns, but they’re less useful for typical gun crime prosecutions because tracing the weapon often isn’t necessary to prove those offenses.
In a country that makes, sells, and owns the most guns in the world, it’s practically impossible to shut down all those possible channels for getting guns off-books. For example, in 2015 there were between 15,000-16,000 homicides in America. Now, let’s assume that all those homicides were gun homicides, and they were all committed with different guns. So, the maximum number of murder guns in 2015 was fifteen to sixteen thousand. If you count all unlawful shootings that caused injury, then the numbers are higher, but the point I’m making still stands. So, that same year, over 14 million guns were manufactured and imported, so the “murder guns” only represented like 0.11% of new guns in the system that year. However, most crime guns aren’t new. If we include the pre-existing stocks around 350-400 million, then the homicide guns are only like 0.004% of the guns in circulation. Then you’ve got over a hundred thousand guns stolen in America every year. It’s a tiny proportion of the total stock that gets diverted to criminal users, but it’s more than enough to fuel crime. It’s very difficult to construct a point-of-sale control system that’s going to effectively prevent that. It’s not a needle in a haystack, it’s a needle in a stack of needles.
Under the 1968 Gun Control Act, all commercial guns must have traceable serials. You can use serial numbers to try to catch trafficking, but most street-level gun crimes aren’t solved by tracing the serials because most street-level gun criminals aren’t identified in the gun’s paper trail. They’re caught illegally carrying, or identified by witnesses, or video cameras, or cell phone data, or investigators find the gun later and match it forensically to a crime scene. If you built the gun, or stole it, or defaced a commercial gun’s serial number, or bought it from a trafficker who has an alibi for how it ended up in the wrong hands, then it’s very difficult to hold anybody accountable for trafficking. There’s no registry in the world that will point detectives to the illegal possessor once the gun is off-record.
So, the reality is that serial number registries and tracing systems have been somewhat disappointing as an investigative tool, and this isn’t just true in America. The registries are good at tracking legally owned guns and keeping honest people honest, but legal gun owners aren’t committing most of the gun crimes. Even in those less frequent cases when legal gun owners do commit violent crimes, the traceability of the gun probably has marginal deterrent effect. So, registries and tracing systems have been of limited value insofar as they track the lower-risk gun owners but oftentimes fail to solve most of the crime that’s actually happening.
Registries and tracing systems are dependent on serial numbers. Traffickers can remove serials with simple tools. There are forensic techniques that will recover a serial that’s been scratched off, but if traffickers are thorough they can make it unrecoverable. In jurisdictions with gun registries, sometimes the trafficked guns have the serials filed off, which makes commercial guns almost as untraceable as a homemade “ghost” gun that somebody builds without the serial at all.
Homemade guns add complexity to this pre-existing problem, but from a criminal investigative standpoint, they probably aren’t quite the game changer that some folks fear. Plenty of crime guns were already hard to trace before the ghost gun hype, and plenty of criminals can still get guns regardless. This will probably stay true even if they pass a bunch of new regulations targeting home gunmaking in the US.
The role of DIY has probably increased in crime over the last decade or so, but they’re still a minority of crime guns in America. Even if governments clamp down on DIY guns, that doesn’t mean criminals won’t still traffic commercial guns, or continue to build guns illegally. Traffickers are adaptive, they can get guns into highly restrictive environments, and traffic them in ways that separate them from the formal records. With modularity, DIY designs, digital fabrication, localized production, and smuggling of disassembled or unfinished components, trafficking investigations will require more time, technology, training, and resources in the future, and a lot of it won’t be caught. Combating gun trafficking is very difficult if you have a lot of people who want to get them illegally. I don’t think this is a problem that can be solved overnight by adding a few more superficial regulations to the licensed industries.
- Can you tell us more about the styles of DIY small arms that people are making, and what kind of technologies people are using?
Seeing how people innovate with household technologies was one of the most intriguing aspects of writing this book. I think gunmaking is entering a “neo-artisanal” moment. People are combining old and new technologies to make a wider variety of firearms, and sometimes they’re doing it in ways that bypass those top-down controls.
Skilled craft makers around the world have often used hand tools and simple shop tools, old drill presses, lathes, making guns with scrap steel, tool steel, automotive steel. In some countries, the government is weak enough or the police are corrupt enough that illicit gunmakers can work openly, so they’re operating small factory floors and hiring semi-skilled workers. These producers make decent knockoff guns emulating mainstream brands, which are cheaper than imported commercial products. Sometimes they’ve even got false markings or serials to emulate the mainstream products.
As some readers probably know, militias and armed groups have often fabricated weapons, sometimes going beyond small arms and into explosives and light weapons. The Viet Cong built Colt 1911 and Kalashnikov knockoffs. More recently, Daesh, al-Nusra, and some Kurdish militias built .50 BMG anti-materiel rifles, rocket munitions, mines, IEDs, improvised armored vehicles, weaponized aerial drones, you name it. The IRA built mortars and sophisticated IEDs. Colombian cartels learned similar techniques. Mexican drug traffickers have been caught building 80% guns, and using digital fabrication tools to print and mill components. There are many skilled makers in the Philippines, and apparently some Asian criminal groups have imported Filipino guns and sometimes the makers to teach their techniques. Japanese Yakuza have allegedly been printing and milling guns lately. It’s caught on among terrorists and criminal rings in Europe. People are making guns all over the world, it’s not just an American thing.
Obviously, 80% builds have popularized in America. That involves finishing an unfinished receiver or frame yourself, usually with simple tools like a drill press, Dremel, routers and so forth, and then assembling with other commercial components. That’s been a focus of DIY in America because the receiver is the component that legally qualifies as the “gun,” so that’s the only part that requires a background check or serial number. Of course, with enough skill, or a 3D printer or CNC machine, you can make frames and receivers from scratch without buying a partially-complete frame. Some people do that, and it shows that simply banning unfinished frames isn’t enough to stop people from building. Of course, you’ve also got the question of when a nonfunctional block of plastic or metal becomes close enough to completion to be considered a “gun” rather than a block of material.
DIYers have developed techniques to build many other components too. Rifled barrels are probably the hardest component to fabricate, but some DIYers can do it with bar stock, press, and a $15 rifling button. Others have pioneered a DIY version of “electro-chemical machining” that uses a 3D printer, bucket of saltwater, and a few other simple components, and they can make good rifled barrels that way. With 3D printing there’s been a lot of hype about plastic guns. In truth, the plastics that most home printers use is not good for guns. It can’t handle the heat or pressures of repeat fire. Some DIYers have developed some clever workarounds, and eventually the materials will improve, but high-end industrial printers that can make good metal or synthetic guns are still very expensive and hard to buy without raising red flags, so that’s still a barrier to your average criminal.
3D printed guns are usually a hybrid of printed plastic parts and more traditional metals for the pressure-bearing components. Most of the printed “all plastic” guns are garbage. I’ve seen plastic revolvers in .22LR or .380 that can do repeat fire, and printable semiautomatics in higher handgun calibers that work pretty well, but they’re not all-plastic. Most of the good “plastic” guns still have metal components.
People are printing magazines to challenge magazine capacity limits, and there are lots of techniques to make suppressors. Of course, you can also make those items with sheet metal. Some people are working on synthetic ammunition, but pretty much all ammunition is still metal-cased, so the totally undetectable “all plastic” gun is still somewhat of a myth, though I’d reckon some intelligence agencies have some amazing stuff that’s hard to detect. The plastic guns that could defeat a metal detector are very limited in capability, mostly single shot or two-shot derringers in small calibers. Theoretically they could be used for an assassination but they’re useless for an active shooting or any serious engagement.
In the book, I talk about those issues with synthetic guns and weapons screening. The bottom line is that screening machines are increasingly capable of catching synthetic guns, but in most venues the weapons screening is security theater anyway. So, from a risk management perspective we should be more concerned about attackers simply blitzing through the security screening rather than smuggling in exotic weapons. That scenario has actually happened—some pretty bad active shootings and terrorist attacks have occurred at venues that had weapons screening. As of today, plastic guns are a relatively minor threat compared to that.
In some countries, homemade submachine guns, suppressors, and extended mags have caught on among illegal makers. They’re usually built from popular designs that started circulating in the 1970s, or they’re knockoffs of cheap World War II-era SMGs like the Sten, which was designed to be easily manufactured. I talked with a guy who had plans for making functional AR receivers with rivets and sheet metal. It’s ugly, but it works, and it’s actually easier than machining a proper receiver. There are unskilled criminals in Australia and Europe making pen guns out of Maglites and $5 center punches from the hardware store, and reselling them for like 20x the production cost. So, when it comes to making a functional firearm, depending on the maker’s skill, patience, and objectives, the most primitive designs to the most sophisticated industry-quality items can be made with accessible technologies. The 4th Industrial Revolution is here, and we shouldn’t be shocked that DIY gunmakers are among the early adopters.
- Has it always been legal for US citizens to build their own firearms?
I haven’t been able to find any clear evidence that it’s ever been illegal at the federal level. I’m open to the possibility that somebody will find otherwise, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Historically, local gunsmithing and household gun ownership were pretty common prior to industrialization, and federal law only started to seriously regulate firearm commerce in the 20th century. Even then, it defined “manufacturers” as those producing firearms for commerce. It exempted home builds from serialization, background checks, or commercial recordkeeping requirements if they were only for personal use. Federal law has always been more focused on commerce than personal gunsmithing.
Ghost guns are often perceived to be a “new” phenomenon because there are emerging technologies involved. Serial numbers and background checks were introduced at the federal level in the 20th century, but Americans were making guns without those federal regulations for more than a century prior. So, DIY gunmaking isn’t simply a “new” practice that bypasses longstanding laws. DIY gunmaking pre-dated those laws, and now we’re trying to shoehorn it into a supply-side regulatory system that was erected much later. Before industrialization, a lot of gunmaking was decentralized and highly customized. Automated engraving and stamping machines didn’t exist, inventory tracking databases didn’t exist, so it was difficult to implement a national system that could literally account for every gun ever built.
Since the increased hype in the 2010s, a number of states have introduced new regulations, and federal legislation has been proposed several times. Some of those proposals are wider or narrower in scope. Some laws would require background checks to buy unfinished frames or receivers, which is a more modest level of regulation. Other proposals would require frames and receivers to be tracked in registries, or marked with traceable serials. Some proposals would outright ban any gunmaking without a commercial license, or would curtail the legal industries that supply tools, tutorials, and unfinished components.
The most controversial proposals would ban distribution of information that facilitates gunmaking, like digital fabrication code that somebody could use to 3D print or CNC a firearm. That’s where you get an interesting interaction between 1st and 2nd Amendment rights. Small arms are regulated, but they’re also legal products. Firearm designs and gunsmithing tutorials have always been legal for the public to access. So, if you start saying that creating or possessing a digital file or string of code is legally equivalent to possessing a gun itself, you get into some complex questions about the limits of state control over technology, information, and speech.
Even if you ban the code, anybody who’s taken an industrial design class will learn how to reverse engineer objects and generate new code, so banning the files won’t stop people from creating new designs, and it won’t stop people from trading the files off the internet or through encrypted communications. To stop criminals from trading that code, you’d need encryption backdoors, and you’d have to search every digital device and printed book that anybody ships or carries across a border. Even North Korea and Cuba can’t keep illicit data from being smuggled that way, and that level of surveillance really isn’t compatible with a free society.
If you ban handbooks or video tutorials, you may get into 1st Amendment territory. There are already controversies about private social media companies de-platforming this kind of information even though it’s technically legal. There are questions about the extent that technical information about guns constitutes protected “speech,” and whether firearm-related speech should be banished from the internet on the basis that it enables behavior that is criminal in one jurisdiction but legal in another. There are proposals lately to leverage the banking and tech sectors’ expansive access to private data to profile and flag gun owners who may pose a risk to the public. In the book, I talk about the potential benefits and liabilities of that kind of “corporate gun control” system. Overall, the idea that information that helps you make something may be legally equivalent to the physical thing itself, really opens a series of complex questions for security, law, and civil liberties.
- “Ghost Guns” have obviously become a hot political issue in the last few years. Can you boil down some political insights from your book?
If I could boil it down, I’d say that the issue of “ghost guns” is not even primarily about guns. It’s really about privacy and social trust. How much do you trust the government, or the tech sector, or the general public, or your neighbors, to know about your private possessions and activities? In a polarized and increasingly uncivil political climate, if people don’t feel that their rights are secure, there’s a chilling effect and people look for ways to do things on a DIY basis that doesn’t generate as many records. Public polls show that trust in government, media, academia, and other mainstream institutions has really tanked in the last few decades, and because there are only two viable political parties that are increasingly polarized, national elections have become a referendum on which half of the population needs to fear the political preferences of the other half for the next few years. It’s not a recipe for mature discussion and compromise, it’s a recipe for people doing things under the table to avoid the backlash whenever the “other” party wins an election.
Ultimately, the controversy over “ghost” guns isn’t that people are building guns in a country that’s already full of guns. The real issue is that they’re building guns that the government doesn’t know about and can’t easily trace or confiscate. Maybe that sounds obtuse, but if you dig into America’s gun debate, you’ll see that the toxicity of gun politics comes from a nearly irreconcilable distrust between the factions. Gun rights advocates have resisted “universal background checks,” even though the concept is fairly popular. Now, some research suggests that universal background checks might reduce crime, but other research suggests that they may not be very effective at reducing crime. I try to keep an open mind, but I’m skeptical that universal background checks would have more than a marginal impact because so many criminals already source weapons informally. I suspect another formal layer of regulation might not accomplish much against those informal transactions. Regardless, some polls suggest the idea is pretty popular even among gun owners, so why would anybody be against universal background checks?
A major sticking point is that a system that tracks and permanently retains the records of all firearm transactions could be repurposed for confiscation. Oftentimes, media personalities and gun control advocates have ridiculed gun rights supporters for their fear of registries. But then, moments later they’ll applaud a political candidate who says “hell yes, we’ll take your AR15,” or they’ll voice support for ex post facto bans on firearms or accessories that people already acquired legally.
This pattern just hardens the pro-gun people. If you already own something legally, it’s threatening to hear proposals that would take it away or make you a criminal for keeping it. The most viable way to confiscate legally-purchased guns is to create a comprehensive data infrastructure, and the difference between universal background checks and a “backdoor registry” is simply whether that data is retained permanently or deleted within a certain timeframe. Once you’ve got the data infrastructure, it’s tempting to just keep all the data forever, and now you’ve got a registry. Of course, “ghost” gunmaking is only one way that a registry could be bypassed. Traffickers could steal or deface the serials on commercial guns, and those guns would be almost as hard to track. Plus, the vast majority of firearms in America are already unregistered. Even if you register every new gun, that unregistered supply could feed traffickers for generations into the future.
Ultimately the “ghost gun” issue, like so many other gun policy issues, isn’t just about guns, it’s about data privacy and political trust. Some gun rights supporters will never accept a national registry, and it’s practically impossible to force compliance without making unacceptable political or policing tradeoffs. However, the opposition would probably be reduced if there was an ironclad guarantee that these tracking systems could never be used to confiscate guns from legal owners. But that guarantee doesn’t exist, and some gun control advocates continue to mobilize supporters by proposing bans and confiscations.
Ergo, a gun control proposal that might get bipartisan support becomes bitterly contested because the gun rights people are deeply suspicious that gun control advocates will use these data infrastructures for confiscation, and some (but not all) gun control advocates continue to signal that confiscation is what they ultimately want. The mainstreaming of ghost guns reflects this distrust, because a lot of people started building guns off-books simply as a prophylaxis against a hypothetical ban in the future.
There’s always been a population of American hobbyists and sportspeople who liked to make and customize their own guns, but I think the wider popularization of DIY guns is a sort of canary in the coal mine with regard to America’s political fragmentation, polarization, and distrust. Americans have been building guns since before independence, but it didn’t generate much controversy until the last couple decades. For most of America’s history, DIY gunmakers weren’t trying to get around retail controls, because those types of controls hardly existed. Today, it’s more of a culture clash between gun control supporters who think it’s necessary to track every gun for public health and safety purposes, versus gun rights people who are opposed to tracking guns because they distrust the motives of the gun control people. Both sides keep demonizing and talking past each other. Meanwhile, lots of people keep building guns regardless of what anybody thinks about it.
- Obviously, you were talking about proposals to regulate DIY gunmaking. Do you think governments can combat illegal gunmaking, and what would that entail?
Well, a lot of gun control in the post-World War II era has reflected a “supply side” strategy. That’s a strategy that tries to control social outcomes by controlling the physical distribution of certain products. But regulating legal industry is a lot easier than combating illegal traffickers and black markets. If traffickers can make the thing you’re trying to ban, then passing a law doesn’t solve the problem, it may just create incentives for criminals to make more money.
That problem is obvious with illicit drugs. Ruthless criminal organizations have grown rich from their ability to manufacture and distribute drugs through their own illegal infrastructures and supply chains. What the drug war teaches us is that you can make something illegal, but good luck trying to stop the supply so long as there’s significant demand to drive up illicit profits. If there’s any space for criminals to operate, they’ll find ways to steal or manufacture that product. Unless you want to clamp down so hard that you’re making serious privacy and civil liberties tradeoffs, there’s always going to be enough space that criminals will be able to operate on some level. A certain amount of crime is the cost of a free society, and I think security professionals, academics, politicians, and the media need to be honest about that reality. If the only way to prevent drug trafficking or gun trafficking is a draconian surveillance state where the government knows what everybody is doing in their garage at all times, I think we need to reframe the issue and ask if there’s another way to prevent social harms that doesn’t involve those tradeoffs.
Some laws would deter typical hobbyists, or chill the wider popularization of DIY. But those consumers won’t appreciate a bunch of laws that make their hobby more difficult if the same laws aren’t stopping traffickers or criminal groups from doing it illegally. That’s part of the political disconnect on this issue. The people who are easiest to control usually aren’t the people who most need to be controlled. Technology is expanding the spectrum of what people can make independently. That has implications for security and policing. There’s a national registry for aerial drones now, but drones can be built from a variety of accessible components, and a malicious adversary can configure a homemade drone so it’s hard for police to identify the maker or operator. So, how much do you want to bet that a lot of drones they catch bad guys using, are going to be homemade and unregistered?
Organized traffickers, terrorists, extremist groups, asymmetric combatants? They were already capable of making or trafficking weapons. Cottage industries in the developing world have been making and selling guns illegally for generations. A lot of those industries developed to service militias and insurgents and crime syndicates. There are criminal rings and militias that make large volumes of weapons in weak states. In developed nations, I think illegal gunmaking is most appealing to isolated adversaries without a support network, or those who want certain custom capabilities, or extremists who are worried about surveillance. Even if you somehow make it illegal for anybody to ever build another gun, serious organizations with logistical networks are still going to build them or source them off-books. Many armed groups have produced more powerful weapons than small arms. Increasingly sophisticated tools and materials are available at declining prices, and with enough skill you can make modern firearms even with simple tools. The real supply chain chokepoint is in propellants and primers. Modern propellants and primers are hard to make, but in the book I talk about some of the ways DIYers and criminals have gotten around this.
Look, firearms are a mature technology that was invented a thousand years ago. Modern firearms have updated materials and engineering, but they’re fundamentally similar to products from the 1800s. People built and improved firearms for hundreds of years before anybody heard of interchangeable parts, machine tools, or digital fabrication. Before the scientific and industrial revolutions, gunmakers didn’t even fully understand the underlying physics or metallurgy or chemistry they were harnessing, but they still improved by trial and error.
Ultimately, I think the neo-artisanal moment is telling us that controlling the social outcomes of guns is not going to get any easier by trying to control their supply from the top down. We really need to think more about illegal gun demand and interrupting the patterns and underlying conditions for violence. It’s really hard to uninvent things, especially in free societies. Do we really expect to maintain complete top-down control over a technology that’s more than a thousand years old? If so, there are going to be tradeoffs, and some of those tradeoffs are pretty toxic politically.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions. Obviously, if you catch people manufacturing a lot of guns to sell illegally, you should throw the book at them. But illegal manufacturing is not that easy to target. It’s in the illicit sales where the trafficking networks have to reach out and take a risk to distribute the guns. With a lot of undercover officers, informants, and other criminal intelligence sources, you can identify the larger trafficking rings and catch them in the act. Overall, I think the debate focuses too much on guns and not enough on deterring violence as a behavior. There are communities where people have lots of guns and there is very little violence, and there are communities where gun ownership is less common but there’s a shameful level of violence. Even in disadvantaged communities, it’s a very small population that’s responsible for most of the violent crime, and that population is mostly composed of people who already don’t get guns legally. Murder is contagious, and if your chances of being caught and successfully prosecuted for an illegal shooting is less than 20% as they are in some US cities, that cycle of violence just keeps going.
As a security professional, I want to protect lives, protect the constitution, and reduce violent crime. But as a civil libertarian, I’m against subjecting citizens to racial or economic profiling, or to programs like stop & frisk, which violated a lot of peoples’ rights but didn’t catch many illegal guns because even in crime-plagued communities it’s only a small number of offenders doing most of that dirt. We don’t need a wider net with bigger holes in it, we need to get better at targeting those small populations that cause the most damage, addressing the underlying variables behind that violence, and restoring trust in government, police, and other mainstream institutions. Decreasing the violence in the drug trade, addressing the alienation of populations from their own police, cultivating better street-level intel, increasing the resources for violent crime enforcement and anti-violence programs that have already been shown to be effective, addressing hopelessness, lack of opportunity, and social distrust, improving access to mental healthcare. These are all long overdue in our country. Gun control is only a band aid we slap on those much deeper societal wounds that aren’t being treated effectively. I’m not saying we should reject all gun control, some gun control does make sense. However, in a world already full of guns, where guns are becoming easier to make and harder to track, I think we can save more lives and help restore trust and civility by targeting violence rather than fixating on guns per se.