The 3D-printed gun movement has survived the downfall of its charismatic founder, a major defeat at the Supreme Court, and involvement in one of the most talked-about crimes of last year.

Meanwhile, the guns have gotten good. Really good. Today's hobbyist gun makers are creating better and better weapons that are easier and easier to make, including some with wildly creative designs.

There's anger and passionate disagreement about strategy, law, copyright, and leadership. The movement's critics are scathing: Lizzie, who met her husband Spezz through an online 3D-gun printing forum, calls movement founder Cody Wilson "a thief, a federal informant, and a pedophile." Spezz says "most of the cool stuff he does he just steals from other people." Wilson, for his part, is dismissive: "If you have evidence, present your evidence."

But in the meantime, this technology is fundamentally undermining the power of the state to control our access to firearms. And what I can't figure out is why more people aren't talking about it.

Is gun control finally dead?

I Built a Gun

A few months ago, I spent an afternoon in Alex Holladay's workshop, putting together two 3D-printed guns. Holladay runs CTRL PEW, which tests and reviews online gun designs, creates video tutorials, and provides step-by-step instructions for how to assemble guns at home.

We had to put about $6 worth of filament into the 3D printer to generate a mold in the shape of a pistol frame. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives' (ATF) view of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, this inert block of plastic was already a real firearm and would require a federal registration and a serial number to be sold.

Assembling an unregistered Glock-like handgun using the 3D printer and metallic gun parts purchased online was fairly straightforward, taking a little more than half an hour with an expert teacher like Holladay looking over my shoulder. The AR-15 was more complicated, but with Holladay's guidance I got through that, too, and we moved on to the fun part: pew-pew. 

And that's how I found myself in a Central Florida backyard on a Monday afternoon shooting at a painted metal target with a newly assembled bright orange AR-15 just off the 3D printer and hoping nothing would go too wrong. The worst that happened was the magazine slipping out of the homemade Glock-like handgun, which Holladay assured me could be fixed with a little extra gunsmithing back in the workshop.  

If I can put together two guns in a couple of hours, many, many others can, too.

The Legal Landscape

On the federal level, at least, there is nothing illegal about building a firearm for personal use: Your printer, your gun—unless you happen to be in one of the 16 states that regulate homemade guns. There, you might be committing a felony and could face up to 10 years in prison.

The question of whether it's legal to make your own gun is complicated not only by geography but by how it's put together. 3D-printed guns are just one type of "ghost gun," a term that refers to any firearm without a serial number. Politicians have embraced the label because it sounds spooky and dangerous.

Kamala Harris warned that ghost guns "can be purchased on the internet, and assembled at a kitchen table" without a background check. Joe Biden said "someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns." Gavin Newsom called it "a crisis in this state and country." Chuck Schumer described ghost guns as "unmarked, unregistered, and completely untraceable firearms." Richard Blumenthal called them "the fastest-growing gun violence menace in the nation."

While 3D printing your own frame remains legal at the federal level and in most states, the Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that a different type of ghost gun—in which you order a kit online to assemble at home—can be regulated by the federal government. That means if you buy a kit, you need a background check, and the gun needs a serial number. The ruling has pretty much wiped out the gun kit market. Meanwhile, 3D-printed gunsmithing remains mostly legal, and it's booming.

A Long History of Homemade Guns

Homemade firearms date back to the American Revolution. The colonists fought off a professional army using factory-produced muskets alongside rifles put together by independent gunsmiths. Gun magazines were instructing readers on how to do custom builds long before 3D printing was a thing. The Unabomber not only made his own bombs, but his own gun as well.

What's changed is that you no longer need much technical expertise or specialized tools to produce weapons far superior to the Unabomber's rickety pistol. As Holladay puts it, "I can make whatever I want with this. There are people from around the community who specialize in trying to clone guns from video games, like sci-fi video games."

The 3D printing gun community is dominated by hobbyists like Holladay, who love the craft. But critics worry some people opt for 3D-printed guns because they can't pass a background check, or because they live in a state where buying a firearm at a gun shop is impossible. There were 26 ghost guns recovered at crime scenes in California in 2015; that number climbed to over 12,000 in 2021. A 2023 ATF report notes a 1,600 percent increase in homemade guns at crime scenes over a six-year period.

But 3D guns aren't only, or even mainly, used by criminals. Holladay argues the technology is broadly democratizing: "It empowers everyone. It doesn't matter what your motivation is—be it a competitive shooter or a guy in the suburbs of Chicago who lives in a rough neighborhood and needs to protect his home."

A Growing Market

"I bought this machine for $200,"says Lizzie, a pseudonymous 3D-printed gun rights activist. "Within two hours of it showing up to my house, I was able to 3D print a gun."

Lizzie's husband Spezz says that the falling cost of this technology is spurring major innovation in gun design.

"Now that we have the ability to have this in every home in America, it just leaves everyone to be an inventor," says Spezz.

Zack Clark, social media director for the National Association for Gun Rights, says 3D printing has made inroads in the traditional gun world.

"You're starting to see 3D-printed developers at gun shows doing presentations and stuff," he says. "That was not the case three, four years ago. Nobody was interested."

David Carpenter, who founded the gun parts company Aves Rails, sees the pace of technological change as a structural problem for regulators. 

"Technology has had a steady track record of exceeding the speed in which the federal government or even state governments can adapt to the new capabilities," he says. "And perhaps that's a good thing."

Carpenter started Aves by selling tiny metal parts, called rails, needed to complete a homemade 9 mm Glock-style pistol—the semi-automatic handgun that is America's most popular firearm. "Within the first few days of selling them we were selling three or four a day," he says. "And now we do thousands of orders a month."

Carpenter has expanded from a single machine to an entire warehouse full of machines and components. "You could directly draw the correlation that every single one of those rail kits ends up as a printed firearm," he says. "There are quite literally thousands of printed frames out there."

We tried out several of his homemade or modified handguns and rifles at the range, including a tiny but powerful autoconversion switch he manufactured for a Glock. The switch is a federal crime for ordinary citizens to possess—Carpenter can use it only because he's a licensed firearms dealer. But the ease with which this small piece of metal makes a semi-automatic pistol dramatically more deadly underscores just how difficult it is to regulate hobbyist gunsmithing. "It's not that difficult to make," Carpenter says. "It is relatively minor machining."

"They're manufactured in China, and you can buy them online and have them brought illegally into the country," he adds.

When gangs started using the device to turn their Glocks into machine guns, California lawmakers decided to ban all Glocks. Backers of the law argued that "no gun sold in California should be one screwdriver away from becoming" a machine gun.

The Supreme Court Ruling and Its Aftermath

That was also the logic behind the 2025 Supreme Court decision that transformed the DIY gun space. In a 7-2 ruling, the high court found that the federal government can regulate 3D gun kits that require less than an hour of assembly and only "common tools" like screwdrivers, jigs, and drill bits.

Following that decision, major online kit sellers like Polymer 80 shut down. These kits were the majority of America's ghost gun market. Polymer 80 had sold over 200,000 unserialized kits in California alone over a six-year period.

But the federal government has nothing to say about the gunsmithing that Holladay is doing with 3D printers. To control this segment of the ghost gun market, the government would have to ban or regulate the printers themselves, or—more likely—outlaw distribution of the CAD files that hobbyists trade on platforms like the Gatalog, with which Holladay is affiliated. The state of California is attempting just that in a recent lawsuit filed against the Gatalog. Holladay believes such a ban would violate the First Amendment because those files contain nothing but information. It's an argument cryptoanarchists first made in the 1990s when the government tried to ban encryption: Code is speech. 

In the meantime, the 3D printers keep going brrr.

Clark sees the Supreme Court decision as part of a broader and longer-term regulatory strategy. "A lot of normal gun owners will look at 3D printing and say, why do I have to care about this? I can just go buy a gun," he says. "They don't realize that one of the underlying pushes has been serialization of all firearms parts for decades. They say they want to do it now because of ghost guns, but they wanted to do this forever. Their goal has always been to attack the secondary market—to make it harder to get repair kits, harder to exchange your barrel."

Cody Wilson: The Dark Prince of Ghost Guns

When does a gun become a gun? What exactly is a "common tool"? When does assembly become a crime? Cody Wilson has spent the last decade fighting in court to force answers to these questions.

The controversial founder of Defense Distributed first launched 3D-printed guns into the world in 2013 when he unveiled a plastic pistol called The Liberator and declared gun control dead. Wilson leveraged his newfound media fame to push a radical cryptoanarchist philosophy, arguing that gun laws were illegitimate and obsolete.

"The debate is over," he told a CBS reporter back in 2018 when eight state attorneys general banded together to try stopping Defense Distributed from sharing online gun files in their respective states.

"The guns are downloadable, the files are in the public domain and you cannot take them back. You can adjust your politics to this reality. You will not ask me to adjust mine."

But Wilson would suffer a major public downfall after his 2019 arrest in Taiwan for paying for sex with a 16-year-old who'd posed as a legal adult on a hookup app. He'd later return to the helm of Defense Distributed after striking a plea deal that cleared his felony record in 2022.

To this day, he remains a polarizing figure in the movement. Several of the gunsmiths we spoke with didn't want to discuss him at all. Holladay was blunt: "I really don't like him personally." Carpenter paused for a long moment when asked about Defense Distributed before saying: "I don't really want to comment on Cody."

Lizzie was not so restrained: "Cody Wilson is a thief, a federal informant, and a pedophile."

So we paid Wilson a visit at Defense Distributed headquarters in Austin, Texas. He acknowledged that the Biden era was, on balance, a loss for his side. "In large part, Biden won this ghost gun fight—in the ways that mattered, if not to him, to whoever was behind it," he says. "Ghost guns still exist. You can still make your own gun. A lot of the stuff is still there, but the kits and the commerce—a lot of that is dead."

Defense Distributed is now marketing the G80 handgun kit, which Wilson maintains is Supreme Court–"approved" because it complies with the legal standard of taking more than an hour to assemble with "uncommon" tools. The high court ruling was in a case called Bondi v. VanDerStok, so Wilson is billing his G80 as "VanDerStok compliant." His goal is to force the government to issue clear rules rather than make up gun regulations on the fly and leave DIY gunsmiths in legal limbo. "VanDerStok is about, hey, where do we draw the line on when a receiver becomes a receiver, when a gun is a gun?" he says. The government's answer so far: "We don't have to draw the lines, but we know basically when we see it."

'Trump Is Not Pro-Gun'

The federal government's crackdown on ghost guns began under Biden but has continued through Donald Trump's second term. Across his two terms, Trump has pushed bump stock bans, mass arrests of unpermitted gun owners in DC, and red flag laws to take away firearms without due process. "If all the sudden any official in government can say, 'I don't think you are capable of having a firearm,' what would stop the red flag laws from being misused?" Carpenter asks. Lizzie is more direct: "Trump is not pro-gun. He banned bump stocks. He has actively pushed gun control this year."

In 2018, Trump tweeted that he was "looking into 3-D plastic guns." "It's one thing to stump for it," Wilson says of the Trump administration's relationship with gun owners. "It is another thing to be in power and realize—oh, OK, political violence is now actually kind of turned up in part because you can 3D print a gun."

So is stringent gun control just the latest in a long line of left-wing policies now championed by the MAGA GOP? It's partly that 3D gun printers have always been outcasts in the gun rights movement. And it's partly that there's been a push within the MAGA movement to do something following the murder of Charlie Kirk and the attempt on Trump's life.

Holladay says he's seen a surge of leftists coming into the 3D gun printing space. "I think a lot of it falls in line with the younger left becoming more and more gun-friendly in general," he says. "There's a very vocal, hard left component to the 3D printed gun space."

"Maybe in another 30 years, we see the far left become the pro-gun party," he adds. "Maybe the right goes, oh, we've gone too far."

The shooting of armed but nonviolent progressive activist Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent is the latest high-profile example of armed resistance on the left—a development that prompted Trump to basically say Pretti shouldn't have been carrying a gun if he didn't want to get shot.

Wilson says the politics of gun control are already completely scrambled. In reaction to a series of mass killings by transgender shooters, the Trump administration even floated an all-out ban on transgender gun ownership. "They are medically pathologizing conditions of firearm ownership or firearm ownership itself," Wilson says. "You're not crazy to notice the pattern [of trans school shooters]. But to me, the trans phenomena is itself like a motif for all of our revolutions. There's a sexual confusion. There's a political confusion."

The Mangione Effect

Luigi Mangione, who is accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly used a 3D-printed gun. Wilson had long predicted this moment. "I've said for years there's going to be a prominent shooting with a 3D gun and that'll do it," he says. "That was Mangione. And it didn't happen."

Wilson sees the reaction to the killing as a reflection of a broader cultural confusion. "I find the Mangione shooting to be almost identical in its implications as any of this trans shooting stuff," he says, "and in a way Luigi Mangione is a trans-shooter because he's politically disoriented. Politically androgynous. Politically hermaphroditic. Baudrillard calls it 'trans-political.'"

Mangione was celebrated by some leftists, but he was also the Ivy League son of a wealthy country club owner, and his apparent interests run the gamut from the Unabomber manifesto to podcasts from wellness influencer Andrew Huberman and the nonpartisan writer and illustrator Tim Urban. "Luigi Mangione's biggest issue was apparently he didn't know if he had free will or not," Wilson says. "He was worried he had become some kind of NPC [non-player character], and it's almost as if he needed some outside event to just prove to himself that he had any kind of agency."

"I don't think these people will listen to me," Wilson says of conservatives who have grown uncomfortable with the movement. "They're almost within their rights—discursively—to want stronger institutions. But I'm not going to be persuaded into limiting or curbing our right to bear arms."

Infighting in the Movement

Wilson, as usual, is fighting a war on multiple fronts. He's battling the federal government in court, and he's countersued members of the Gatalog—including Holladay. At issue are gun files that Wilson's online library DefCad hosts, some of which designers have ordered him to remove under threat of copyright infringement. The designers claim his exposure could reach $37.5 billion in liability.

"He's selling other people's shit," says Spezz. "People are putting stuff out for free for everybody to use, and then Cody takes it and puts a paywall behind it," Lizzie adds.

Wilson is unapologetic. "Did I bring a copyright suit?" he says. "If they wanted to settle a question of law, they could have brought it as a question of law, not tried to shut down my companies. Overly litigious—I'm sorry, that's the pot calling the kettle black. These people confuse pathos with ethos. If you sue me, how is it not noble to oppose you?"

Wilson fundamentally rejects the concept of copyrighting gun designs. As he put it in his Black Flag White Paper, his early gun files used open source licenses because they "frustrate state and world government attempts to control 3D gun files." He draws a direct line between copyright registration and gun confiscation: "Everybody knows registration of your firearms is the prelude—the first step toward confiscation. How does that not apply to registering your 3D printed gun files with the federal government? It's noxious."

"There is infighting in the 3D printing space," Carpenter says. "It seems like that's a common thing in the firearms industry. We can't help but eat our own. I think that's just human nature in general."

The Global Gun Printing Movement

The ugly personal and legal battles aside, and despite the big loss at the Supreme Court, the gun printing movement is growing fast—and not just in America.

In Myanmar, poorly armed rebels resisting a 2021 military coup were spotted using the FGC-9—short for "Fuck Gun Control"—widely considered the first fully functional homemade 3D gun requiring no specialized parts: just a printer, a pipe, and some saltwater. "The government had all the guns, the police had all the guns," Holladay says. "So what did they do? They turned to 3D printing. They turned to files that had been produced by our community—the FGC-9 primarily."

According to one report, the printed guns were used in the early phases to train insurgents and in guerrilla-style ambushes where rebels could seize better weapons. Another analysis found that "the FGC-9 is proving itself through the test of battle, setting a blueprint for how under-equipped and underfunded rebellious groups can wage a successful armed movement against better equipped government forces."

"They started with 3D printed guns, and they were fighting a regional military power, and they have them on the back ropes now," Clark of the National Association for Gun Rights says. "They really did start off with pipe shotguns and 3D-printed FGC-9s. They fought their way up using those."

This idea—that a rag-tag group of rebels can resist a professional military using guerrilla tactics and homemade firearms—is why 3D-printed gun advocates see their movement as a vital check on tyranny. "The purpose of the Second Amendment is resisting a tyrannical government," Clark says. "You can do that with 3D-printed guns because people in Myanmar are doing it right now, and they're winning. And they started by printing guns in basements."

Carpenter puts the Second Amendment's purpose plainly. "It's definitely hunting," he says, sarcastically. "That's what the Founding Fathers meant for us to do with the Second Amendment—was hunt deer." More seriously: "The purpose of the Second Amendment is, quite literally, the means to acquire and keep a way to defend yourself. Now, what you're defending yourself against is where the interpretation comes up. Tyranny, violent criminals, deer?"

Zombie Gun Control

Behind the Defense Distributed headquarters sits a gravesite. On the tombstone are the words "American Gun Control."

But is gun control really dead? The government can regulate kits out of existence, so makers will adapt their methods. They're getting more innovative, more reliable, and the guns are more numerous. If Alex Holladay were in New York, he might be facing prison time. A federal circuit court just ruled that Wilson must continue blocking IP addresses originating in New Jersey from accessing his online gun library to comply with state law. California recently filed a suit against the Gatalog seeking the same outcome.

But, even so, homemade gun makers are hard to catch. "Gun control can never die, because it lives in the hearts of men," Wilson says. "No, gun control is not dead—it's undead. We just keep killing it."

Give gunsmiths an internet connection, a printer, and some tools, and there's no stopping them. If I can build a gun, so can most people. Governments can make gun printing inconvenient, but once an idea surfaces on a decentralized network, censorship becomes virtually impossible. You can't stop the signal.

• Camera: César Báez
• Graphics: Lex Villena
• Editor: Hana Ko
• Camera: Kevin Alexander