ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Twenty-six-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder in last week's shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York. Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania yesterday. He's also facing gun charges, and his use of an apparent ghost gun raises concerns about the spread of untraceable firearms. NPR law enforcement correspondent Martin Kaste is here to talk about the gun. Hi, Martin.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: So authorities say when Mangione was arrested, he had a gun on him that is, quote, "consistent with the weapon used in the murder." They say it may have been made on a 3D printer. Is a 3D-printed gun the same as a ghost gun?
KASTE: Well, a ghost gun is just a gun that doesn't have a serial number. It can't be traced, and nobody did a background check when it was acquired. And it could be made from parts bought online or parts made on a 3D printer, or it could be made from a mixture of both. And this one looks like it's probably a mixture.
SHAPIRO: How can you tell?
KASTE: Well, I can't, but there are a lot of people online. There's this community of do-it-yourself gun enthusiasts who really know this stuff well. I've been talking to some of them today as they've been studying a photo of the gun that was circulating in the media. One of the most prominent people in this very secretive community, otherwise, is Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. He's been at loggerheads with the government for years over guns like this. He also reached a plea bargain a few years ago in an unrelated sexual assault case. But he says you can tell by the distinctive stippled pattern on the grip of this gun that it's a remix of a copy of a Glock that was created a few years ago by another secretive community member in this group.
CODY WILSON: That frame is hard to find. And that's a curious thing about Mr. Mangione. It means, to me, that he was at least in orbit of this community years ago, not just recently.
KASTE: Now, keep in mind Wilson is just speculating here about Mangione's degree of experience with these guns.
SHAPIRO: I also want to ask you about - in the security video of the shooting, the gun appeared to have a silencer attached. Can you tell us anything about that? Is it a ghost silencer?
KASTE: Yeah. Well, we have less certainty about that because the images aren't as clear in that video. The experts think it does look like a newish 3D printer design, though. It's a series of silencers called the FTN series. In that acronym, the F stands for an expletive, and the TN is the National Firearms Act, which is the 1934 law that banned silencers.
SHAPIRO: So silencers are illegal. What about ghost guns themselves?
KASTE: They're not necessarily illegal to have if you're a person who's allowed to own guns. But the Biden administration did crack down on the companies selling them as kits, telling companies to put serial numbers on the main part, the frame, and to do the same kind of background checks they would do if they were selling completed guns. Now, that was challenged by gun rights groups. The Supreme Court heard arguments in October, and there is a decision on that pending. But you have to keep in mind that that's a legal fight about companies selling kits, not about people making guns at home with their own 3D printers. And that's what worries David Pucino here. He's a ghost gun expert with the Giffords Law Center.
DAVID PUCINO: If what Wilson says is correct and this is a 3D-printed gun and a 3D-printed silencer used in this assassination, I think this is the moment that people like me have been worried about for a long time, which is the moment when these 3D-printed guns do become a major vector of gun violence in the United States.
SHAPIRO: We're talking about a very high-profile crime, the killing of a CEO in midtown Manhattan, but how big a factor are ghost guns in everyday crime?
KASTE: During the pandemic, the ATF did report a surge in the number of ghost guns being recovered from crimes. It more than doubled in one year. But those are still a small fraction of all the guns used in crimes. Also, most of the ghost guns used in crimes are from those kits that have now been targeted by the Biden administration. And since those rules were put in place, some cities and states have actually reported some decrease in the number of ghost guns that they have been recovering from crimes.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR law enforcement correspondent Martin Kaste. Thank you.
KASTE: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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