Ghost Gunner company accused of rebranding ploy to dodge California ban
When San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawsonremer first saw the Coast Runner milling machine being marketed as some state-of-the-art product for creative people in California, she was livid.
Despite its chill name and the retro colors splashed on its side, Lawsonremer said the Coast Runner was clearly just a rebranded Ghost Gunner — a desktop machine the state outlawed in
2022 for its ability to turn simple slabs of metal into homemade components for untraceable ghost guns, including assault rifles resembling AR15S and AK-47S, and semiautomatic pistols.
“The idea that you could take the same exact product that is designed to kill people, put a different packaging on it, and suddenly it’s not lethal and not illegal? That is just offensive,” Lawson-remer said.
On Thursday, San
Diego County sued the manufacturer of both devices, Texas-based Defense Distributed, asking a state court to declare the Coast Runner illegal under California law and to order the company to stop selling and marketing it in the state.
“The ‘Coast Runner’ is in fact the Ghost Gunner with a new coat of paint,” the lawsuit argues. “It has the same internal designs, the same features, and is being marketed for the same purpose: the illegal production of untraceable ghost guns.”
Defense Distributed — which was co-founded by the controversial and outspoken gun rights activist Cody Wilson, an early player in the world of 3-D-printed firearms — dismissed the lawsuit as unfounded in a statement to The Times.
“Defense Distributed observes California law to the very letter,” the company said. “Even when it’s obviously illegal and doomed to fail Constitutional review.”
The county’s lawsuit, which it filed with the support of the gun control advocacy organization Giffords Law Center, is the latest salvo in a pitched battle between California authorities, who have identified ghost guns as a major threat to public safety, and Defense Distributed, which has said its milling technology is
“as easy as 3-D printing” and brings “milling to the masses.”
Defense Distributed previously argued in its own lawsuit that California’s law blocking gun-making milling machines is unconstitutional, but a judge rejected that argument and the company withdrew its claim.
Computer numerical control, or CNC, milling machines — which usually cost a few thousand dollars — are devices that guide drills to produce intricate and precise mechanical parts from slabs of metal. Such machines have turned otherwise complex manufacturing into a household hobby. While the tools can be used to make parts for cars or bicycles and a range of other items, they have also made it easier to create high-quality frames and receivers for ghost guns. Such firearms lack serial numbers, which are attached to commercially produced weapons and can help authorities investigate crimes.
It is unclear how many homemade or ghost guns exist in the state, or the country, but experts believe the number is huge. A 2023 report by the state’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention found the number of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement in connection to a crime in California jumped from 26 in 2015 to more than 12,000 in 2022.
State legislatures and courts across the country have been wrestling with how and whether such firearms can be regulated. A Biden administration rule changing the federal definition of a firearm to include unfinished parts such as frames and receivers — like those made by milling machines — is currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2022, Defense Distributed sued California over a law that made it illegal for anyone without a federal license to manufacture guns to “sell, offer to sell, or transfer a CNC milling machine that has the sole or primary function of manufacturing firearms” to anyone in the state. The law also requires people in California to have a federal license to purchase or possess such a machine or to use one to make gun parts.
The company acknowledged in previous court filings that its
Ghost Gunner machine was used to produce unserialized parts for ghost guns. But it argued it also was the “modernday manifestation” of age-old firearm milling techniques that had “never before been regulated in American history,” and that enforcement of California’s law should be blocked as unconstitutional under the “history and tradition” test that the Supreme Court set for assessing modern gun laws in a landmark 2022 decision.