For the past five years, Cody Wilson has applied every possible advance in digital manufacturing technology to the mission of undermining government attempts at gun control. First he created the world's first 3-D printed gun, a deadly plastic weapon anyone could print at home with a download and a few clicks. Then he started selling a computer-controlled milling machine designed to let anyone automatically carve out the body of an untraceable AR-15 from a semifinished chunk of aluminum, upgrading his provocations from plastic to metal. Now his latest advance in home firearm fabrication allows anyone to make an object designed to defy the most basic essence of gun control: A concealable, untraceable, and entirely unregulated metal handgun.

On Sunday, Wilson's gun rights advocacy group, Defense Distributed, announced a new release of software for his computer-controlled milling machine known as the Ghost Gunner. The new code allows the 1-foot-cubed tabletop machine—which uses a spinning bit to carve three-dimensional shapes with minute precision—to not only produce untraceable bodies of AR-15s but to carve out the aluminum frame of an M1911 handgun, the popular class of semiautomatic pistols that includes the Colt 45 and similar weapons. Wilson says he plans to follow up soon with software for producing regulation-free Glocks and other handgun models to follow.

Wilson's goal now, he says, is to do for small arms what Defense Distributed did for AR-15s when it first released the $1,500 Ghost Gunner milling machine exactly three years ago to the day: Give people the ability to make a lethal weapon at home with no regulation whatsoever.

The latest model of the milling machine can finish a handgun's frame in about an hour, with minimal human interaction. And that frame is the only regulated part of the pistol: Under current US law, every other part of the gun, from its barrel to its slide to its tiny firing pin, can be ordered online with no questions asked. Making that one element at home means the entire process of assembling a working weapon requires no identification, no background check, no waiting period, not even a serial number that would allow the Department of Justice to track the gun's existence.

With little more than a software file, Defense Distributed has made its anarchic, DIY path to gun ownership available for a class of weapon that's both more concealable and used far more often in violent crimes than the large, semiautomatic rifles its gunmaking machine produced in the past. "The whole cypherpunk attitude of total gun privacy is more coherent in this smaller package," says Wilson, referring to the group whose first libertarian adherents in the 1990s advocated gun rights, encryption, and other technologies designed to hamstring government surveillance. "Now you can have a private 1911 or a private Glock, and it’s at the level of automated manufacturing."

A More Violent Market

Of course, Wilson's machine could also help customers who otherwise wouldn't legally be able to obtain a gun—minors, people with a mental disorder, or those with a criminal record—obtain one. California, in fact, already outlawed so-called "ghost guns"—homemade firearms without serial numbers—last summer. But no such law exists at the federal level, allowing anyone to bypass virtually all gun control laws if they make a gun at home and don't sell it or give it away.

"The ghost gun threat is real and growing," says Kevin De Leon, the California state senator who introduced the statewide ghost gun ban. "Are they being made by gang members? Are they being manufactured to sell to individuals who are prohibited from possessing firearms? Technologies that make it possible for the general public to manufacture guns raise serious questions."