CNC milling machines are used to fabricate all sorts of things. They’re in pretty much every machine shop in America, if not throughout the world as a whole. They can mill parts with precision far easier than a human being can. The problem is that they’re kind of expensive, so if you want one for home use, you’re going to have a problem.
And in California, even a rebranded desktop CNC based on the Ghost Gunner that makes firearm parts is an even bigger problem.
Now, any CNC milling machine can make firearm receivers. All you need are the correct files and a hunk of the appropriate metal, and you can go to work. The Ghost Gunner just does it on a different scale. And the state of California banned such devices.
The alternative known as the Coast Runner, and a judge has ruled that it, too, is banned in California.
A San Diego Superior Court judge has issued a ruling that bars a Texas-based company from selling and marketing in California a computer-controlled milling machine designed to make untraceable “ghost guns,” with the decision marking the third significant victory for San Diego County in the early stages of its lawsuit against the company.
The county’s lawsuit, filed last May on behalf of state residents, accused Defense Distributed and several related entities of slapping a new name and paint job on the “Ghost Gunner” milling machine, which is barred from sale in California, and instead illegally marketing and selling the device in California under the name “Coast Runner.”
The county claimed that “ghost guns such as the ones that can be manufactured using the Coast Runner are fueling an epidemic of gun violence across the country.”
On Thursday, Judge Loren Freestone confirmed a tentative ruling he made last week granting the county’s motion for preliminary injunction. The injunction bars Defense Distributed from selling or marketing the Coast Runner “and any other substantially similar (computer-controlled) milling machine in California,” pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
“The People have demonstrated that Defendants have likely attempted to evade the law by essentially rebranding the Ghost Gunner as the Coast Runner,” Freestone wrote in his ruling. “The Ghost Gunner and the Coast Runner share not only a similar name, but also a similar design, similar parts, and similar features. The operator’s manual for the two products is also substantially similar, and the manual for the Coast Runner even makes reference to the Ghost Gunner by using the initials ‘GG.’”
That’s quite the take.
Especially considering the law in question doesn’t mention Ghost Gunner by name, only by function, so renaming it the Coast Runner was never going to result in getting around the law.
In fact, there’s no evidence that Defense Distributed ever actually tried to evade the ban in California.
Even if such a thing were to show up in the state, it would be necessary to prove they sold it to someone in the state knowingly and shipped it to a California address to even begin to say they tried to bypass the ban.
They can’t.
It should be noted, though, that criminals in the Golden State have never had any trouble getting firearms illegally, despite the mountains of gun control laws on the books, sold to the people as necessary to keep guns out of the wrong hands. That’s how the ban on devices like the Ghost Gunner started, but has it had any kind of impact?
Nope.
But at least people can’t get desktop CNC machines that can also be used to produce things other than guns. Nope, can’t have people being creative with new technologies or anything, can we?
I mean, they might make something progressives don’t like, even a gun.
