I Made an Untraceable AR-15 ‘Ghost Gun’ in My Office—And It Was Easy | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/2015/06/i-made-an-untraceable-ar-15-ghost-gun
...
I fired again. Then three more times. Then I emptied the magazine. Then I reloaded and emptied another one.
Halfway through the next magazine, I pulled the trigger but got nothing but a soft click. The rangemaster, who happened to be a former winner of the shooting competition reality TV show Top Shot named Chris Cheng, diagnosed that the upper receiver had jammed and needed to be lubricated—a common problem with new rifles. He opened it up and doused the bolt and buffer parts in grease, then put the upper receiver back on.
My rifle performed perfectly for the rest of the morning. After our video team fired the rest of the 40 rounds I’d brought, Rynder walked over to the neighboring range and convinced the friendly local SWAT team members practicing there to give us another 60 rounds. We shot those too. The gun didn’t misfire again.
...
When this story published, the Ghost Gunner still sat in a storage room of WIRED’s office a few blocks away. It’s ready to make another lower receiver at any time. And Defense Distributed has already sold more than a thousand of their gun-making boxes, each one a tiny, easy-to-use, anarchic rifle factory.
In other words, to paraphrase the rifleman’s creed again, this ghost gun was mine. But there will be many like it.