3D-Printed Ghost Guns Won’t Stay Anonymous: How Digital Fingerprints Could Track Every Part
Introduction: Ghost Guns and Digital Fingerprints 3D printing has opened the door to amazing innovations – custom tools, spare parts, even artistic creations – but it also has a dark side. In recent years, hobbyist 3D printers have been used to produce unregistered, untraceable firearms known as ghost guns. These DIY weapons lack serial numbers and skirt traditional gun regulations, making them appealing to criminals. A chilling example came in late 2024, when a ghost gun was implicated in the murder of a healthcare executive engineering.washu.edu engineering.washu.edu. This incident underscored why law enforcement is anxious about ghost guns: they’re effectively