San Diego County jumped into California’s sprawling ghost gun fight this week, suing a 3-D printing filament manufacturer it says hocks material for homespun firearms in violation of state law.
Working with the Giffords Law Center, the county counsel sued manufacturer Polymaker, alleging the company made a “strategic business choice” to market and sell 3-D printer filament to Californians for the express purpose of building illegal weapons. The polymer filament is sold in spools that feed into 3-D printers, allowing the devices to form designs created by their owners.
“Unlike ghost guns assembled from commercially sold unfinished parts, 3D printed ghost guns can be produced from plastic filament using consumer-grade equipment,” the suit said. “Upon acquiring a 3D printer, a fully functional, untraceable firearm can be printed and assembled by anyone in less than nine hours.”
This spring, the San Diego Police Department’s Ghost Gun Team recovered spools of the material from the home workshop of a 16-year-old would-be school shooter, along with printed guns and firearm parts they believe he intended to sell — evidence, the suit said, of the manufacturer’s harm to the state.
Polymaker did not respond to requests for comment.
The spool suit is the latest in a coordinated effort by California’s municipalities and the state attorney general’s office to throttle the bootleg gun industry by stanching the flow of its precursor components.
In February, the San Francisco city attorney’s office partnered with the California attorney general to sue the online library Gatalog, whose popular digital firearm manufacturing codes can produce more than 150 different 3-D-printed guns and accessories.
“Widely available consumer-grade 3D printers capable of printing firearm parts, frames, receivers, and accessories now start at about $200 and are compact enough to fit on a small table,” the complaint alleged.
“A single spool of PLA+ polymer filament, for example — the only other material required — costs approximately $20-30 and may be sufficient to print multiple firearm components,” putting a 3-D-printed handgun at roughly half the price of a Glock, the suit said.
State law enforcement officers now recover about 11,000 ghost guns and homemade manual-to-automatic conversion kits a year, compared with roughly two dozen a decade ago, the San Francisco suit alleged. According to the San Diego action, more than half of all ghost guns recovered in the U.S. are confiscated in California. It’s unclear how many of those weapons were made from scratch using 3-D printers and how many were built using mail-order kits that contain many of the necessary parts, though law enforcement officials have said the latter is far more common.
The proliferation of untraceable weapons has forced state and local authorities to stretch their regulatory power under California law to try to capture the blueprint books and filament spools that allow novice tinkerers to build backyard arsenals with minimal upfront investment, technical savvy or criminal ingenuity.
Gatalog and Polymaker both market through a network of influencers “specializing in 3D printed ghost gun content, as well as companies and individuals that illegally distribute [digital firearm manufacturing codes],” according to the suits.
Both also directly target state residents: Gatalog advertises a “California Compliant Glock 19-based Carbine kit,” while Polymakers’ website features Proposition 65 warnings and state-specific privacy opt-out features.
That puts both afoul of California law, the suits allege.
The men behind Gatalog and its sister site, CtrlPew, went to federal court in Orlando, Fla., to try to block that assertion, saying California’s suit interfered with their constitutional rights.
“[The California suit ] seeks to impose civil penalties and injunctive relief on Plaintiffs for purely Floridian speech and links published on the open Internet,” the complaint said.
The court rejected that claim.
“The Ghost Gun Ban is a classic example of the exercise of state police power and moral judgment,” U.S. District Judge Paul G. Byron wrote. “As the Supreme Court has recently clarified, ‘a State may exclude from its territory . . . any articles which, in its judgment . . . are prejudicial to the interests of its citizens.’”
The recent flurry of ghost gun litigation is part of a broader, increasingly coordinated effort between local governments and the state to advance so-called affirmative litigation under California’s Unfair Competition Law.
San Diego’s Polymaker suit is one of three launched this week by the county counsel’s new affirmative litigation department — a division built to wield its recently expanded authority to investigate and sue businesses on behalf of residents.
Still, whether California can actually enforce its newest gun control measures remains largely untested.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has grown increasingly hostile to gun control since President Trump began his aggressive overhaul of the bench almost a decade ago. In July, Trump’s newest appointee Eric Tung joined the circuit’s top 2nd Amendment acolyte Lawrence VanDyke in scathing dissent over California restrictions on switchblade knives.
Then, in August, the 9th Circuit tossed California’s challenge to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives’ 2022 ghost gun rule, saying the state lacked standing to challenge its carve-out for pre-manufactured components such as “unformed block of metal, liquid polymer, or other raw material.”
“The terms frame and receiver ‘shall not include a forging, casting, printing, extrusion, unmachined body, or similar article that has not yet reached a stage of manufacture where it is clearly identifiable as an unfinished component part of a weapon’,” Judge Consuelo M. Callahan wrote for the panel.
That rule has already been fought over at the Supreme Court, which nodded to a similar conclusion in upholding restrictions on “buy build shoot” kits last year.
In a 7-2 decision, the court sided with a group of Ivy League linguists who argued the disassembled parts should be understood as a gun in the same way an IKEA flat-pack is understood as a table or Vasily Grossman’s incomplete opus “Everything Flows” as a novel.
But that logic goes only so far, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the court.
“It would be extravagant to speak of a novel when the author has dashed off only a few lines,” Gorsuch wrote. “Few would call a pile of unfinished logs a table.”
Not everyone in the court read its decision so narrowly.
In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that under the court’s ruling, “whether an unusable, unfinished piece of metal constitutes a regulable ‘frame or receiver’ can turn on a manufacturer’s ‘marketing materials’” — much as California’s newest ghost gun laws assert.
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