3D Printed Guns and UnitedHealthcare

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1:33Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist found in company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I am your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. Noah Manuel this week. Hopefully he'll be here next week. One brief piece of housekeeping.

2:14There is an article on the site called 404 Media Objects to Texas Attorney General Kane Paxton Subpoena to Access Our Reporting. I'll read one quote from the article. this subpoena undermines the free and independent press it also highlights the fact that the alarm bells that have been raised about legal attacks on journalists in the second trump administration are not theoretical politicians already feel emboldened to use the legal system to target journalists end quote that's all we're going to say about this for now but go check out the article if you do want to get a little bit more context on that um jason merch yeah uh so sam and i and the others, but mostly Sam and I have been working on getting a refreshed new merch, new shirts, hoodies, crew neck, sweatshirts.

3:05We tried really hard to get these before Christmas so that you could give them as gifts. But we're not going to have them in time. The reason that I'm talking about this now is because probably later this week, we'll put them up on our Shopify if you're interested. And I want to highlight that it's a pre-sale, as in we've ordered them, but we're not going to get them before Christmas. But if you want to buy them, I will ship them out the second that I get them, which will probably be at the very beginning of January. So if you want to give your loved ones a piece of paper that says, you're getting a shirt from 404 Media, now is your chance.

3:46Is that right, Sam? Yeah. Yeah, the coveted IOU, always a classic for the last minute gift giving. I've done it a thousand times, unfortunately. But yeah, and it helps us if you pre-order to know how much to get. So, and I think they look sick. So watch for that. I haven't done an IOU, but I might do that this year. I've done it most years. I've done it so many times. I'm probably going to do it this year. Here's a printout of what I bought you. It's coming later. It's in the mail. It's like, that's, yeah, for sure. I respect it. I didn't know that was a thing. And I guess soon, yeah, soon we're going to begin to, I know, we're going to get into sneaker culture because we're doing all these drops now and pre-sales.

4:25We're going to have bots on our website. No, I don't want to give anybody any ideas. But yeah, definitely go and order that if you want. The show is going to be a little bit different here and then we're going to have a couple of breaks because there is just so much to talk about with the United Healthcare CEO. We've done a few different stories on it, probably different to the ones you've read at other outlets. Obviously, this is the biggest story, at least in the United States. But let's get into it. The first one that we're going to talk about is one that I wrote called United Healthcare Shooting Person of Interest Had 3D Printed Glock.

4:57I will give a super brief summary of recent events. I'm sure many people know this. But last week, a man ambushed the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson in Manhattan, on the pavement and shot him in the back and killed him. There was a massive manhunt with various things along the way. The police found a rucksack full of Monopoly money in Central Park. Lots of photos of the alleged shooter were released as police got them. And then eventually, reportedly, an employee at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania called authorities after seeing this person of interest later turned suspect. He's arrested, and his name is Luigi Mangong, ABC, NBC, CNN, all obtain images of a weapon found on him.

5:47This is where my story comes in. I think it's Mangione. Sure, we'll go for that. Thank you very much. I even checked. Trying to be respectful. I'm awful. I apologize. It's okay. It's the mispronounced word of the week. We're bringing it back. Bringing it back. Yeah, we had a good run. I saw in the replies on Twitter immediately the photo of the weapon and, you know, to an untrained eye like mine, it just looks like a black Glock, you know, it just looks like a pistol. But then people were tagging a particular Twitter user and mentioning somebody and saying it was a particular design of a 3D printed Glock frame.

6:31I then spoke to two people who said the same. One of those sources we granted anonymity, and another one was Print Shoot Repeat, who, for those who don't know, is a pretty high-profile YouTuber and 3D-printed firearm community member. They do all sorts of things with firearms and 3D-printed weapons and uploads videos. They have various issues with YouTube as well, demonacizing content as you might expect all of that um but both both of these people they said that the weapon in the photo released was a chairman wong version one um and i think and i think others would agree that is hugely significant in that this might be the first assassination in the United States using a 3D printed weapon.

7:30Now, again, I'm no expert, but Jason helped me with this because you have a little bit more knowledge than me and through the two people I spoke to. Just because we say a weapon is 3D printed, that doesn't mean the entire thing has been made by a printer. You're going to have different components like the slide, which you'll have to purchase, but this was the Glock frame, you know, and that was 3D printed. Before we touch on that a little bit more jason we haven't covered 3d printed guns i think directly at 404 media just because i don't know hasn't super uh come up but way back at motherboard the technology section of vice where we used to work and i think actually before my time there motherboard made probably like the first serious documentary about 3d printed guns what was the deal there yeah so it was called Clickprint gun.

8:21And it was made by our ex-colleagues at Motherboard. I think it came out maybe in 2012. It was a long time ago. And it followed Cody Wilson, who made this 3D printed gun called the Liberator, that he called the Liberator. And basically was just showing that it was possible to make a 3D printed gun. And I will say just for people who are interested, The producer and director of that documentary, which I think was like 25 minutes long, was Aaron Lee Carr, who has since gone on to make some very high-profile documentaries for HBO and other outlets. So it's extremely well made and it's worth watching.

9:06And this was a really big deal for Motherboard as well. I remember it got coverage from CNN and other major media outlets because they had no idea that this was even possible. And it really raised a lot of questions about free speech, content moderation, things like that. Back to the extent of the Second Amendment, various issues like this. Back when people were not talking about it as much, Cody Wilson went on to found this... I guess it's a company. I don't even know if it's a company or if it's just like an online platform, like nonprofit type thing called Defense Distributed, which has like all of these different designs for 3D printed guns, things like that.

9:54But the big thing is that the Liberator was, I believe, made entirely out of 3D print resin, which is like printable plastic, more or less. and he fired it. He tested it, showed that it worked, but it wasn't super reliable as a gun. Well, there's footage of it breaking and stuff. Yeah, it breaks. It's kind of like one of those one-time-use guns, more or less. And I think the very interesting thing is that in the years since then, as most things do in technology, 3D printed guns have gotten a lot more sophisticated and a lot different. And the gun that Joseph wrote about earlier this week that we're talking about, the Chairman Juan gun, is, I guess you'd call it like a hybrid 3D printed gun where the case is 3D printed plastic resin.

10:52But then as Joseph mentioned, many of the parts are metal and you buy those metal parts from the internet. And there was actually a kind of interesting academic study that's referenced in that article that came out in October about the rise of this type of gun because they're a lot more reliable than just like a plastic gun, as you'd expect. But they're a lot more sophisticated. And it's causing some... There's speculation in this paper that it's going to cause some problems for law enforcement because the definition of what a 3D printed gun is, is changing. And tracking this stuff is getting a lot more complicated for that reason.

11:43And that paper came out in the United Kingdom that has actual gun laws, whereas the United States, very few, very, very few. um but i thought it was i thought that was like very interesting context was was this paper but anyways uh joseph you want to talk a little bit more about this specific um gun and then also what what this tells us about what what might happen here yeah so and i guess just before that when you when you talk about the liberator from the early documentary it it looks very much like its own gun right it's like a particular design it's not trying to like replicate a glock from what i remember it's made in a certain way presumably because the physics of it has to try to be an effective even if one shot or a couple of shots weapon right and it's different now in that the 3d printed firearms market or community are basically making copies of established weapons that people know work and they're able to effectively replicate them.

12:47So this weapon, the Chairman One V1, I was told, you know, it was released in around 2020 or 2021, depending on where it was potentially downloaded from. And it quickly became unpopular because the v2 came out something like six months later um we don't know enough about you know the suspect and whether they did download this when they downloaded it but i thought that was an interesting data point in that this isn't like the version 3 or the version 4 or whatever a more recent one it is a years old model of this particular 3d printed firearm design so interesting uh data point there. You just mentioned that UK paper and how we could have problems for law enforcement.

13:37When the reporting initially came out about this 3D printed weapon, a few outlets relying on the comments of the police, obviously, were framing it as a ghost gun, which is a gun without a serial number. And of course that is true in that you don't 3D print a serial number onto it if you have any sense right um but i do think it's much more significant that's 3d printed than it just doesn't have a serial number and i think it bears repeating that as you say jason uh it could be a real problem in the uk in the us uh basically nothing in the way of somebody just buying a weapon like this anyway that being said stuff might change now and i'm i'm glad like i didn't like we don't want to make predictions i remember when emmanuel was editing this piece he changed a word because I said it might likely have legal ramifications.

14:28He's like, we don't want to predict, which is true. Print Shoot Repeat, the high-profile YouTuber, they said, quote, it appears to be the first high-profile case involving a 3D printed gun, and it's my guess that this will have a huge impact on DIY firearms regulations going forward, end quote. So that's one of the most prominent members of this community acknowledging and seeing that maybe there's going to be some sort of legal crackdown. Now, what that exactly looks like, I'm not clear on. Some members, I think many members of the 3D printed firearms community would say that this is information.

15:08It is a speech issue. All we're doing is distributing plans, that sort of thing. uh so we'll we'll see how that pans out legally but as well as a weapon of this type being used in a very high profile murder and assassination i think it really just just show how far freely printed weapons have come when i was writing my book about a nom the encryptophone company the fbi secretly ran and backdoored and read all the messages on there the fbi and other authorities got messages showing that a gang in Finland had basically made a factory for 3D printed submachine guns. And you look at the photos and it's crazy.

15:52There's like three or four 3D printers all lined up and they just have a supply chain of these things. So you have that. You also have some neo-Nazis in Finland who have turned to the weapons as well, apparently. And then if you are interested in this, I recommend you go follow the work of Popular Front from Jake Hamrahan, who's done a bit more reporting on this, and I think he did a recent documentary, but there's also even rebels in Myanmar who are now using 3D-printed weapons. This is here to stay now. We're so far from the Cody Wilsons doing a single-shot pistol now. Yeah, I've been pretty shocked at the fact that a lot of the 3D-printed guns appear to me to be submachine guns or automatic weapons in some way.

16:35Preface, or post-face, I don't know anything about guns. I know a little bit about 3D printed guns, just enough to sort of edit the piece that you did, but I don't know terminology. I don't know exactly if they're technically automatic weapons or what, but I have been surprised at how far it has clearly evolved since that initial Cody Williams story. Yeah, absolutely. Let's have a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about a couple more stories around all of this. We'll be right back after this.

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20:40Okay, and we're back. This one, Jason, you just published this today. Luigi Mangioni played Among Us, breathes air. Obviously, a sarcastic headline. I think before we get to sort of what you're criticizing, when the name of the suspect came out, what did you do? Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who has done journalism on the internet has done this at some point. And I think actually just random people who are interested in stories have started doing this as well, which is the name was announced. The name Luigi Mangione was announced yesterday by the NYPD. And then you Google the name and you try to figure out who was this person.

21:23And you try to look for their accounts, more or less. And in this case, it wasn't like John Smith. Like, it was easy to find quickly. There were several Luigi Mangiones, but the sort of like biographical information seemed to match what was happening on this person's account. And the most common thing that people do, the most common time that this happens is in the result of like a mass shooter where the name of a mass shooter is released. And then the people who cover these things essentially go looking for their online footprint and their manifesto, if there is one. There's been several high-profile examples where a mass shooter had a YouTube channel where they had lots of hateful stuff, or in some cases explained explicitly why they did what they did.

22:20we can talk about why that is a problem in a minute but basically it's like I and I believe all of you to some extent started looking for Luigi Mangione's online accounts and there were many many many accounts it's almost like a reflex unfortunately at this point which I don't really know what that says about us or journalism and maybe it's not all bad but it's like an impulse yeah Yeah. And the interesting thing in this case, a couple interesting things. One, we've written a lot of articles about, like, he was not a mass shooter. This was like an act of political violence. And there is, it has resonated with people in ways that we are probably going to talk about in the second half of the show.

23:10And so I think that people wanted to see, did this person's online politics align with an idealized version of him where he did this killing, allegedly it was him, to start a class war against a very repressive and anti-human health insurance regime. and I think that people pretty quickly realized that at least on the surface there was not a manifesto there was not like a long history of talking about health problems on his social media accounts things like that like some of that has now since been reported um but I think often about the website heavy.com which is like a website that I don't even know what it is other than they're very good at SEOing to the top of any search result for a mass shooter.

24:16They're like, terrible mass shooter, five quick facts you need to know. And it always goes like, it's always the first thing that pops up. And I think that every... Well, many, many, many online media outlets are playing that game with this shooter, with mass shooters, with tragedy, with the big news story. And I think that reflex to do that is understandable because I'm very interested in who this person is and why they did what they did and that sort of thing. There's a big vacuum of information. And then there's one little detail, which is his name. And then you try to fill in all the gaps of the information that you don't have.

25:00And sometimes that's very easy. But usually it's very hard. because what people were finding was his GitHub page where he had worked on some AI stuff back in 2016, 2017. We're talking six years ago. A Facebook page that had stuff on it, but was also very outdated. A WordPress, a Substack, a Twitter feed. And most of this stuff was quite dated. By years. Yeah, like a couple years, several years, something like that. Yeah, and a lot of it was unrelated, I guess, because people's online presences don't neatly align with an act like this, usually. And then there was also the Goodreads account. So I think pretty immediately people found the Goodreads account, which is, if people don't know, Goodreads is a website where people review books.

26:00And Luigi Mangione has an account there. and there was dozens and dozens and dozens of books that he read. And so people were trying to form this narrative of what information ecosystem was he surrounding himself with? Is he leftist? Is he a rightist? Is he a class warrior? People learned very quickly that he went to this fancy private school in Maryland and so on and so forth. And all of this is very understandable, but every morsel of information was turned into some sort of blog. and the worst of them that I have seen that everyone has been dunking on was an NBC News article that had the headline and lead sort of explaining that he had once played the game Among Us, which is in my opinion it's a game for children.

26:50Millions and millions and millions of people have played it adults play it, etc. One year we played it for my birthday actually. Oh yeah, we did. We did. you know yeah i'm not i'm not mad at anything like a baby game but by by that by a game for children i mean like if i had a kid and they were five years old i would feel comfortable allowing them to play this game it's not really like that violent of a game it's a cartoon game that doesn't have any like blood or guts in it as far as i know and it's a game about social skills more or less If you're not familiar, basically, it's like the parlor game Mafia, where each round or each time you play, you're randomly assigned a role.

27:36You're either a crew member or an imposter. And if you're an imposter, you try to kill one of the crew members secretly. And then you talk over voice chat if you're on Zoom or you just like... I don't know if you talk in the game in some way. But basically, you try to trick people into thinking that you didn't do the murder, more or less. And the NBC News article was like, it was more or less like Luigi Mangione role played as an assassin in this game at some point. And that's not useful information. Well, and spoke to a friend who played with them, right, or somehow else associated and called it extremely ironic that we were playing this game and he turned out to allegedly murder somebody.

28:21and it's just like, you get to this in the piece and it's not just your social media posts from years ago are not representative of the very complex person you are. Also, the comments from somebody who you played an online game with years ago mean jack squat, basically. And yet, NBC News feels like it should be the headline and the lead. Yeah. And then, so the article then sort of gets into like, we did this whole search and we talked about whether we were going to write an article. And then we basically didn't write an article. But then I wrote... Your article, to be clear. Yeah. Yeah. And then I ended up writing this meta article about it because everyone was talking about this NBC News article and how it's like useless.

29:07It is a useless exercise. And I said this in the article and then you and Emmanuel said really mean things to me. But it's like, I'm not going to do a murder. I'm not going to do anything like this. I hope to never, ever, ever be in the news for anything like this. But anytime I do this process of Googling for people, I start thinking about what my online profile looks like if someone were to do this to me. And if you Google me, and I have Googled me, it's like all this random shit comes up that is either very old or from really old live journal I had as a teenager, photos of things where I've been, places that don't actually mean anything to me.

29:58I was actually on Facebook the other day buying a couch on Marketplace and a post came up from 10 years ago that I don't remember writing. There's just all this stuff that I don't really remember doing on the internet because I've been on the internet for 25 years. just posting and doing stuff. And if you want to have a narrative about someone, you can kind of like pick out any little detail and say like, oh, this is why he did it or like this is relevant or so on and so forth. And so that's what I tried to write about. Yeah, it makes sense. The only time you're going to be able to get a good sort of picture of somebody is when, you know, a magazine comes in and does a real, real deep dive.