California sues websites over 3D-printed “ghost gun” blueprints
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu filed a new lawsuit targeting two websites that distribute instructions for making 3D-printed firearms described as “ghost guns,” the state said. The suit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, names Gatalog Foundation Inc. and CTRLPEW LLC as defendants.
In court filings, California argues the sites provide access to illegal and untraceable weapons by offering computer code and step-by-step guidance for more than 150 designs of lethal firearms and prohibited firearm accessories. The lawsuit says the sites’ materials include code and printing guidelines as well as instructions tied to illegal large-capacity magazines and other firearm-related products.
The state alleges that California investigators as part of their probe downloaded the relevant code and instructions from the websites “with a few simple keystrokes” and used them to build a Glock-style handgun. The lawsuit asserts that the resulting firearms evade key safeguards because the weapons are not serialized, the filing said.
Bonta said in a statement that the defendants’ conduct enables people who are “too young or too dangerous to pass firearm background checks” to illegally print deadly weapons without a background check and without a trace. He said the case underscores what he described as the danger of the ghost gun industry and the harm caused by what he called its skip-the-background check business model in California communities.
The lawsuit says the websites’ distribution also circumvents background-check requirements because the guns can be manufactured privately rather than through a system that includes those safeguards, according to the state’s description of how ghost guns work. The filing described the weapons as effectively untraceable for law enforcement due to the lack of serialization.
In addition to the two companies, the lawsuit names three men: Alexander Holladay, identified as the Gatalog Foundation’s principal; John Elik, identified as its director; and gun rights attorney Matthew Larosiere. The filing describes Larosiere as having previously characterized ghost guns as a “legal hobby” for firearms enthusiasts in an interview with the Mercury News in 2019.
In that 2019 interview, Larosiere told the Mercury News that “It is, and always has been, legal for ordinary adults to make firearms for their own personal use.” He added, “These people tend to be dedicated hobbyists. Home-built firearms have been around as long as our nation, and today in a country of 300 million people, we rarely ever see them used in crime.”
California’s filing said the spread of ghost guns has accelerated over the past decade in the state and described it as a “public safety crisis.” The lawsuit said law enforcement agencies recovered 26 ghost guns in 2015, and that since 2021 agencies have recovered an average of more than 11,000 ghost guns per year, according to the state.
The lawsuit also pointed to specific incidents it said show the risk posed by 3D-printed firearms. Among the examples, it cited the arrest of a 14-year-old boy who was accused in 2024 of using a 3D printer to manufacture multiple firearms in Santa Rosa.
Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and vice president of GIFFORDS Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement that the organization had previously partnered with Bonta to stop three ghost gun companies from operating in California. Skaggs said “a new generation of irresponsible gun industry actors” is trying to “unlawfully arm minors, people with felony convictions, and domestic abusers” by enabling them to 3D-print their own guns without background checks.
The defendants could not be reached for comment.