A San Diego Superior Court judge has issued a ruling that bars a Texas-based company from selling and marketing in California a computer-controlled milling machine designed to make untraceable “ghost guns,” with the decision marking the third significant victory for San Diego County in the early stages of its lawsuit against the company.
The county’s lawsuit, filed last May on behalf of state residents, accused Defense Distributed and several related entities of slapping a new name and paint job on the “Ghost Gunner” milling machine, which is barred from sale in California, and instead illegally marketing and selling the device in California under the name “Coast Runner.”
The county claimed that “ghost guns such as the ones that can be manufactured using the Coast Runner are fueling an epidemic of gun violence across the country.”
On Thursday, Judge Loren Freestone confirmed a tentative ruling he made last week granting the county’s motion for preliminary injunction. The injunction bars Defense Distributed from selling or marketing the Coast Runner “and any other substantially similar (computer-controlled) milling machine in California,” pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
“The People have demonstrated that Defendants have likely attempted to evade the law by essentially rebranding the Ghost Gunner as the Coast Runner,” Freestone wrote in his ruling. “The Ghost Gunner and the Coast Runner share not only a similar name, but also a similar design, similar parts, and similar features. The operator’s manual for the two products is also substantially similar, and the manual for the Coast Runner even makes reference to the Ghost Gunner by using the initials ‘GG.’”
County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who has championed gun-safety regulations, called the preliminary injunction “a big step forward in our fight to hold ghost gun manufacturers accountable for choosing profit over public safety.”
Attorneys for Defense Distributed and the other defendants, Ghost Gunner Inc. and Coast Runner Industries Inc., did not respond to a request for comment on the judge’s decision.
The preliminary injunction ruling — which came just days after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal regulation on ghost guns — is the third notable legal victory for the county in the 11 months since it filed the lawsuit in partnership with Giffords Law Center, the legal arm of the gun control advocacy group named after former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot and wounded in a mass shooting and assassination attempt during a public speaking event. Attorneys from Giffords Law Center and Sullivan & Cromwell are representing the county pro bono.
Last October, after the defendants sought to move the case to a federal court in Texas, a federal judge in San Diego ruled that not only would the case not be moved to Texas, but it would be remanded back down to San Diego Superior Court where the county first filed.
The defendants then sought to dismiss the suit under California’s anti-SLAPP laws, arguing the county’s lawsuit was unlawful retaliation against Defense Distributed for filing prior federal litigation against the state and for exercising its First Amendment right to free speech through political advocacy. But Freestone denied that motion in February, ruling that the county’s lawsuit did not arise from the defendants’ political advocacy or prior litigation.
That all led to the preliminary injunction ruling, in which the judge found that the county “demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits” of its claims.
The county claimed in its lawsuit that Coast Runner Industries “is merely an alter ego of Ghost Gunner Inc. and Defense Distributed” that was created shortly after Defense Distributed lost a federal lawsuit in October 2022. That lawsuit had challenged the California law that bans the sale and marketing of computer numerical control, or CNC, milling machines that are primarily designed to manufacture firearms.
The judge agreed with the county’s claim, noting that the founder of Defense Distributed and Ghost Gunner also incorporated Coast Runner and did so shortly after Defense Distributed lost its federal lawsuit. “The timing reasonably suggests that Coast Runner … was intended as an end-run around the law,” Freestone wrote, adding that Coast Runner marketing materials also showed its clear connections to Defense Distributed and Ghost Gunner.
“The Ghost Gunner website also indicated that purchasers in California would receive a Coast Runner in lieu of a Ghost Gunner,” Freestone wrote. “This reasonably links them to the product’s sale and distribution.”
The judge also noted in his order that the defendants argued the Coast Runner device was not intended primarily for firearm manufacturing because it’s classified by the U.S. Department of Commerce as a general-purpose machine. “But the Ghost Gunner is also classified in that manner, and there is no genuine dispute that the Ghost Gunner is intended for firearm manufacturing,” the judge ruled.
The defendants also argued, according to the judge, that the state laws they are accused of violating are not lawful under the Second Amendment. The judge ruled that the California statutes outlawing CNC milling machines likely do not violate the Second Amendment, in part because the Coast Runner is not an “arm” protected by that amendment.
“It is not, itself, a weapon,” Freestone wrote. “It is instead a machine that can be used to manufacture a type of weapon.”
The term ghost gun can refer to weapons manufactured in a variety of ways, whether from a CNC milling machine, a 3D printer or put together by hand from parts in a prepackaged kit. The defining factor is that they do not have serial numbers, making them hard for law enforcement to track and thus attractive to criminals or people otherwise barred from owning guns.
The county argued in its lawsuit that the proliferation of ghost guns in California has been dramatic. Citing a 2023 report from the California Office of Gun Violence Prevention, it asserted that in 2015, authorities in California recovered 26 ghost guns in connection with crimes, but by 2022 that number had skyrocketed to 12,894.
Esther Sanchez-Gomez, litigation director for the Giffords Law Center, praised the injunction ruling as a “major victory for gun safety” and California citizens.
“We … look forward to making the injunction issued today permanent,” Sanchez-Gomez said in a statement.
The lawsuit filed by the county last year was the first civil litigation of its kind undertaken by the county since the Board of Supervisors agreed in 2022 to sue gunmakers.
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