A Washington, DC, man was busted with a homemade “ghost gun” minutes after he showed the firearm on Instagram, court documents show.
The social media maven, identified as Ryan Parker in a criminal complaint obtained Tuesday by the Daily Beast, allegedly showed off his 9mm handgun — which he had personally converted to fire fully automatically — during an Instagram Live broadcast Saturday.
The footage depicted a suspect police say is Parker wearing a black hoodie and a blue medical face mask inside a vehicle while holding the gun in his left hand, court documents show.
“The handgun had a green lower receiver with a black string tied around it and a silver slide,” the complaint reads. “Attached to the firearm was a black drum magazine.”
The firearm also had a blue “giggle switch,” an after-market accessory that makes a semi-automatic handgun capable of fully automatic firing — effectively making it a machine gun, an FBI agent wrote in the complaint.
Parker aimed the weapon that appeared to be a “fully functional handgun” directly at the camera during his live broadcast, which was spotted by a Metropolitan Police Department officer, according to the complaint.
Parker, who was known to cops and frequently hung out near the Fort Chaplin Apartments in northeast DC, was taken into custody “within minutes” of ending his Instagram broadcast.
A handgun with a drum magazine was found “in plain view” on the driver’s seat of a silver sedan Parker was seen in during the Instagram Live video. He tried to flee but was taken into custody, according to the complaint.
“The firearm was determined to be an unserialized 9mm Personally Manufactured Firearm, commonly referred to as a ‘ghost gun,’” the complaint reads. “The firearm was loaded with one round in the chamber and 36 rounds in the attached drum magazine, and it was fitted with a ‘giggle switch’ rendering it capable of fully automatic fire, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
Parker did not have an attorney listed in court records and could not be reached for comment, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday. Attempts to reach him Wednesday were unsuccessful.
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