The gun control lobby is crowing today after a jury in Baltimore slapped a Maryland gun store with a $62 million verdict for “flooding the city” with unserialized firearms.
Baltimore, working hand-in-hand, with the gun control group Brady, sued Polymer80 and Hanover Armory in June, 2022, a couple of months before Joe Biden’s ATF began enforcing a rule treating “buy, build, shoot kits” as firearms that needed to include a serialized frame or receiver, even if it wasn’t in completed form when it was sold.
The lawsuit was also filed on the same day that Maryland’s ban on unserialized firearms went into effect, which helps to explain why Baltimore filed a lawsuit in civil court instead of the state’s attorney general or Baltimore prosecutors filing criminal charges against the companies. Though the complaint accused both Polymer80 and Hanover Armory of violating numerous state and federal laws, no charges were ever brought against the defendants.
Polymer80, which is now defunct, ended up settling with the city for $1.2 million, but Hanover Armory decided to face a jury after settlement talks broke down. Not to Monday (or Thursday) morning quarterback, but that seems like a risky proposition given that the trial was held in Baltimore itself.
Until the day the lawsuit was filed, neither Maryland nor the federal government treated unfinished frames and receivers as “firearms”, so both Polymer80 and the gun store were operating within the bounds of the law, despite claims to the contrary. Baltimore and Brady argued “the manufacture and sale of unfinished frames and receivers was regulated before June 1, 2022 as well.”
Maryland law prohibits the manufacture, sale, or distribution of a handgun that is not on its Handgun Roster, which is a list of handguns that are allowed for sale in the state.Md. Code Pub. Safety § 5-406(a)(1). Specifically, Maryland establishes a Handgun Roster Board within the Maryland State Police to facilitate a determination of which weapons may legally be sold in the state.
But unfinished frames and receivers weren’t treated as firearms by Maryland until June 1, 2022, so there would have been no reason (or way) for the Maryland State Police to consider an 80% frame or receiver for inclusion on the roster.
The city and gun control group also accused the defendants of creating a public health emergency by selling the “buy, build, shoot” kits, noting that “[b]efore 2018, BPD had never recovered a ghost gun,”and “[i]f current trends hold, BPD anticipates recovering 393 ghost guns in 2022.”
So-called ghost guns, though, only comprised 14% of the total number of guns that were seized in Baltimore in 2021, and just 32 of the 345 ghost guns recovered by BPD were linked to a homicide or shooting that year. Homicides in Baltimore started soaring in 2015, years before the first “ghost gun” was seized by the BPD, so it makes no sense to blame either Polymer80 or Hanover Armory for creating a “public health emergency.”
Unfortunately, there was virtually no media coverage of the two-week long trial, but it’s hard to imagine that Hanover Armory could have found a jury pool that was willing to take an unbiased look at these facts. Based on the comments both before and after the trial by Baltimore officials and Brady’s Kris Brown, though, I’m sure the jury was told they had both the opportunity and duty to hold Hanover Armory financially responsible for the violence in their city, and I’m guessing that argument was pretty persuasive given the size of the verdict.
Crime was a big problem in Baltimore long before Polymer80 ever distributed its first “buy, build, shoot” kit, but it’s easy to scapegoat these companies and blame them for the actions of violent criminals. In fact, Baltimore is currently suing Glock over the criminal misuse of their handguns, and yesterday’s verdict will only embolden the anti-gunners to go after more gun companies instead of the criminals illegally acquiring and using their products.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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