Jury awards Baltimore $62 million in lawsuit over ‘ghost guns’

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A Baltimore City jury on Wednesday night ordered an Anne Arundel County-based gun retailer to pay $62 million in damages for allowing the spread of “ghost guns” throughout the city.

The city sued Hanover Armory and manufacturer Polymer80 in 2022 after a state law banning “ghost guns” took effect. The firearms are typically purchased in kits and assembled by the buyer. They lack serial numbers, making them next to impossible to trace.

According to a statement from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, it’s the largest verdict against a gun dealer defendant in American history.

“Baltimore has lost generations of friends, neighbors, and loved ones to gun violence,” Scott stated in a press release. “Together, we are saying enough is enough. Today’s verdict is a massive victory in Baltimore’s fight against illegal ghost guns and the companies that have allowed these weapons to proliferate in our neighborhoods.

“To be clear: there are legitimate businesses that sell firearms legally and respect safeguards designed to keep people safe,” Scott continued. “Hanover is not one of them. Irresponsible companies like this one, that ignore the law in pursuit of profit, have no business operating in Baltimore — or anywhere, for that matter. We are making it clear: anyone — any company — who enables violence in our city will be held accountable.”

Hanover Armory plans to appeal, company official Reese Lang stated in an email.

The money will go to three community violence intervention groups through an abatement fund, the mayor’s statement said.

The other defendant, Polymer80, agreed to a $1.2 million settlement in February 2024. It went out of business after verdicts cost the company millions and forced it to stop doing business in several states, including Maryland.

The lawsuit said Baltimore police recovered a skyrocketing number of ghost guns, from nine in 2018 to 324 in 2021, representing 14% of the firearms it seized. It recovered 131 in the first four months of 2022.

“In making these sales, Hanover Armory does not seek to determine whether a purchaser is a domestic abuser, felon, juvenile, or any other kind of prohibited purchaser,” the city’s complaint stated. “By manufacturing and selling ghost guns, these Defendants have predictably, if not intentionally, caused violence, destruction, and death in Baltimore City.”

In a motion for summary judgment last year, Hanover Armory argued the city could not prove its “privately made firearms” contributed to any crime and said the city overstated its market share.

“(Baltimore) has had a longstanding, pre-PMF problem with gun violence going back decades before Hanover even existed,” the motion stated.

“Now that the City has recently been recovering more PMFs than in prior years though, it is looking for a scapegoat for its problems with gun violence, and it has apparently chosen Hanover. But there is no evidence (literally none) that any PMF used to commit a crime in Baltimore was ever sold by or in any way connected to Hanover.”

Avery denied the motion last October, sending the case to trial.

The Baltimore City Law Department brought the case along with the law firms Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight and Berger Montague, as well as the gun-violence reduction advocacy group Brady.

Baltimore City Circuit Judge Shannon Avery presided over the trial; the damages amount is subject to her approval.

Juries don’t always get the final say in the amount in damages a party has to pay.

After a trial last year, a Baltimore jury issued a $266 million verdict against two opioid distributors for their role in the city’s opioid crisis. Baltimore City Circuit Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill ordered a new trial to determine damages, calling the amount awarded by the jury “grossly excessive.” Rather than go to trial again, the city decided to accept $152 million, which included $100 million for abatement, The Baltimore Banner reported.

Phil Bangle, a lawyer for Brady, said Hanover Armory sold 2,347 kits from 2016 until the lawsuit was filed in 2022, marketing aggressively in the city and selling to people prohibited from buying guns.

The trial lasted two weeks, Bangle said, and the jury’s award was more than double the city’s request for $30 million in damages.

He said retailers used a loophole — DIY gun kits without serial numbers were not considered to be firearms — to get around “pesky laws” that require background checks and other due-diligence. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Biden administration rule requiring gun kits to include serial numbers and to be treated as guns.

Bangle said the verdict sets a historic precedent in gun violence prevention efforts.

“There’s really no way I can overstate the significance,” Bangle told The Daily Record. “It’s a big deal.”

This story has been updated.