After almost a decade of 300 or more homicides each year, since 2023 Baltimore's murder stats have been trending in the right direction. The city had 333 homicides in 2022, 261 in 2023, 201 last year, and is on pace to have fewer than 200 murders in 2025.
Despite those trends, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and the Baltimore City Council are accusing a local gun store of "flooding" the city with so-called ghost guns and are seeking to hold the shop financially responsible for the city's violent crime.
Working with gun control group Brady, Baltimore sued Anne Arundel County gun store Hanover Armory on June 1, 2022; the same day that Maryland's law banning the sale, transfer, and manufacture of an unfinished frame or receiver unless it's been serialized by a licensed manufacturer, as well as prohibiting the possession of unserialized firearms. The city also sued Polymer80, but the now-defunct company settled with Baltimore rather than go to trial.
Hanover Armory, on the other hand, has so far refused to bend the knee. In its response to the city's lawsuit, attorneys for the store argued that Baltimore has no basis for accusing it of aiding and abetting violent criminals.
Hanover Armory argued the plaintiffs couldn’t prove its “privately-made firearms” contributed to any specific crime in Baltimore. It said the city overstated its market share, relied on inaccurate lists and didn’t account for online purchases.
“(Baltimore) has had a longstanding, pre-PMF problem with gun violence going back decades before Hanover even existed,” the company’s motion for summary judgment 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.”
There's also no evidence that Hanover Armory broke the law when selling kits or unfinished frames and receivers, which is why this is a civil trial and not a criminal complaint. The Biden-era rule treating kits as completed firearms didn't take effect until after Maryland's law was in place, so there would have been no reason to subject buyers to a NICS check. In fact, I don't know that a NICS check could have been performed on these products prior to the ATF's rule going into effect.
According to a story from last October, Hanover Armory did take part in discussions about a settlement, but those talks were "unproductive." Polymer80, however, agreed to pay $1.2 million to Baltimore, as well as ending sales to Maryland customers (a moot point since the company is now out of business).
The civil trial could last a couple of weeks, so we'll provide some updates in the days ahead. As Hanover Armory's attorneys have argued, Baltimore has long had a problem with violent crime, and blaming the store's legal sales for the illegal actions of violent criminals is already ridiculous. If ,as the store's attorneys contend, the city can't point to a single crime committed with a privately manufactured gun that started out as a kit sold by the company, then this should be a slam dunk case in favor of the gun store.
