Ghost gun retailer settles with Baltimore for $2M

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Hanover Armory, the Anne Arundel County-based firearms seller accused of flooding Baltimore with untraceable “ghost guns,” has agreed to pay the city $2 million to settle its ongoing public nuisance lawsuit.

The dollar amount of the settlement, which also includes significant injunctive relief, is much lower than the historic $62 million jury verdict against the retailer in August. The settlement resolves Hanover Armory’s appeal. No briefs were filed in the appeal

According to Brady, an anti-gun violence advocacy and legal group that helped represent the city, the verdict was the largest in American history against a gun seller.

Hanover Armory did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to the money, the settlement “ensures that Hanover Armory will responsibly sell firearms in the future,” according to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s office.

Among other “strict reporting requirements,” the company agreed to notify the city whenever a prohibited purchaser tries to buy a gun. It won’t sell unserialized gun kits or mechanical conversion devices. Hanover Armory agreed to notify Baltimore City of attempted straw purchases and to report to the city annually on its sales of firearms and accessories.

“This case sends a clear message: we will not tolerate irresponsible gun dealers putting illegal weapons on our streets and enabling cycles of violence in our communities,” Scott stated in a Monday news release.

“A small number of gun dealers sell the majority of guns used in violent crimes, and our work to stem the flow of illegal guns into our city is focused on these reckless dealers. This settlement delivers accountability and oversight, ensuring that any business Hanover Armory does must be within the bounds of the law.”

The city will use the money to support gun violence prevention programs that were defunded by the Trump administration last year, the mayor’s office said.

City Solicitor Ebony Thompson added, “This settlement both mitigates the risks of an appeal and leverages that verdict into an agreement that will make Baltimore safer.”

“This settlement fits squarely into the City’s legal strategy regarding firearms,” Thompson stated. “We will continue to target the worst actors in the gun industry and achieve results that both fund anti-violence efforts and, most importantly, bring those bad actors into compliance with the law.”

The city sued Hanover Armory and manufacturer Polymer80 in 2022 after a state law banning ghost guns took effect. It argued they had allowed people who were prohibited from buying guns to use a legal loophole to buy kits and assemble the guns themselves. Those kits lacked serial numbers, making them impossible for law enforcement to trace.

Polymer80 settled with the city in February 2024. Since then, according to Scott, police have recovered far fewer ghost guns.

The settlement with Hanover Armory comes about a month after the Maryland Supreme Court dealt a blow to local governments’ efforts to sue companies for public nuisance for widespread alleged harm to their communities. On one day last month, the court published back-to-back decisions against local governments in lawsuits against Big Pharma and Big Oil.

First, the court ruled that Anne Arundel County can’t use the common-law doctrine of public nuisance to hold pharmacy benefit managers and drug distributors accountable for their role in the proliferation of opioids. Then, it ruled that three governments’ claims against global oil and gas companies were preempted by federal law and that they hadn’t adequately stated public nuisance claims.

In the climate case, Justice Brynja Booth wrote that the notion that local governments could use nuisance claims against international polluters was “so far afield from any area of traditional state or local responsibility that it cannot be seriously contemplated.”

Kathleen Hoke, a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, said these rulings might have played into the city’s decision to settle with Hanover Armory.

Hoke said the court was taking “a very constrained view of the tort nature of public nuisance for local governments.”

“It doesn’t leave them high and dry,” she said, “but where we have this more general claim of public nuisance, it’s just taking away one of the litigation tools that a jurisdiction may have.”