The sellers of a “ghost gun” kit that a Virginia teenager used to build a working pistol, and then kill two of his classmates, agreed to pay more than $2 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the parents of the slain teens. In the settlement approved by a Fairfax County judge, two North Carolina firms acknowledged operating a website that sold a ghost gun kit to an 18-year-old but did not admit any liability for the deaths of Ersheen Elaiaiser and Calvin Van Pelt, both 17. The teens died in April 2021 after a fistfight in a home garage, when Zackary Burkard, then 18, pulled out a firearm he had assembled after ordering online a “ghost gun” kit, which contained parts with no serial numbers, and opened fire. Burkard was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The case against the makers and sellers of those parts, filed with the anti-gun-violence nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, was part of a broader court effort by localities, gun-control advocates and grieving families to increase oversight of companies that have long operated in a legal gray area as their products proliferate, reports the Washington Post.
The weapons — easy to assemble and prized by criminals looking for unserialized weapons that can’t be traced — have soared in popularity in recent years, used in mass killings, school shootings and with increasing frequency by teenagers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said police and federal law enforcement seized fewer than 2,000 ghost guns in 2016 and more than 28,000 in 2022. ATF had ruled that unassembled gun parts did not qualify as a gun under federal law, but the Biden administration in 2022 implemented a rule change that required buyers of the kits to undergo background checks and sellers to add serial numbers and keep sales records. Gun rights groups challenged the rule, and last month the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the case, seeming to lean toward allowing the new rule to remain.
Okori LLC and BUL USA LLC, both of Charlotte, were the final defendants in the Virginia case. The companies operated a website called 80P Builder, which sold a full kit for assembling an unserialized gun to the teenage Burkard, including a frame, slide, barrel and jig for mounting them.
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