On Friday, Everytown Law and Weiner, Spivey & Miller, PLC, announced a favorable settlement in a lawsuit brought on behalf of the families of two 17-year-old Virginia residents, Calvin Van Pelt and Ersheen Elaiaiser, who were shot and killed by an 18-year-old classmate armed with a Polymer80 ghost gun during an altercation at a friend’s house on April 25, 2021.
The lawsuit, filed in September 2023, alleged that online retailer 80P Builder unlawfully and negligently sold the ghost gun kit to the teenage shooter without a background check or age verification. Federal law requires that licensed gun dealers perform background checks on customers, and prohibits handgun sales to anyone under the age of 21.
According to the announcement, none of the defendants “admitted any liability with respect to any claims brought in, or that may have been brought in, this lawsuit.” But the alleged operators of 80P Builder agreed to no longer “sell or transfer firearms, firearm assembly kits, or pistol frames to customers who have not undergone and passed a background check. Financial and other terms of the settlement are confidential.”
TURNING GRIEF INTO ACTION
“We miss Calvin every day,” said Vanessa Van Pelt and Michael Winfield, the parents of Calvin Van Pelt, “Our lives will never be the same without him. We turned our grief into action through this lawsuit because no parent should ever go through the loss we’ve felt. Gun sellers should not be allowed to arm underage boys, plain and simple.”
“While nothing will ever bring back our son and brother, we are glad to have made progress in making deadly weapons inaccessible to young people,” said Mashaer Adlan and Komi Elaiaiser, the parents of Ersheen Elaiaiser.
GHOST GUNS IN THE NEWS
Ghost guns are unserialized, and thus untraceable, firearms made from gun-building kits or 3D-printed components. Polymer80, once the largest manufacturer of ghost gun parts and kits, reportedly shut down in August after settling lawsuits filed by Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Baltimore and agreeing to pay over $10 million collectively. The company also agreed to no longer sell ghost guns into D.C., California, and Maryland, respectively.
Additionally, Polymer80 settled another lawsuit filed by two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies who were ambushed and seriously wounded in a 2020 shooting involving a Polymer80 ghost gun. But the details of that settlement are confidential.
Several states have also enacted laws prohibiting ghost guns in recent years, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) issued a rule that went into effect in August 2022 regulating ghost gun kits like commercially made firearms. In early October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok, a case challenging the ATF rule, which has helped shrink the ghost gun market.
A recent study by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund analyzing crime gun recoveries in 34 U.S. cities from 2019 to 2023 found that Polymer80 ghost gun recoveries dropped by 28 percent last year — the first decrease since 2019.