According to reports, just before 6:30pm on July 28, 2025, a 27-year-old gunman wearing body armor and armed with an AR-15 entered 345 Park Avenue, a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, and killed four people — including an off-duty NYPD officer — and injured another person before turning the gun on himself on the 33rd floor of the building.
The gunman allegedly drove from his home in Nevada to New York City to carry out the attack. Mayor Eric Adams said that the attacker had been “focused on the NFL,” which has offices in the building, but went to the wrong floor.
While the investigation is ongoing, the New York Post reported that the gunman used a Palmetto State Armory AR-15 and shared an image of the weapon, which appears to be a short-barreled PA-15 “pistol” equipped with an SB Tactical SBA4 arm brace. Police said that the gunman purchased the AR-15 for $1,400 “from the man who supervised him at his job at the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas.” The weapon was also equipped with a 30-round ETS magazine, a sight, a sling, and a flashlight.
A similar model with a different brace and grip, shown below, is currently listed for sale on the Palmetto State Armory website for $400 as part of the company’s “Christmas in July” promotion.
arm braces and THE trump ADMINISTRATION
For years, the gun industry has marketed arm-brace-equipped ARs and AKs as “pistols” instead of short-barreled rifles, which require enhanced background checks to own because they are easy to conceal under a coat or in a backpack, for example. Short-barreled AR-15s, in particular, have been used in at least four mass shootings, including in Dayton, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Nashville, and another was recovered after the Super Bowl rally mass shooting in Kansas City, in which one person was killed and 22 others were wounded, in February 2024. The manufacturer of the short-barreled AR-style rifle configured with a stabilizing brace used in the Boulder mass shooting, Ruger, has been sued by survivors of that shooting for violations of state and federal law.
The perpetrator of the Nashville mass shooting used a short-barreled AR-15 made by Lead Star Arms, a sister company of Palmetto State Armory.
Under President Biden, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) issued a rule clarifying that arm-brace-equipped firearms “designed and intended” to be fired from the shoulder are indeed short-barreled rifles subject to National Firearms Act (NFA) registration requirements. Gun groups immediately challenged the rule, which was vacated by a federal court in Texas.
The Department of Justice had appealed that decision. But less than a week ago, the department reversed course and moved to dismiss the case, signaling that it would no longer defend the arm brace rule in court.
Gun groups celebrated the Trump administration’s decision, which is yet another effort to chip away at the NFA. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” removed the $200 tax required by the NFA for making and transferring silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and other easily concealed weapons, and his administration effectively legalized forced-reset triggers, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like NFA-regulated machine guns.
MORE ON PALMETTO STATE ARMORY
Headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina, Palmetto State Armory is a large, vertically integrated gun maker known for producing low-cost AR- and AK-style weapons. Along with producing its own firearms under the Palmetto State Armory brand name, the company sells firearms and components from other gun makers online and at several brick-and-mortar stores across Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
According to the company, “Our mission is to maximize freedom, not our profits. We want to sell as many AR-15 and AK-47 rifles as we can and put them into common use in America today. Our focus isn’t to make massive amounts of money but to spread freedom as far and wide as possible. Our legacy will not be about money; we want our legacy to be about maximizing American freedom.”
Palmetto State Armory has also marketed products to political extremists. In the past, the company offered a “Big Igloo Aloha” AK-47 with a Hawaiian-shirt-themed paint job associated with “boogaloo” extremists who want to violently overthrow the U.S. government. The company also sold a T-shirt depicting a boogaloo supporter guarding a pile of toilet paper rolls in the midst of pandemic shortages as well as a Hawaiian shirt emblazoned with AK-47s.
The company also sells “meme” lower receivers, the basic building blocks of AR-style rifles, with models like the “Tyranny-15” and “Let’s Go Brandon” as well as those engraved with the Gadsden flag and Trump — gun parts that play into culture wars while simultaneously trivializing deadly assault weapons.
Palmetto State Armory also sold an AR lower receiver printed with an arm brace to raise funds to support its legal challenge against the ATF’s arm brace rule, which it described as an “unconstitutional overreach.” Notably, the part’s serial number begins with “SHOULDER,” and the fire selector positions are marked as “2A,” “OVER REACH,” and “OVERTURN.”
More examples of the company’s problematic marketing tactics are below.
