PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Police have seen a steep rise in the criminal use of so-called ghost guns, including this week’s mass shooting in Kingsessing. Now the city is suing the two largest suppliers of parts for the weapons in Common Pleas Court.
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Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said both guns found on Kingsessing shooting suspect Kimbrady Carriker after he was taken into custody appeared to be “privately made firearms” — commonly called ghost guns. That's the AR-15 police say he used to kill five people and wound four, and a 9mm handgun he didn’t use on Monday.
Ghost guns are untraceable because their parts have no serial numbers.
“If he would’ve dropped that weapon and got away, we would have had no way to trace that weapon back to him,” Vanore said.
That is the most immediate example of why the city is suing two companies for negligence and creating a public nuisance by selling untraceable gun parts. City Solicitor Diana Cortes said it asks the court to order Polymer 80 and J.S.D. Supply to cease sales of gun parts and pay an unspecified amount for damages for the economic burden that puts on the city.
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“The lawsuit filed [Wednesday] against these distributors will hold them accountable for the harm they’ve caused in our city due to their reckless and illegal business practices,” Cortes said Wednesday.
Mayor Jim Kenney says he’s most concerned with halting unregulated sales: “We’re just looking for sanity, so what we’re looking for is a change in behavior.”
The news conference to announce the lawsuit was planned before Monday's shooting.
Five years ago, the Police Department didn’t even count ghost guns, because there were so few, said Michael Garvey, head of the police crime lab.
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According to the lawsuit, ghost guns are now recovered from 10% of crime scenes. Kenney said Wednesday that’s a nearly 300% increase in ghost guns recovered during police investigations over the past four years.
In 2019, police seized 95 ghost guns. In 2020, they seized 250 of them. That grew to 575 last year. This year, police have already seized 292 of the weapons, including the two used Monday.
“The problem is we’re seeing larger numbers, which prevent us from doing the very thing we have to do — figure out how did that fire arm get used in a crime — by us not being able to trace it to the first purchaser and any purchaser after,” Garvey said.
Garvey says PMFs are the third-most popular crime gun, after Glocks and Tauruses. This year alone, Philadelphia has seen 750 shootings — 200 of them fatal.
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The city’s past attempts to regulate guns have been preempted by the state, and a lawsuit challenging that preemption failed in court. Kenney says there’s no choice but to keep trying.
“We keep on coming up with hopefully ingenious ways of attacking it, but we can’t just sit idly by,” Kenney said.
J.S.D. Supply declined comment, and Polymer 80 did not return requests for a response.
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