D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb recently joined Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown and Erich Tirschwell of Everytown Law to announce a civil suit aimed at three D.C.-area gun stores that are accused of facilitating the illegal sale of handguns.
For Ryane B. Nickens, this multijurisdictional lawsuit, in part, represents the fulfillment of a vision that she articulated to Schwalb when he was a candidate for the office he currently holds.
“We talked about solutions to curb gun violence, then I said ‘When are we going to go after the gun manufacturers and gun stores,’” Nickens, the founder and president of The TraRon Center, said at the George Gordon Meade Memorial Statue on Constitution Avenue in Northwest as she recounted her engagement with Schwalb in 2022.
“It’s the whole system,” Nickens said. “The person who owns the store [should be] held accountable for their actions. It takes all of our efforts to make our communities safer.”
In 2017, Nickens, a lifelong Southeast resident, launched The TraRon Center to help young people heal from the trauma of gun violence through the arts. By that time, Nickens knew all too well how gun violence affects families and entire communities.
In 1989, someone killed Nickens’ uncle in a case of mistaken identity as he left her grandmother’s Southeast home. In the early 1990s, Nickens’ sister, then nine months pregnant, also succumbed to gun violence when she and another person got into an argument.
Decades later, in her work to combat intergenerational trauma, Nickens once again found herself in the middle of gun violence. In 2018, she had to console a young person after gunfire broke out at Woodland Terrace, where The TraRon Center was hosting summer programming.
Throughout much of her adolescence, Nickens, like some of the young people under her purview, lost friends and family members to illegal guns. She said each incident pushed her further along a path to tackle gun violence at the root. That’s why, long before she met Schwalb, Nickens served as a member of Do Not Stand Idly By and the Washington Interfaith Network, through which she became focused on the part that negligent gun manufacturers play in the proliferation of illegal guns.
“There are multiple people behind that trigger before that person pulls that trigger,” Nickens said in support of Schwalb’s collaborative efforts with Brown and Everytown Law. “When a person purchases a gun, brings it back to the community and sells it to a 14-year-old, now they’re carrying it for a reason, whether it’s for their protection. That’s the neighborhood norm, so [this lawsuit] is about not wanting kids to repeat the cycle.”
Overview of the Civil Suit
Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shows that 95% of firearms purchased in the District originate from Maryland and Virginia.
A significant portion of those firearms, prosecutors said, often happens through straw purchases — a process by which a person buys a large amount of firearms from a licensed gun seller to sell to people who can’t legally own firearms.
The criminal complaint filed by Schwalb, Brown, and Everytown Law targets three federally licensed gun stores in Rockville, Maryland — Engage Armament, LLC; United Gun Shop; and Atlantic Guns, Inc. — that allegedly engaged in straw purchases with Demetrius Minor.
Throughout 2021, Minor obtained 34 semiautomatic weapons from Engage, United Gun, and Atlantic over seven months. In the criminal complaint, prosecutors allege that the gun sellers violated federal, D.C. and Maryland law when they overlooked the patterns of a straw purchase, including bulk purchasing and repetitive buys within a short time period.
“Strawman gun sales are illegal and gun shop owners have a responsibility to enforce the law,” Brown said. “These stores contributed to illegal gun trafficking and guns ended up in the hands of people who aren’t allowed to have them. They played a part in supplying firearms for crimes in our region.”
Law enforcement officials have since discovered at least nine of these firearms at crime scenes throughout the D.C. metropolitan area. In 2022, the Hyattsville Police Department recovered a gun from the residence of a stabbing suspect. Later that year, the Montgomery County Police Department recovered another weapon from the Adelphi, Maryland home of a criminal defendant.
A couple months later, the Metropolitan Police Department searching a hotel room found a Prince George’s County man in possession of a gun connected to Minor, as well as an illegally obtained high-capacity magazine.
While Minor has been convicted of crimes related to the illegal distribution of those firearms, Engage, United Gun, and Atlantic haven’t faced any legal consequences.
In their lawsuit, Brown, Schwalb, and Tirschwell are seeking monetary damages for the harm done to District residents, in addition to an injunction that forces Engage, United Gun and Atlantic to curb the illegal sale of guns. This counts as part of the work that Everytown Law, the litigation arm of Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, does on behalf of families and communities that have suffered from gun violence.
“The defendants repeatedly sold numerous similar handguns to straw purchasers,” Tirschwell said. “Sometimes multiple guns on the same day. Mr. Willis and the straw purchaser were prosecuted and sent to prison, but that’s not enough. That’s why we’re here.”
The Ongoing Fight to Stop the Flow of Illegal Guns
With the suit announced, advocates are working to hold the firearms stores accountable.
The owners of United Gun didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Representatives of Atlantic told The Informer, “Atlantic Guns, Inc. has never and will never knowingly sell to someone who we have reason to believe is committing a straw purchase.”
Andrew Starr Raymond, owner of Engage and a self-described person of integrity and duty, told The Informer that he “looks forward to” responding to the civil suit. In his statement, Raymond outlined the process by which Engage ensures compliance with local, state and federal laws.
“In Maryland, all handgun transactions are reported and flow through the Maryland State Police for approval or disapproval. In addition, all handguns offered for sale in Maryland have to be approved by the Maryland Handgun Roster Board which is composed of law enforcement officials and civilians appointed by the Governor,” Raymond said. “In fact, for someone to purchase more than one handgun per month in Maryland they need a special letter authorizing them to do so which is issued by … the Maryland State Police.”
Over the last few months, the D.C. Council has attempted to stem, or at least study, the flow of illegal guns into the District. During the debate around emergency public safety legislation, and the Secure DC Omnibus bill, D.C. Councilmember Robert White (D-At large) secured the inclusion of provisions centered on the collection of data about gun recovery, including point of purchase and where guns were recovered in the District.
D.C. Councilmember Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) also introduced the Establishment of Reasonable Controls for the Firearm Industry Act, which included a provision allowing for lawsuits against gun manufacturers that fail to prevent gun trafficking and the illegal sale of firearms.
That legislation hasn’t gone beyond the D.C. Council’s Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety.
This latest collaborative action by the D.C. Office of the Attorney General follows a lawsuit that it won against ghost gun manufacturer Polymer80 in 2022. The entity, which sells kits to construct untraceable guns, was ordered to stop selling those kits and to pay $4 million in penalties.
While Schwalb noted his office’s prosecution of youth gun crimes and work in violence interruption, he described the Polymer80 lawsuit, and the current lawsuit against the three Rockville, Maryland gun stores, as part of a larger strategy to prevent the flow of illegal guns into the District.
The continuation of that work, he told reporters on Aug. 3, will probably include his counterpart in Virginia.
“We need to stop guns from getting in the District in the first place,” Schwalb said. “When the distributors who, in the pursuit of profits, are driving violence, we need to put a stop to their illegal conduct and hit them in their wallets. We plan to hold gun dealers accountable.”