Five months before he murdered 10 black people in a Buffalo grocery store, Peyton Gendron wrote in his online diary that he had found a gun secured with a locking device sold by a company in Georgia.
Called the MA Lock, the device was ostensibly to thwart Mr. Gendron, a white supremacist who wants to kill as many black people as possible. Mean Arms, a Georgia-based company, sells a device that holds the magazine (the part that holds the ammunition) to the firearm.
This part is intended to prevent shooters from using detachable magazines, which are illegal in New York because detachable magazines allow for rapid reloading. The company says its device allows guns to comply with New York law.
But according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by the New York Attorney General, Mean Arms deliberately sells easy-to-remove locks and even includes step-by-step removal instructions on the back of its product packaging. there is In fact, Mr. Gendron did not refer to the device as a lock in his diary, but instead as a fixed-magazine “release.”
In fact, according to a photo Gendron posted in his diary in January 2022, he was able to unlock it quickly with little effort. In the May 14, 1945 shooting, he used a 30-round detachable magazine. Using a larger-capacity magazine avoided reloading the gun, which may have helped Gendron kill more people. In addition to the ten people he killed, three others were also injured in his attacks.
Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement: “We lost 10 innocent lives when a hate-driven individual was able to make the AR-15 even more lethal with a simple home modification. ‘ said. He added that Mean Arms sold the locking device “knowing it could be easily removed to make the gun more dangerous.”
Lawyers for Mean Arms, based in Woodstock, Ga., did not respond to a request for comment. The company says on its website that the lock was designed as a “complete fixed magazine solution” and “developed for states with burglary laws that require a fixed magazine.”
“Once installed, it cannot be removed with tools. This meets the laws of California and New York,” the website states. Gendron’s diary and Mean Arms product packaging seem to point to the opposite.
