When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday to toss out Mexico’s lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and other American gun makers, it handed a “significant and severe setback” to the gun prohibition lobby, which had been “supporting and rooting for Mexico.”
(See the related report from AmmoLand correspondent John Crump.)
That was the analysis from Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), and he had a lot of company.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who led an amicus brief in support of the firearms manufacturers in December, issued a statement declaring, “This is a win for gun manufacturers and gun owners across the country.
“The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act makes it clear,” Knudsen said. “American firearms manufacturers should not and do not have to answer for the actions of criminals. Today, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed. Mexico’s dangerous gun policies are to blame for their own gun violence crisis, not American gun manufacturers following the law.”
Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, called it a “tremendous victory for the firearm industry and the rule of law.”
“For too long, gun control activists have attempted to twist basic tort law to malign the highly-regulated U.S. firearm industry with the criminal actions of violent organized crime, both here in the United States and abroad,” Keane said in a prepared statement. “The firearm industry is sympathetic to plight of those in Mexico who are victims of rampant and uncontrolled violence at the hands of narco-terrorist drug cartels. The firearm industry works closely with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to prevent the illegal straw purchasing of firearms and the illegal transnational smuggling of firearms. This unequivocal decision by the Supreme Court that PLCAA applies and there is no evidence whatsoever that U.S. manufacturers are in any way responsible is verification of commitment to responsible firearm ownership.”
Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation, and a practicing attorney, put it bluntly: “The ultimate goal of this lawsuit was simple – bankrupt the firearms industry, at the ultimate peril of the American people. Thankfully, the Supreme Court saw through this thinly veiled attempt to wield the legal system as a cudgel against lawful commerce.”
The 15-page opinion, authored by liberal Justice Elena Kagan, was diplomatically brutal.
“Mexico’s complaint does not plausibly allege that the defendant manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers,” Kagan wrote.
But perhaps even more devastating to the Mexican case, and the U.S.-based gun prohibition groups which supported it and were hoping for a victory, came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, another of the court’s liberals, in a concurring opinion.
“I write separately,” Jackson stated, “to explain that, in my view, the complaint’s core flaw is its failure to allege any nonconclusory statutory violations in the first place. Tellingly, that failure exposes Mexico’s lawsuit as precisely what Congress passed PLCAA to prevent. PLCAA was Congress’s response to a flood of civil lawsuits that sought to hold the firearms industry responsible for downstream lawbreaking by third parties. Activists had deployed litigation in an effort to compel firearms manufacturers and associated entities to adopt safety measures and practices that exceeded what state or federal statutes required.”
NBC News noted that the lawsuit, originally filed in 2021, accused S&W, Colt and other gun companies of “deliberately selling guns to dealers who sell products that are frequently recovered at Mexican crime scenes.” It is essentially the same argument anti-gunners have been making for several years since the first municipal lawsuits against the gun industry started cropping up more than two decades ago. Those legal actions, which cost the industry millions of dollars to fight, were the catalyst for passage of the PLCAA, which the Biden -Harris administration had vowed to repeal, but Congress wouldn’t pass a bill. Anti-gunners want PLCAA gone so they can renew their efforts to bankrupt the firearms industry.
Thursday’s ruling might also be something of a rebuff of attorney Jonathan Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence and special litigation advisor to Everytown Law, an adjunct to anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. According to CBS News, Lowy had been asked by Mexico “to help devise its strategy to cut off the gun pipeline.”
As CCRKBA’s Gottlieb summed it up, “We know the gun ban bunch has been trying for years to stop gun sales and erase the Second Amendment, either through passage of extremist gun control legislation or by bankrupting the firearms industry. Once again, people who would blame firearms manufacturers and law-abiding American citizens for crimes they did not commit, have failed. However, the greater failure here is in the Mexican government’s inability to bring their own criminals to justice. Before attacking our house, Mexico needs to get their own house in order.”
The case has been reversed and remanded back to the 1st U.S. District Court of Appeals in Boston, which had revived the lawsuit last year after a trial judge initially threw it out.
Supreme Court Rejects Mexico’s Lawsuit Against Smith & Wesson
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
