The Supreme Court docket handed down a unanimous opinion on Thursday that shuts down a lawsuit introduced by the nation of Mexico in opposition to US gun firms.
In Smith & Wesson v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Mexico sued seven American gun producers, claiming that their merchandise are sometimes bought to gun traffickers who then present these weapons to Mexican drug cartels. The Mexican authorities claims that as much as 90 p.c of weapons recovered at crime scenes in Mexico come from the USA.
Sadly for Mexico, nevertheless, a 2005 regulation referred to as the Safety of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) provides American gunmakers broad immunity from lawsuits searching for to carry them responsible for harms “brought on by the misuse of firearms by third events, together with criminals.” PLCAA does comprise some exemptions to this basic rule. As Justice Elena Kagan explains within the Court docket’s Smith & Wesson opinion, a gunmaker will be held responsible for “aiding and abetting another person’s firearms offense.”
Mexico claims that the gunmakers aided and abetted unlawful gross sales to cartels by “provide[ing] firearms to retail sellers whom they know illegally promote to Mexican gun traffickers.” Mexico additionally faults the businesses for permitting bulk gross sales of weapons, which may allow unlawful gross sales, and for practices equivalent to designing weapons that attraction to Mexican tradition.
One such gun, for instance, options a picture of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, together with a quote from Zapata: “It’s higher to die standing than to reside in your knees.”
However Kagan’s opinion concludes that the mere proven fact that US gun firms probably knew that a few of their weapons have been being resold within the unlawful market, a lot much less that a few of their weapons are designed to attraction to Mexicans, is just not sufficient to beat PLCAA. As Kagan explains, this conclusion largely flows from the Court docket’s pretty current determination in Twitter v. Taamneh (2023).
Twitter involved an assault by the terrorist group ISIS that killed 39 folks at a nightclub in Istanbul, together with a person with American kin. These kin sued a number of social media firms in US court docket, claiming that the businesses aided and abetted the Istanbul assault by permitting ISIS to put up content material which promotes ISIS’s ideology and that makes an attempt to recruit folks to the terrorist group’s trigger.
However Twitter warned in opposition to a authorized regime the place “peculiar retailers might turn into responsible for any misuse of their items and companies, regardless of how attenuated their relationship with the wrongdoer.” As a basic rule, somebody who offers a great or service to all comers is just not legally accountable if a nasty actor makes use of their product for a depraved objective. If Ford sells a truck to a person who deliberately makes use of it to run over and kill his spouse, Ford usually won’t be liable for this murder.
And so Kagan concludes that it’s not sufficient for Mexico to point out that gunmakers might have taken extra steps to stop their merchandise from winding up within the fingers of drug cartels. As a substitute, “the service provider turns into liable provided that, past offering the great on the open market, he takes steps to ‘promote’ the ensuing crime and ‘make it his personal.’”
After all, one factor that distinguishes Smith & Wesson from Twitter is that social media platforms usually are not weapons whose whole objective is to injure folks. If PLCAA didn’t exist, Mexico might need argued that the gun firms’ determination to make and promote an inherently harmful product ought to make them responsible for the implications of promoting such a product.
However, after all, PLCAA does exist. As Kagan writes, “Congress enacted the statute to halt a flurry of lawsuits making an attempt to make gun producers pay for the downstream harms ensuing from misuse of their merchandise.” Which may be a nasty selection on Congress’s half. However, absent a constitutional violation, it isn’t the Court docket’s job to second-guess Congress’s determination to set nationwide coverage.
