New York found a way to sue gun makers out of existence — and on Monday, the Supreme Court shrugged and let them.
Here’s a fun new rule the lawyers just invented: if a criminal steals a gun and shoots someone, you can sue the company that legally made the gun. Not the criminal. The company. The one that followed every federal law on the books, sold the firearm to a licensed dealer, and had exactly nothing to do with the guy who pulled the trigger.
Sounds insane, right? That’s because it is. And on Monday, June 15, the highest court in the land looked at this circus, decided it had better things to do, and walked right past it.
The Supreme Court declined — without a single word of explanation — to hear the gun industry’s challenge to New York’s liability law. No comment. No reasoning. Just a quiet “next” from nine people who were perfectly happy to leave the whole rotten thing standing. The lower courts had blessed it, the Second Circuit rubber-stamped it last year, and the Supremes just yawned and let the lower-court rulings ride.
So now it’s the law. New York gets to drag gun makers into court under a “public nuisance” theory — the same legal gimmick city governments use to sue over potholes and stray cats — every time some third party misuses a firearm. A criminal does the crime. Smith & Wesson does the time. Or at least the legal bills.
The Workaround Was Always the Point
Now, you might be thinking: didn’t Congress already settle this? Wasn’t there a whole federal law about exactly this nonsense?
There was. It’s called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, passed back in 2005 for one simple reason — the trial lawyers had figured out that if you can’t ban a product at the ballot box, you can just sue the people who make it until they go broke. PLCAA said the obvious thing out loud: you don’t get to bankrupt a company because somebody misused its lawful product. You can’t sue Ford because a drunk plowed into a minivan. You can’t sue a knife maker because some lunatic stabbed a guy. And you can’t sue Glock because a criminal who was never supposed to have a Glock used one to commit a crime.
That was the deal. For twenty years, that was settled.
Then New York did what New York does. The politicians who couldn’t get the votes to ban guns decided they’d just write a state law that “creatively” routes around the federal one. Call it a “public nuisance.” Slap a new label on the same old lawfare. And dare the courts to notice.
The gun makers noticed. The National Shooting Sports Foundation — the industry’s trade group — took the fight all the way up, with Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Beretta, Glock, Sig Sauer, and Sturm signing on. Their argument was about as complicated as a stop sign: federal law beats state law, that’s literally how the country works, and Congress passed PLCAA precisely to stop this exact stunt.
A federal district judge said no. The Second Circuit said no. And the Supreme Court — the body whose entire job is to sort out when a state law tramples a federal one — said nothing at all.
Follow the Logic Off the Cliff
Here’s where it gets fun, because the people who built this thing never think about where their own rules lead.
If a company is liable for what a criminal does with its lawful product, then the gun maker is just the first stop. Next comes the distributor who shipped it. Then the wholesaler. Then the little shop on Route 9 with the bell over the door and the owner who’s known your family for thirty years. He ran the background check. He followed every rule. Doesn’t matter — under “public nuisance” logic, he’s part of the “nuisance” too.
And it won’t stop at New York. This is a template. A few other blue states are already eyeing the same trick, and now they’ve got a green light, because the Supreme Court just told them the coast is clear.
You — the law-abiding owner, the guy who’s never so much as gotten a parking ticket — you’re the one this lands on. Because when the lawsuits make insurance unaffordable, and insurance makes manufacturing unaffordable, and the manufacturers thin out or pull out, the shelf at your local shop gets emptier and the price tag on everything left gets fatter. They can’t take your rights, so they’re coming for your supply chain.
This is gun control through the courthouse. No vote. No debate. No senator who has to stand up and explain to his constituents why he wants to put the corner gun shop out of business. Just a slow financial chokehold, applied by trial lawyers in good suits, blessed by judges who’d never be caught dead at a gun range.
We’ve watched this movie before. They did it to the tobacco companies. They did it to the painkiller makers. The playbook is identical: find a product the elites don’t like, declare it a “public nuisance,” let the lawsuits do what the legislature couldn’t. The only thing new here is that this time the “nuisance” is a constitutional right.
And give it a few years. The same crowd that swears they only want “common-sense” measures will be standing in the rubble of the firearms industry insisting they never wanted anything of the sort — that they were just holding manufacturers “accountable.” Accountable for the crimes of people they never met, never sold to, and were never allowed to sell to in the first place.
PLCAA was supposed to be the wall that stopped exactly this. On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to defend it. So the lawyers walked right through.
Remember that the next time someone tells you your Second Amendment rights are safe because nobody’s trying to repeal them. They don’t need to repeal anything. They just need to sue.
