Good day all. This may have slipped below the radar thanks to the Summer of Fiery Love II now ramping up in L.A. Last week the Supreme Court ruled that Mexico’s lawsuit against several gun makers was dead. What was surprising was that it was a unanimous decision.
To review, a few years ago, Mexico decided to sue all the American gun companies, claiming that they were selling guns to the cartels. They were backed by the usual gun control groups, the Democrats and of course, the “Blue” States. The problem is that the lawsuit was a load of manure on a number of levels, starting with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
The case should have been thrown out on the PLCAA grounds early on, however incompetent idiots of the 1st Circuit Court of appeals decided that this was a good way to crush the 2nd Amendment by bankrupting all the American gun manufacturers. This was after Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor in federal court in Boston tossed the suit because of the PLCAA. Now the Supreme Court has tossed the case into the garbage heap where it belongs. Here are the details from Fox News:
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of seven U.S. gun manufacturers who were sued by the Mexican government over allegations they aided and abetted illegal gun sales to Mexican cartels.
The high court’s decision in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos was unanimous, finding that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a statute that protects gun makers from lawsuits, did not include exceptions that gave the Mexican government the ability to sue.
“The kinds of allegations Mexico makes cannot satisfy the demands of the statute’s predicate exception,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court.
What was amazing was that the three Communists Liberal justices agreed with the rest that Mexico had no case. Most people would have expected them to disagree and say “Why of course Mexico can destroy a major United States industry.”
Kagan noted the exceptions in the law would allow a lawsuit against the gun makers if they “proximately caused” Mexico harm.
“Mexico’s complaint, for the reasons given, does not plausibly allege such aiding and abetting,” Kagan wrote. “So this suit remains subject to PLCAA’s general bar: An action cannot be brought against a manufacturer if, like Mexico’s, it is founded on a third party’s criminal use of the company’s product.”
The Supreme Court concluded that the “proximate cause” standard meant the U.S. manufacturers could not be sued when the complex commerce pipeline goes from them to wholesalers, distributors, rogue retail dealers, straw purchasers, smugglers and then to the Mexican cartels.
The short version is that the gun manufacturers did not sell anything to the cartels. In fact, the major gun manufacturers do not sell their products at the retail level. They sell them to dealers with federal firearm licenses. They are the ones that sell to the general public. By the way, the PLCAA does not protect a manufacturer of their product is defective. If a gun should have a defect, such as going off without the trigger being pulled and it can be show that there was some sort of defect, that can and does go to court.
The Trump administration has pushed the Mexican government to better patrol its border to block drugs and migrants from entering the U.S., while Mexican officials have demanded the U.S. stop military-style firearms from ending up in Mexico — fueling the very drug crisis both sides seek to end.
One of the little details that the media isn’t reporting is that the cartels are not buying civilian firearms. They are more interested in military weapons including automatic rifles, belt fed machineguns, rocket launchers and other such items. You aren’t getting these and Bubba’s Guns and Beer emporium in Texas. Where are they getting them from? Mostly from the Mexican military.
During the proceedings, attorneys for Mexico, which has strict gun sale restrictions, argued the country should be allowed to file a $10 billion civil lawsuit in U.S. courts.
The gun makers countered that their standard business practices were being unfairly targeted and that they had no awareness that their products had been illegally transported into Mexico.
Well, we do know one way they were smuggled into Mexico. That would be Operation Fast and Furious dreamed up by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder. Several thousand guns were smuggled in and some of them were used to kill American citizens after the Obama DoJ “Lost track” of the weapons.
Like Mexico, families of gun violence victims, such as the parents of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, have also tried to bypass the PLCAA, but this case marks the first time the Supreme Court has examined the limits of the law. The Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million out-of-court settlement with gun maker Remington.
And Remington no longer exists as an independent corporate entity. Caving in to that bogus lawsuit was one of the reasons.
Gun control advocates have argued the high court ruling against Mexico will make it harder for them to go after U.S. gun manufacturers when future mass shootings occur, if it can be proven they knowingly and foreseeably broke the law.
That nonsense was one of the reasons that the PLCAA was passed. By those standards anything used in the commission of a crime means they can go after the manufacturers. This includes car manufacturers, tool manufacturers, knife manufacturers, etc. Now no one blames car makers for the actions of criminals. However, the Left wants the American people disarmed by any means necessary and they saw this suit as a way to make it impossible for people to get guns. No one is making them, no one can buy them.
Second Amendment rights groups, meanwhile, have said a lawful and heavily regulated industry should not be subject to liability for criminal acts committed by armed gangs in another country.
The Supreme Court agreed with the gun rights groups in this case. Kagan wrote that Mexico’s complaint did not “plausibly allege the kind of ‘conscious… and culpable participation in another’s wrongdoing’ needed to make out an aiding-and-abetting charge” against the gun companies.
So it looks like this lawsuit is dead. I suspect it will also be used the next time some leftard tries to sue a gun manufacturer when a criminal misuses their product. As for Mexico, they weren’t thinking about how things could have gone for them. For all intents and purposes, Mexico is a failed state controlled by the Cartels.
Mexico has allowed millions of illegals to cross our border, not to mention the literal kilotons of drugs that has been smuggled in through Mexico for decades. What would be stopping the United States from using the same legal theories against Mexico and for, not billions, but trillions of dollars?
Well, despite what the current president is saying, that case is dead and frankly, all such cases need to be quashed when some moron tries going after a company like Ruger or Smith & Wesson. Now we just need to get the Supreme Court off their dead asses and put an end to all this unconstitutional gun control nonsense.
Thatisall
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