The gun industry faces a growing threat of civil liability over gun violence despite a federal law intended to shield manufacturers from costly lawsuits.
New plaintiffs emerged from a rash of mass shootings. And gun-violence prevention groups have assembled more information about firearm distribution practices and criminal gun markets.
Cracks in the shield law’s immunity surfaced in the lawsuit that Sandy Hook families brought against Remington Arms over the school massacre.
In 2019, Connecticut’s highest court said that the families could pursue claims that Remington unscrupulously marketed its Bushmaster rifle to videogame playing, military-obsessed young men.
The government of Mexico is pursuing billions of dollars in damages from gun companies for allegedly arming cartels. Eight Democratic-led states have enacted laws making it easier to bring civil lawsuits against gun makers. And courts are weighing several lawsuits brought by families of mass-shooting victims.
The gun industry’s exposure to negligence and public-nuisance lawsuits was once assumed to be largely settled. Now, the issue looks destined for Supreme Court review.
In 2005, gun industry lobbyists persuaded a Republican-led Congress to pass a statute giving dealers, distributors and manufacturers broad immunity from a torrent of tort litigation.
Gun-control advocates and trial lawyers have spent years refining their legal theories and lobbying for new state laws to get around the federal statute’s constraints.
“It’s not this cloak of immunity that everybody originally thought it was,” said Philip Bangle, a senior litigation counsel with the Brady gun-violence prevention group.
The firearms industry says gun-control activists are defying Congress’s intent when it enacted the immunity law.
