While the legislatures of several states grapple with the pivotal issue of legalized concealed carry for defense, high profile lawsuits against firearms manufacturers have moved to center stage.
On March 7, San Diego Superior Court Judge Vincent DiFiglia gutted a sweeping lawsuit against the firearms industry that combined actions filed by 12 California cities, dismissing all named firearms manufacturers and trade associations, but ruling the suit can continue against three wholesalers and two gun retailers.
On March 11, the Appellate Division of New Jersey Superior Court ruled that Newark may pursue a lawsuit similar to those in California that seeks to hold gun manufacturers liable for the costs of crime.
“We must give the city the benefit of the doubt” and a chance to prove its allegations, the court said in a 52-page opinion that also will apply to similar suits brought by Camden and Jersey City.
And on March 24 (after this issue of Gun Week goes to press), in federal court in New York’s Brooklyn borough, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) will start presenting its case against the firearms industry, claiming that gun companies have failed to take steps to lessen the impact of “handgun violence” that “disproportionately harms poor, urban blacks.”
The decisions in California and New Jersey inspired partisan comments from the anti-gun Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, which has assisted on all the cases against the industry, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the principal trade association for gun companies also usually named as a defendant in the suits designed to accomplish in court what the anti-gunners have failed to get from federal and state lawmakers.
NSSF was buoyed by the California decision, particularly since only a few days before DiFiglia’s oral ruling was issued following arguments by almost 40 lawyers, the Brady Center had been trumpeting a deposition by Robert Ricker, billed as an industry whistleblower.
DiFiglia said there was no evidence that the gun industry could be blamed for the black market for guns in California. Even if such evidence existed, he said, policing of the industry is a job better left to lawmakers and agents responsible for enforcing existing firearms laws.
Lawyers for the cities and the Brady Center said DiFiglia’s decision will be appealed.
Similar cases in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Atlanta and Miami-Dade County have been thrown out of federal and state courts, and Boston dropped its suit voluntarily after it came up empty in its discovery of industry documents. Lawsuits by other cities—Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and New York City—are pending and haven’t made it to trial.
Immediately after the New Jersey ruling, NSSF called on Congress to pass HB-1036, a US House bill with 244 co-sponsors that would provide what NSSF calls “common sense legal reform.” Similar measures have passed in more than 30 states.
In the NAACP’s suit, anti-gun lawyers claim to have “powerful new legal ammunition’ as well as a sympathetic trial judge. Their “ammunition” consists of gun trace statistics obtained in a subpoena of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Presiding over the NAACP case is federal Circuit Court Judge Jack Weinstein, an 81-year-old semi-retired federal trial judge famous for his sympathy for creative liability theories and using the courts to resolve tough social problems. He supervised what seemed to be an important gun-control court victory in 1999 that was later reversed by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
In an unconventional move, Weinstein is putting an “advisory jury” in the box for this bench trial—meaning he will consider the jurors’ views but reserve to himself the role of ultimately determining liability and a remedy. Return to Archive Index