by Gun Week Staff
A New Jersey Superior Court judge on Mar. 10 dismissed the Newark city lawsuit against the firearms industry with prejudice, meaning that the city cannot refile its legal action.
In December, the court had dismissed the case without prejudice, allowing the city to refile, but sources close to the case suggested that the city simply decided to let the case die quietly.
The Newark lawsuit was among dozens that had been filed in the late 1990s against gun makers in an effort to hold them responsible for gun violence and injuries caused by criminals and other third parties. Several of those lawsuits have been dismissed, or are now in the appeals process, with the track record clearly on the side of the gun industry.
The trial court stated that plaintiffs had not met any of the requirements of a prior court order which would have been necessary to permit plaintiffs to file an application to reinstate the complaint before a court-imposed Mar. 1 deadline.
In commenting on this final dismissal of yet another lawsuit filed by anti-gun local politicians, Sturm, Ruger President Stephen L. Sanetti addressed the central problem with such litigation and called on the US Senate to reconsider its vote on the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act which was voted down earlier in March.
“While we are pleased to obtain yet another dismissal of these baseless and costly municipal lawsuits, their only genuine resolution will be the enactment of federal preemptive legislation to prevent the filing of such lawsuits arising out of the criminal misuse of lawfully sold, non-defective products,” said Sanetti. “Clearly, such legislation has widespread bipartisan popular support, and likely would have passed the US Senate recently but for being loaded down with amendments that have nothing to do with its merits.
“On behalf of the many thousands of workers in this vital American manufacturing base, the many millions of our customers who use our products honorably and responsibly, and the taxpayers of our cities who should not be burdened with the costs of ill-advised political lawsuits, we urge the reconsideration and prompt enactment of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” Sanetti concluded.
According to Gary Mehalik with the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF)—one of the defendants in several of the lawsuits—the City of Newark “let it go, wisely.”
“Newark has joined an ever-growing list of cities that are abandoning this wasteful approach,” he said. NSSF maintains what it calls the Municipal Litigation Scorecard on its website that keeps an update on the disposition of these cases. Mehalik estimated that the suits have already cost the industry about $150 million.
Gunmakers and the NSSF have taken to calling these legal actions “junk lawsuits.” Mehalik said the recent attempt to pass federal legislation barring such lawsuits was misrepresented by opponents of the bill. He said the bill would not have prevented legitimate lawsuits against gunmakers for making defective products. It was, he said, an attempt to open the door to tort reform.