Judge Dismisses DC Suit Against Gun Firms
The District of Columbia’s lawsuit against gun manufacturers was dismissed on May 22 by a DC Superior Court judge who ruled that the suit was precisely the sort of claim that the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was intended to block.
The Washington Post reported that in a 37-page opinion, Judge Brook Hedge wrote that the city and the federal government had two competing policies, and only one could prevail.
The DC Council, she wrote, had determined that assault weapons have “little or no social benefit but at the same time pernicious consequences for the health and safety of District residents and visitors.” Congress, however, “has trumped local law by passing legislation to protect the profits of such manufacturers,” she wrote.
The suit—District of Columbia v. Beretta USA Corp. et al—filed in 2000 by the city of Washington and by victims of gun violence and their families, aimed to hold gun manufacturers strictly liable for the flow of firearms into the District and for the carnage created by the sale of illegal weapons.
Gun-related violence is a chronic problem in the city, nourished by a steady supply of illegally obtained guns brought into the city by criminals who have no fear of meeting defensive arms in the hands of city residents. Under DC law, only the police are allowed to have firearms.
The city’s attempt to use the strict liability law to blame the industry for its perennial murder problems faced formidable challenges in the courts and on Capitol Hill.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, signed by President Bush in October after winning easy House and Senate approval, enacted broad liability protections for the country’s gun industry.
Gunmakers and trade groups say the industry has been made a scapegoat for lax law enforcement and the actions of criminals, The Post noted.
The suit filed by the District and gun violence victims was among the most aggressive of many such suits filed across the country. As with many of those suits, it claimed that the manufacturers create a public nuisance with their products and were conducting business with little regard for the risks their products created.
But the DC suit went a step further, arguing that under a 1990 District law, the manufacturer, dealer or importer of an “assault weapon” or machinegun can be held liable for damages arising from an injury or death that results from the discharge of a firearm in the District.
In 2002, DC Superior Court Judge Cheryl M. Long threw out the lawsuit, rejecting the nuisance and negligence claims and concluding that a 1990 statute, the Assault Weapon Manufacturing Strict Liability Act, was unconstitutional. In 2004, a three-judge panel of the DC Court of Appeals upheld much of Long’s ruling but said the city could sue under the strict liability statute. In April 2005, the full Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, sending the case back to Superior Court.
After the new liability protections for the gun industry were enacted in 2005, manufacturers petitioned Superior Court to dismiss the suit. The plaintiffs countered that their suit met an exception in the new federal law and that the law was unconstitutional in any event.
Hedge rejected those legal arguments.
“The court is faced with a classic tension between two elected branches of different governments, two equally clear legislative judgments, but each enforcing opposite policies,” Hedge wrote.
“At bottom,” she said, the federal law was enacted “to prohibit the very types of lawsuits the Strict Liability Act allows.”
And unless she was persuaded that the federal law was unconstitutional—which she was not—the federal law would prevail, she wrote.
The DC attorney general’s office and Wilmer Hale, the firm that is the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said on May 22 that they are weighing whether to appeal the ruling to the DC Court of Appeals.
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