(NewsNation) — The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday on whether the country of Mexico can proceed with a lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers, accusing them of fueling violence caused by drug cartels that use American firearms.
For the first time, the case asks the nation’s highest court to consider the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA. The law was passed in 2005, and gives immunity to gun makers so they can’t be held liable for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons.
The case came to the Supreme Court on the same day President Donald Trump put into effect tariffs on Mexico to put pressure on the nation to stop fentanyl trafficking and illegal immigration.
The outcome of the case could have significant impacts in the U.S. depending on how the court rules, Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, told NewsNation.
“I don’t think this is going to sort of cut off these types of lawsuits, but depending on how the court decides and what language majority opinion uses, it could make lower courts a little bit more skeptical of these claims across the board,” he said.
In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to consider a gun manufacturer’s argument that PLCAA prohibited the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims from suing.
But this ruling could make that harder if the court rules more broadly, Willinger said.
Why is Mexico suing US gun companies?
Mexico filed a $10 billion suit against leading U.S. gun manufacturers in 2021 over allegations that their practices facilitated illegal gun trafficking to Mexican drug cartels, causing violence and bloodshed in the nation.
In its filing, the government of Mexico stated that it has only one gun store, issues less than 50 gun permits a year and that about 70% of all guns recovered from Mexican crime scenes come from the US.
Mexico argues the companies knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to cash in on that market.
The defendants include big-name manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Colt and Glock.
They “deliberately sell their guns through dealers who are known to disproportionately sell firearms that are recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. They provide these red-flag dealers with the firearms that Petitioners know cartels prefer, designing and marketing those firearms in ways they know cater to the cartels. They embrace distribution practices they know enable these red-flag dealers to illegally sell to cartel traffickers. And they intentionally do all this to boost their bottom lines,” Mexico wrote in one of its filings.
The gun companies say Mexico has not shown the industry has purposely done anything to allow the weapons to be used by cartels and is trying to “bully” gunmakers into adopting gun-control measures.
Those companies argued that the lawsuit was barred by the PLCAA, which prohibits certain lawsuits against gun manufacturers.
“When the manufacturer or supplier of a lawful product simply puts its product in the general stream of commerce, the aiding-and-abetting statute does not charge that business with broadly policing every bad actor who may pick up its products downstream,” they wrote in filings.
How did the lower courts rule?
The lawsuit was initially dismissed by a district court that cited legal protections for gun makers from damages resulting from criminal use of firearms.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that while the PLCAA does apply to lawsuits by foreign governments for harm suffered abroad, Mexico’s lawsuit falls within the law’s “predicate exception,” which allows lawsuits when gun companies knowingly broke the law.
The gun makers are asking the Supreme Court to undo the appeal court ruling.
“Mexico has extinguished its constitutional arms right and now seeks to extinguish America’s,” the National Rifle Association told the Supreme Court.
“I suspect that the court is going to side with the gun manufacturers here,” Willinger said, adding that it was primarily an inference from the fact that the court decided to take the case at this early stage.
“If the justices were sympathetic to Mexico’s allegations, they would look at this and say ‘we want to give the trial court a chance to see what Mexico brings forward,’ but the fact that they didn’t signals that they likely have issues with the appeals court ruling,” he said.
What are the implications of the case for Americans?
The words used by the court will be crucial, Willinger said.
The families of the Sandy Hook victims were able to sue a gun company under an exception to PLCAA, eventually settling with the manufacturer that made shooter Adam Lanza’s assault weapon for $73 million in 2022.
While the violations alleged were different in the Sandy Hook case, a broad court opinion on PLCAA and how important it is could have caused cases like Sandy Hook from moving forward, he said.
“To the extent that the court is more focused on the nature of the violation, like aiding and abetting illegal sales and to what extent a gun manufacturer can be liable even when they don’t know, that could have a big impact on domestic litigation because the issue in those cases is often the same,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
