I love it when activist judge with a political agenda get slapped by SCOTUS and have to publicly reverse themselves.<\/p>\n
Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Blaming Gun Company for Mass Shooting<\/a><\/p>\n A Brady-backed lawsuit against Century Arms blaming a Romanian gun company and a U.S. firearms distributor for the 2019 mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California has finally been dismissed by a federal judge, almost a year after he ruled the case could move forward.<\/p>\n U.S. District Judge William Sessions refused to dismiss the suit in late 2024, arguing that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act didn’t shield Romarm S.A. and Century Arms because the plaintiffs had “plausibly pled an aiding and abetting\u00a0theory that satisfied the predicate exception to PLCAA\u2019s\u00a0liability bar.”<\/p>\n The predicate exception, according to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in\u00a0Smith & Wesson v. Mexcio<\/em>, requires that defendants\u00a0\u201cknowingly violated a State or\u00a0Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing\u201d of\u00a0firearms, and the violation \u201cwas a proximate cause of the\u00a0harm for which relief is sought.”<\/p>\n The plaintiffs in the case stemming from the Garlic Festival shooting had argued that Romarm and Century Arms\u00a0had aided and abetted the shooter’s\u00a0illegal gun\u00a0possession in California by selling the WASR-10 that was used in the attack in states where the arm is perfectly legal to own.<\/p>\n Sessions originally accepted that claim under the dubious reasoning that the defendants “knew that California-based criminals\u00a0were buying guns in Nevada with the illegal intent of\u00a0transporting them into California,” yet “flooded\u00a0the Nevada market with guns and employed marketing and\u00a0pricing strategies with the intent of encouraging or\u00a0facilitating such transport, not merely with indifference\u00a0that such transport occurs,” which in turn “aided\u00a0the commission of illegal gun possession in California.”<\/p>\n But in\u00a0Smith & Wesson v. Mexico<\/em>, the Supreme Court stated that any aiding-and-abetting claims that aren’t based on a specific violation of state or federal law “must be backed by plausible allegations of\u00a0pervasive, systemic, and culpable assistance.\u201d After that decision was handed down Romarm and Century Arms asked Sessions to reconsider his decision, and now the judge has\u00a0reversed himself<\/a>\u00a0and dismissed the case. The issue for reconsideration, in light of\u00a0Smith and\u00a0Wesson<\/em>, is that none of those findings are particular to the specific incident in this case. The shooter was a Nevada resident at the time of purchase, so his purchase was presumptively legal. Plaintiffs have not alleged with any specificity that Defendants advertised or marketed their products in any way that encouraged the shooter to take his legally purchased firearm across the border to California where it would be illegally possessed. <\/span><\/p>\n The oversupply argument similarly fails, as applied to the shooter, because he was a Nevada resident. No matter how many surplus guns were distributed in Nevada beyond what the Nevada market could bear, the fact that the Plaintiff was a part of the Nevada market who was not engaged in some sort of broader trafficking scheme is a flaw in that reasoning. <\/span><\/p>\n Put another way, the firearm at the center of this case was not part of an excess supply allegedly flooded into Nevada with the goal of attracting California residents for the simple reason that the shooter was a Nevada resident. So, while Defendants\u2019 act in manufacturing the firearm and marketing it in Nevada may have aided the commission of some illegal gun possession in California, it does not follow, on the facts pled, that they aided the shooter\u2019s illegal gun possession in California \u201cbeyond providing the good on the open market.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It seems to me that Sessions could and should have dismissed the case even before SCOTUS handed down its unanimous decision throwing out Mexico’s lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and other U.S. gunmakers, but the fact that he allowed the case to move forward under such specious claims just demonstrates the importance of the Supreme Court’s decision that helped lay out the scope of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act’s protections.<\/strong><\/p>\n Sessions, a Clinton appointee who’s served on the bench since 1995, still argued in dismissing the case that “it may well be true” that “Defendants\u2019 acts aided the commission of illegal gun possession\u00a0<\/span>in California\u201d in other instances, but the plaintiffs haven’t plausibly proved that to be the case here. That statement was completely superfluous and unnecessary, and appears to telegraph Session’s willingness to punish companies in the firearms industry for the third-party actions of criminals whenever possible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In this case, thankfully, Sessions couldn’t get around the plain language of the Supreme Court’s opinion in\u00a0Smith & Wesson v. Mexico.\u00a0<\/em>If it weren’t for that unanimous decision penned by Justice Elena Kagan, though, Brady’s junk lawsuit would still be an ongoing threat to the lawful commerce in arms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love it when activist judge with a political agenda get slapped by SCOTUS and have to publicly reverse themselves. Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Blaming Gun Company for Mass Shooting A Brady-backed lawsuit against Century Arms blaming a Romanian gun company and a U.S. firearms distributor for the 2019 mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,23,11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-courts","category-crap-for-brains","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112556,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112555\/revisions\/112556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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