Supreme Court must decide whether Mexico can sue US weapons manufacturers

The Supreme Court on Friday decided to decide whether Mexico can sue gun manufacturers in the United States for aiding the trafficking of weapons used by drug cartels.

Mexico indicted seven weapons manufacturers and one distributor in 2021, accusing them of rampant violence caused by illegal arms trafficking from the United States, spurred by drug cartels’ demand for military-style weapons.

“For decades, the government and its citizens have been victims of a deadly flood of military and other particularly lethal weapons flowing across the border from the U.S.,” the Mexican lawsuit said, adding that the resulting carnage was “the foreseeable outcome of the defendants’ intentional acts and business practices.”

Mexico has strict gun control laws that it says make it virtually impossible for criminals to legally obtain firearms. According to the lawsuit, the gun store issues fewer than 50 permits per year. But gun violence is widespread.

The lawsuit, which seeks billions of dollars in damages, alleges that 70 to 90 percent of guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico came from the United States and that gun dealers in border states sold twice as many firearms as dealers in other parts of the country. country.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the Federal District Court in Boston dismissed the Mexican lawsuit, saying it was barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a 2005 law that bans many types of lawsuits against makers and distributors of firearms. The law, Judge Saylor wrote, “prohibits precisely these types of lawsuits from being brought in federal and state courts.”

But a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston revived the case, saying it qualified for an exception to the law, which allows claims for knowing violations of firearms laws that be a direct cause. of the plaintiff’s injuries.

Judge William J. Kayatta Jr., writing for the panel, emphasized that the case was in its early stages where the Mexican description of the defendants’ activities should be recognized. “We conclude,” the judge wrote, “that the complaint adequately alleges that defendants knowingly aided and abetted the unlawful downstream trade of their weapons into Mexico.”

While urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the gunmakers said that “Mexico’s lawsuit has nothing to do with a U.S. court.” Mexico’s legal theory, they added, was an “eight-step Rube Goldberg, starting with the legal production and sale of firearms in the United States and ending with the damage drug cartels are doing to the Mexican government.”

“Without intervention from this court,” the gun manufacturers’ petition continued, “Mexico’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit will hang over the U.S. firearms industry for years, forcing costly and intrusive discovery by a foreign sovereign seeking to bully the industry. passing a host of gun control measures that have been repeatedly rejected by American voters.”

In response, Mexico said the defendants were complicit in mass violence.

“The flow of petitioners’ firearms from sources in the United States to cartels in Mexico is not a coincidence,” the Mexican letter said. “It is the result of petitioners’ conscious and conscious choice to supply their products to bad actors, to permit reckless and unlawful practices that fuel the crime weapons pipeline, and to design and market their products in ways that the petitioners intend to increase demand among the cartels.”

In August, Judge Saylor dismissed the Mexican case against six of the defendants on various grounds, meaning the Supreme Court’s decision in the case will impact the claims against Smith & Wesson, a gun manufacturer, and Interstate Arms, a wholesaler.

The case, Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, No. 23-1141, is one of 13 the court added to its docket Friday following the justices’ annual “long conference” on Monday, where they heard hundreds of petitions were considering reviews that had piled up during their summer vacation. The new court term starts on Monday.

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