Supreme Court appears to lean into gun industry in latest lawsuit

Yet again, a Second Amendment case has come before the Supreme Court, and I doubt people on the left are going to be very happy about it.

This time, the fight comes from the Mexican government, which is trying to put the blame for Cartel violence on American gun manufacturers.

This is yet another major challenge to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which offers broad protections for gun manufacturers, and it is a law that gun activists have been trying to repeal virtually since its inception.

The Challenge

The Court did not seem very receptive to the Mexican government’s challenge, citing the failure of previous challenges to the PLCAA.

For instance, Justice Clarence Thomas, who I can assure you will fall in favor of gun manufacturers, asked, “How is your suit different from the types of suits that prompted the passage of PLCAA?”

Even liberal Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown appeared to resist the challenge, stating, “I’m just wondering whether the PLCAA statute itself is telling us that we don’t want the courts to be the ones to be crafting remedies that amount to regulation on this industry. That was really the point of the entire thing.

“And so to the extent that we’re now reading an exception to allow the very thing that the statute seems to preclude, I’m concerned about that.”

The justices also pushed back on the overall vagueness of the suit in terms of who should actually be held accountable. For instance, Justice Barrett stated, “You haven’t sued any of the retailers that were the most proximate cause of the harm.”

Justice Kagan added, “What you don’t have is particular dealers, right? ‘It’s a pretty — there’s a lot of dealers, and you’re just saying some of them do. But which some of them? I mean, who are they aiding and abetting in this complaint?”

From the outside looking in, and again, I am not a legal expert, but the case seems pretty thin to try to link manufacturers to downstream dealers who are allegedly selling weapons illegally.

This is far from the first time someone has come after the protections of the PLCAA, but to me, it just seems one of the weakest attempts to get by the legislation.

It would not surprise me one bit to find out gun activists were backing the suit, hoping that the weight of a foreign government would swing the Court in their favor. If anything, it seems to have united the Court.