Supreme Court to Decide Whether Mexico Can Sue U.S. Gun Makers

The justices will consider whether a 2005 law that gives gun makers broad immunity applies in the case, which accuses them of complicity in supplying cartels with weapons.

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

Mexico sued seven gun makers and one distributor in 2021, blaming them for rampant violence caused by illegal gun trafficking from the United States spurred by the demand of drug cartels for military-style weapons.

“For decades, the government and its citizens have been victimized by a deadly flood of military-style and other particularly lethal guns that flows from the U.S. across the border,” Mexico’s lawsuit said, adding that the resulting carnage was “the foreseeable result of the defendants’ deliberate actions and business practices.”

Mexico has strict gun control laws that it says make it virtually impossible for criminals to obtain firearms legally. Indeed, the suit said, its single gun store issues fewer than 50 permits a year. But gun violence is rampant.

The lawsuit, which seeks billions of dollars in damages, said that 70 to 90 percent of the guns recovered at 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.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the Federal District Court in Boston dismissed Mexico’s lawsuit, saying it was barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a 2005 law that prohibits many kinds of suits against makers and distributors of firearms. The law, Judge Saylor wrote, “bars exactly this type of action 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 suit, saying that it qualified for an exception to the law, which authorizes claims for knowing violations of firearms laws that are a direct cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.

Judge William J. Kayatta Jr., writing for the panel, stressed that the case was at an early stage, one in which Mexico’s description of the defendants’ activities must be credited. “We conclude,” the judge wrote, “that the complaint adequately alleges that defendants aided and abetted the knowingly unlawful downstream trafficking of their guns into Mexico.”

In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the gun makers said that “Mexico’s suit has no business in an American court.” Mexico’s legal theory, they added, was an “eight-step Rube Goldberg, starting with the lawful production and sale of firearms in the United States and ending with the harms that drug cartels inflict on the Mexican government.”

“Absent this court’s intervention,” the gun makers’ petition continued, “Mexico’s multibillion-dollar suit will hang over the American firearms industry for years, inflicting costly and intrusive discovery at the hands of a foreign sovereign that is trying to bully the industry into adopting 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 flood of petitioners’ firearms from sources in the United States to cartels in Mexico is no accident,” Mexico’s brief said. “It results from petitioners’ knowing and deliberate choice to supply their products to bad actors, to allow reckless and unlawful practices that feed the crime-gun pipeline, and to design and market their products in ways that petitioners intend will drive up demand among the cartels.”

In August, Judge Saylor dismissed Mexico’s case against six of the defendants on different grounds, meaning that the Supreme Court’s decision in the case will affects 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 on Friday after the justices’ annual “long conference” on Monday, where they considered hundreds of petitions seeking review that had piled up over their summer break. The court’s new term starts on Monday.