The United States Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit from the government of Mexico that argued American gun manufacturers like Smith & Wesson failed to prevent illegal firearm sales to cartels and criminal organisations.
In one of a slew of decisions handed down on Thursday, the top court decided that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shielded the gun manufacturers from Mexico’s suit.
The court’s decision was unanimous. Writing for the nine-member bench, Justice Elena Kagan explained that even “indifference” to the trafficking of firearms does not amount to willfully assisting a criminal enterprise.
“Mexico’s complaint does not plausibly allege that the defendant manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers,” Kagan wrote (PDF).
“We have little doubt that, as the complaint asserts, some such sales take place — and that the manufacturers know they do. But still, Mexico has not adequately pleaded what it needs to: that the manufacturers ‘participate in’ those sales.”
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The Mexican government’s complaint, she added, “does not pinpoint, as most aiding-and-abetting claims do, any specific criminal transactions that the defendants (allegedly) assisted”.
The case stems from a complaint filed in August 2021 in a federal court in Boston, Massachusetts. In that initial complaint, the Mexican government — then led by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — argued that the sheer volume of firearms illegally smuggled into its country amounted to negligence on the part of gun manufacturers.
Those firearms, it said, had exacted a devastating toll on Mexican society. The country has some of the highest homicide rates in the world, with the United Nations estimating in 2023 that nearly 25 intentional killings happen for every 100,000 people.
Much of that crime has been credited to the presence of cartels and other criminal enterprises operating in Mexico. The Igarape Institute, a Brazil-based think tank, estimated that Mexico’s crime cost the country nearly 1.92 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) from 2010 to 2014.
The US is the largest arms manufacturer in the world — and also the largest source of illegally sourced firearms.
The stream of firearms that pour into Mexico and the broader Latin America region, for instance, has been dubbed the “iron river”. Nearly 70 percent of the illegal guns seized in Mexico from 2014 to 2018, for instance, were traced to origins in the US, according to the Department of Justice.
That has led countries like Mexico to demand action from the US to limit the number of firearms trafficked abroad.
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In its lawsuit, Mexico targeted some of the biggest names in gun manufacturing in the US: not just Smith & Wesson, but also companies like Beretta USA, Glock Inc and Colt’s Manufacturing LLC.
But the firearm companies pushed back against the lawsuit, arguing they could not be held responsible for the actions of criminals in another country.
The Supreme Court itself cast doubt on some of Mexico’s arguments, including the idea that the gun manufacturers designed and marketed their products specifically for cartel buyers.
“Mexico focuses on production of ‘military style’ assault weapons, but these products are widely legal and purchased by ordinary consumers. Manufacturers cannot be charged with assisting criminal acts simply because Mexican cartel members also prefer these guns,” Justice Kagan wrote.
“The same applies to firearms with Spanish language names or graphics alluding to Mexican history,” she added. “While they may be ‘coveted by the cartels,’ they also may appeal to ‘millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.’”
On Thursday, an industry trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision as a “tremendous victory” against an unfair charge. It had filed an amicus brief in support of the defendants in the case.
“For too long, gun control activists have attempted to twist basic tort law to malign the highly-regulated U.S. firearm industry with the criminal actions of violent organized crime, both here in the United States and abroad,” the group’s senior vice president, Lawrence G Keane, said in a statement.
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Keane added that he and others in the firearm industry felt “sympathetic to plight of those in Mexico who are victims of rampant and uncontrolled violence at the hands of narco-terrorist drug cartels”.
But he said the issue was about “responsible firearm ownership”, not the actions of gun manufacturers.