The United States stands out from other countries in various aspects. One distinct feature is a constitutional amendment, which forms part of the Bill of Rights and serves as the safeguard for the others: The Second Amendment.
The right to own and carry firearms, as acknowledged in the Second Amendment, has sparked numerous debates, legal battles, legislative actions, and disputes. To address this, Congress enacted the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005. This legislation has often been misconstrued as shielding gun manufacturers and sellers from accountability. However, they remain liable for any defects in design or production, similar to the responsibility borne by manufacturers of any other lawful product. The key protection offered by the Act is immunity from lawsuits arising from the criminal misuse of their products, which presents a distinct legal challenge.
This week, the Second Amendment and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act will be tested in the United States Supreme Court as Mexico brings forth a lawsuit challenging these provisions.
That’s right. The government of Mexico is suing the makers of a perfectly lawful product in America due to their inability to deal with Mexico’s horrendous crime rate.
Mexico is seeking billions of dollars from seven major U.S. gun makers and one gun wholesaler to recover costs related to gun violence and to stop the marketing and trafficking of illegal guns to Mexico. But the gun makers counter that the lawsuit “challenges how the American firearms industry has openly operated in broad daylight for years.”
Tuesday’s case is the first test before the high court of a federal law enacted in 2005 to protect the gun industry. The law includes a key carve-out that allows lawsuits when the harm at issue stems from a gun manufacturer’s knowing violation of U.S. laws.
Here’s the onion:
Mexico has very strict gun laws that make it almost impossible for criminals to obtain a gun legally there. There is only one gun store in the whole country, and the government issues fewer than 50 gun permits per year. But Mexico ranks third in the world in the number of gun-related deaths. In 2021, 69% of homicides were committed with a gun. Mexico contends that as many as 70 to 90% of the guns that police recover at crime scenes in the country were trafficked into Mexico from the United States.
Mexico contends that – but doesn’t mention the astounding amount or actual military-grade hardware in the hands of the cartels, including machine guns, grenade launchers, and land mines:
There are 2nd- or 3rd-generation, fully automatic, belt-fed .50 caliber machine guns, World War II-era German MG 34 machine guns, rocket-propelled shoulder-fired grenade launchers, 40 mm rifle grenade launchers, and (reputedly) FGM 148 Javelin infrared-guided missile launchers—known as the most sophisticated shoulder-fired missile launcher in the world, with a range of a mile and a half—and Claymore M18A1 land mines. There are retired Israeli-made Galil ACE rifles, manufactured in Colombia as the official weapon for Mexican and Colombian law enforcement. And there are hand grenades made for militaries all over the world.
“That sh*t is not coming from the United States. You can’t get those weapons systems from American gun stores,” said retired Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence Captain Jaeson Jones, a Newsmax border correspondent and longtime student of Mexico’s cartels. “No one will ever talk about this, but those are coming from corruption in the Mexican military from their armories. Blaming the U.S. 24/7/365 isn’t going to cut it anymore today. The cartels are in a new world.”
None of those came from American gun dealers.
