Mexico's attempt to extort $10 billion from a group of U.S. gun manufacturers ended Wednesday when a court ruled that the country lacked jurisdiction.
Judge Dennis Saylor, a Harvard Law School graduate who served as a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judge before being appointed by then-President George W. Bush to serve as a district judge in Massachusetts in 2004, declared that foreign governments lacked sufficient jurisdiction to make this claim.
The original lawsuit
The original lawsuit was filed by Mexico (officially the United Mexican States) in 2021. It alleged that U.S. gun manufacturers were to blame for Mexico's horrific murder rate (five times that of the U.S.), and that gun makers like Smith & Wesson, Barrett Firearms, Beretta, Colt, and Glock purposefully designed and marketed their products to make them appealing to Mexican drug cartels. At the time, Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and gun control expert, called the lawsuit “a long shot.”
Mexico filed suit in Boston, an anti-gun city in an anti-gun state. The court likely reflected that viewpoint. The judge ruled, “The court has considerable sympathy for the Mexican people, but none for those who smuggle guns to Mexican criminal organizations. However, it is the court's duty to follow the law.”
The “law” in question is the Protect Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a safeguard that Congress enacted in 2005 to prevent unfair and costly lawsuits like this one from bankrupting the gun manufacturing industry. The law specifically “prohibits the bringing of civil liability actions against manufacturers for damages resulting from the misuse of their products by others.”
But Mexico appealed, and Saylor's ruling was overturned. The appeals court said there were exceptions to the PLCAA, and that gun manufacturers could be held liable for “criminal conduct.” Lawyers for the gun manufacturers appealed the ruling in a different way: They argued that Mexico did not have jurisdiction to bring the lawsuit in Massachusetts.
Latest ruling
From Wednesday's ruling:
The central jurisdictional issue is whether the claims against the six Mexican defendants (firearms manufacturers and dealers) “arise out of” commerce in Massachusetts….
As for the defendant (Mexico), the connection between this matter and Massachusetts is tenuous at best: the Mexican government is expressly not a citizen of Massachusetts.
None of the six defendants in the complaint are incorporated in Massachusetts, and none of them have their principal place of business in Massachusetts.
There is no evidence that these companies have manufacturing facilities or even sales offices in Massachusetts.
None of the alleged injuries occurred in Massachusetts.
No Massachusetts residents were reportedly injured.
Plaintiffs also have not identified the specific firearm or set of firearms sold in Massachusetts that caused the injuries in Mexico.
That should have been the end of the matter.
But the justices considered the evidence, or lack thereof, that compelled them to reach that conclusion in case Mexico wants to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Plaintiffs argue that the Court has personal jurisdiction over the six defendants because the defendants sold firearms to resellers in Massachusetts and, through allegedly unlawful distribution practices, smuggled some of those firearms into Mexico for criminal use.
Each of the six defendants argues that the plaintiffs have not shown that their Massachusetts business activities were the reason for the alleged damages (“Without X, would Y have occurred?”), as required by Massachusetts' Long Arm statute, nor have they shown that those activities were sufficiently “related to” the claims set forth in the complaint, as required by constitutional due process.
Mexico argued that:
The complaint alleges that “some or all” of the six plaintiff defendants sold weapons to individual dealers in Massachusetts and that some of the weapons sold by those dealers (though not necessarily supplied by the six defendants) were illegally smuggled into Mexico.
Plaintiffs have not presented any specific evidence to support their claims….
Absent such a connection, there is no basis for asserting personal jurisdiction under Massachusetts' long-range weapons statute….
Thus, plaintiffs have not met their burden of presenting a specific and plausible allegation, or concrete evidence, that the claims at issue arose out of transactions in Massachusetts by the six plaintiff defendants.
Therefore, the requirements of the long arm law are not met….
For the foregoing reasons, Defendants Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Inc., Beretta USA Corp., Century International Arms, Inc., Colt's Manufacturing Company, LLC, Glock, Inc., and Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc.'s motion to dismiss the action for lack of personal jurisdiction under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(2) is GRANTED.
The case shows the extent to which gun control opponents in the U.S., and their outside backers in places like Mexico, are prepared to damage and ultimately eliminate the country's private gun manufacturing industry. The ruling is a favorable decision in one skirmish in the long-running fight against private gun ownership.
But the outcome of that long war remains in doubt.
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