The Gun Industry Is Beginning to Lose Immunity From the Violence It Fuels

The morning after a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, left four people dead and nine injured, members of the Georgia Senate Study Committee on Safe Firearm Storage gathered to discuss potential gun control legislation. The timing was a chilling coincidence; the committee had already been scheduled to meet prior to September 4, when 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle, killing two students and two teachers.

The tragedy at Apalachee High School — the 45th school shooting this year and the deadliest since March 2023 — has sparked renewed calls for legislation to address the U.S.’s gun violence epidemic. Georgia has some of the weakest gun laws in the country, including allowing residents to open carry guns without permits and purchase firearms without background checks. However, as is all too common in discussions about gun control in the United States, much of the conversation in recent weeks has been focused on solving the gun violence crisis through increased criminalization. This is not the way forward.

For those of us who support prison abolition, criminal legal solutions to the gun violence crisis can often feel like a double bind by attempting to reduce gun violence with increased state violence. But to tackle the crisis, we don’t have to embrace intensified policing or prosecution of gun owners, which will often disproportionately harm and be used to target people of color. In 2020, for instance, a group of public defenders found that 78 percent of felony gun possession cases in New York State involved Black defendants, despite Black people making up only roughly 12 percent of the population. Only 7 percent of cases involved white defendants.

Fortunately, we can turn to a recent wave of state legislation and civil lawsuits, which have taken aim at the firearms industry for its role in the gun violence crisis.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, individuals impacted by gun violence in more than 30 cities were suing the gun industry for damages and improved safety standards. That all changed when lobbying from the gun industry led Congress to pass the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) in 2005. For decades, the PLCAA has shielded gun manufacturers and dealers from most civil lawsuits targeting their culpability in acts of violence committed with their firearms.

But the tide is now turning. The PLCAA includes carve-outs for violations of state laws, and more and more states are passing new laws that aim to hold gun manufacturers and dealers accountable for the destruction caused by their weapons. In a pivotal win in 2019, the Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit against Remington Arms Co., brought by nine families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, to proceed. Settling in February 2022 for $73 million, that suit successfully argued that Remington had violated Connecticut law by irresponsibly marketing its firearms to young boys.

At least nine states have now enacted laws that undermine gun industry immunity from civil lawsuits. New York was the first in 2021, passing a law that allows firearm sellers, manufactures and distributors to be sued for creating a “public nuisance.” The following year, after a white supremacist shot and killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket, the City of Buffalo sued the gun manufacturers Beretta, Smith & Wesson, Glock, Remington and Bushmaster, alleging they had fueled the violence. In California, two laws were enacted in 2022 that explicitly authorized lawsuits against the industry, and Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, Hawaii and Colorado soon followed suit with similar laws on the books. Most recently, on June 1 of this year, a law went into effect in Maryland that sets a minimum standard for the firearm industry to prevent harm and similarly enables “public nuisance” civil litigation against gun manufacturers and distributors.

This legal strategy has a precedent. As the leading cause of death of children and teens in the United States, gun violence is a public health crisis, and it should be addressed as such. Gun safety advocates point out that similar lawsuits have been successful against other major industries for their roles in public health epidemics, including Big Tobacco and the opioid industry. That the gun industry has been protected from such litigation for so long is exceptional.

And these efforts are beginning to stretch across the United States border: This March, a U.S. appeals court revived a $10 billion lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against American gunmakers. The suit alleges that the negligent practices of seven gun manufacturers and one distributor facilitated the trafficking of guns from the United States to Mexican gun cartels. On August 7, a judge dismissed Mexico’s claims against six of the eight companies.

Of course, retroactive financial settlements won’t reverse the trauma of gun violence, nor does such litigation directly prevent a shooting from occurring in the first place. But it may dissuade gun manufacturers from aggressively marketing their products in fear of future settlements. And it is encouraging that some states are beginning to reckon with the industry itself for its role in abetting the gun violence crisis. Other bills are now cropping up: In May, New York lawmakers introduced first-of-its-kind legislation aimed at prohibiting the sale of semiautomatic pistols produced by the gun manufacturer Glock, which can easily be modified into machine guns, as well as requiring that other manufacturers’ handguns cannot be turned into machine guns.

As other states consider gun control measures, we must continue to push for enhanced industry accountability. Meanwhile, we should continue to look to examples of community-based alternatives to the criminal legal system, such as Save Our Streets and Man Up!, which are with noncarceral interventions.