By By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a bid by U.S. gun maker Smith & Wesson and firearms wholesaler Interstate Arms to throw out Mexico’s lawsuit accusing them of aiding the illegal trafficking of firearms to Mexican drug cartels.
The justices took up an appeal by the two companies of a lower court’s refusal to dismiss Mexico’s suit, which was filed in federal court in Boston in 2021, under a 2005 U.S. law that broadly shields gun companies from liability for crimes committed with their products.
The Supreme Court is due to hear the case during its nine-month term that begins on Monday.
Mexico had originally sued seven U.S. gun manufacturers – Smith & Wesson, Barrett, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock and Ruger – as well as Interstate Arms. Six gun manufacturers later were removed from the case on procedural grounds, leaving Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms as the remaining defendants.
The nine-count complaint included allegations that the companies violated state laws by aiding and abetting the trafficking of guns to Mexican drug cartels, helping to fuel what Mexico has called an “epidemic of violence.”
The lawsuit accused the gun companies of unlawfully designing and marketing their products with the aim of driving up demand among the cartels, including by associating their “civilian” products with the U.S. military and law enforcement.
It also accused the companies of knowingly maintaining a distribution system that included firearms dealers who conspire with third-party, or “straw,” purchasers who traffic guns to cartels in Mexico.
“Defendants use this head-in-the-sand approach to deny responsibility while knowingly profiting from the criminal trade,” Mexico’s suit stated.
The estimated value of all guns trafficked from the United States into Mexico – counting those made by the defendants and other manufacturers – totaled more than $250 million annually, according to the lawsuit.
Mexico is seeking monetary damages of an unspecified amount, estimated in the billions of dollars, and a court order requiring the gun companies to take steps to “abate and remedy the public nuisance they have created in Mexico.”
A majority of the 180,000 homicides involving guns in Mexico, a country with strict firearms laws, from 2007 to 2019 were committed with weapons trafficked from the United States, according to court filings in the case.
Up to two thirds of intentional homicides in Mexico in recent years have borne signs of organized crime, including the use of high-powered weapons, multiple victims, evidence of torture and messages linked to specific criminal groups, according to a 2021 report by the University of San Diego.
According to the lawsuit, gun violence fueled by smuggled U.S.-made firearms has contributed to a decline in business investment and economic activity in Mexico, and forced its government to incur unusually high costs on services including healthcare, law enforcement and the military.
The gun companies, seeking to dismiss the suit, argued that the litigation was barred by a 2005 federal law known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects firearms manufacturers and distributors from liability for the criminal misuse of their products.
U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor in Boston sided with the companies in 2022 and threw out the case, finding that this law “seeks to prohibit exactly the type of claim that is currently before this court.”
On appeal, the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Saylor’s decision in January and ruled that the suit could proceed. The 1st Circuit found that Mexico had plausibly claimed that the U.S. gun companies “aided and abetted the knowingly unlawful downstream trafficking of their guns into Mexico,” causing injury to the government – conduct that falls outside that law’s protections.
In appealing to the Supreme Court, the companies argued that the suit seeks to “bully the industry into adopting a host of gun-control measures that have been repeatedly rejected by American voters.”