AP Photo/Augusto Zurita
The High Points:
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SCOTUS unanimously rejected Mexico’s lawsuit blaming U.S. gunmakers for cartel violence.
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The Court said Mexico provided no plausible evidence of aiding traffickers.
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Mexico’s government avoids admitting its own agencies supply many guns to cartels.
This case was a constitutional slap across the face — and a well-deserved one. Mexico and Jonathan Lowy marched their theory into the Supreme Court and got absolutely demolished, 9-0, by justices across the ideological spectrum. Elena Kagan, not exactly a favorite of the gun-rights world, wrote the opinion eviscerating their claims. That tells you how weak the case really was.
Lowy pushed the fantasy that gun manufacturers “aid and abet” cartel violence by selling ordinary, legal firearms to the American market. But when asked for actual facts — names, transactions, evidence — they had nothing. Meanwhile, investigative reporting keeps pointing to the real problem: Mexico’s own military and police legally buy U.S. firearms, then leak them into cartel hands through corruption and incompetence.
Instead of cleaning up its own mess, the Sheinbaum administration prefers to blame the United States. And activists like Lowy happily carry the water. But the Supreme Court wasn’t buying it — and neither should anyone else.
From Bearing Arms:
Jonathan Lowy managed to achieve something almost unprecedented in recent years when he and the Mexican government defended their lawsuit against major U.S. gun makers at the Supreme Court earlier this year; a unanimous 9-0 decision. In Lowy’s case, though it was a 9-0 decision declaring that Mexico’s lawsuit violates the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
The Court held that Mexico and its attorneys failed to make plausible arguments that U.S. gun makers are aiding and abetting cartel violence, and shot down their theory that gunmakers’ designs and marketing decisions are meant to appeal to cartel members and other criminals. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the Court:
Mexico focuses on production of “militarystyle” 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. The same applies to firearms with Spanish language names or graphics alluding to Mexican history—while they may be “coveted by the cartels,” they also may appeal to “millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.” Even the failure to make guns with non-defaceable serial numbers cannot show that manufacturers have “joined both mind and hand” with lawbreakers in the manner required for aiding and abetting.
You’d think that being on the receiving end of a SCOTUS scolding like that might have humbled Lowy a bit, or at least caused him to rethink the cockamamie theory he pushed.
Nope. The former Brady litigator, who now runs an outfit called Global Action on Gun Violence, teamed up with an official in the Mexican government for a new column in which they repeat their failed arguments and blame gunmakers for cartel violence; not the cartels themselves, and not the administration of Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum, who’s continued the “hugs, not bullets” strategy of her predecessor.
The complaint Mexico filed showed the world how the gun industry is part of the gun violence problem, and how it could also be part of the solution by cutting off the flow of illegal guns to criminals. It pointed out that law enforcement and even executives in their own ranks told U.S. gun manufacturers to stop supplying dealers that sell trafficked weapons. Yet an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 guns are still illegally trafficked from the United States into Mexico every year.
Although the case was clearly supported by U.S. and Mexican common law principles, and an appeals court unanimously allowed it, SCOTUS held that the case was barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a law that gives the gun industry unique protection from civil claims that would otherwise be valid in other industries.
That’s some serious revisionist history. The complaint alleged a lot of things, but it showed very little. Again, quoting from the SCOTUS opinion authored by Kagan:
Mexico’s complaint does not plausibly allege that the defendant manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers. To begin, the complaint sets for itself a high bar. It does not pinpoint, as most aiding-and-abetting claims do, any specific criminal transactions that the defendants (allegedly) assisted. Instead, it levels a more general accusation: that all the manufacturers assist some number of unidentified rogue dealers in violation of various legal bars. The systemic nature of that charge cannot help but heighten Mexico’s burden. To survive, it must be backed by plausible allegations of pervasive, systemic, and culpable assistance.
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