Mexico's Historic Lawsuit Against U.S. Gun Companies
News Licensing / MEGA
Mexico sues U.S. gun makers for billions stating "negligent practices"!
Date: February 17, 2022
In early February, the attorneys general of 12 states and Washington DC expressed support for the Mexican government’s $10 Billion lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers. The lawsuit, filed in 2021, blames U.S. manufacturers for the increase in Mexico’s gun violence and rampant trafficking across the southern border. Among the defendants are Smith & Wesson, Colt and Glock, who filed a motion to dismiss the case based on a federal law that protects gun manufacturers from lawsuits such as these.
The federal law, called the PLCAA, essentially says gun manufacturers cannot be sued for crimes committed using their guns. Makes sense, right? Your actions are your own. As are the consequences. You can’t sue General Motors if you drive drunk and kill somebody, so the same rule should apply with gun manufacturers. And yet, a coalition of attorneys general appeared in Federal Court in Massachusetts to argue against the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case.
If this sounds strange to you, that’s because it is. If it pisses you off, that’s because it should. If it confuses you, well, join the club. Why in the world an attorney general of any state would argue on behalf of a foreign power that is suing U.S. companies for making and selling a 100% legal product in the United States is bizarre. Beyond bizarre, it’s egregious when you consider the rampant corruption in Mexico and the country’s unwillingness to bring cartel members to a court of law.
They won’t arrest drug kingpins, but they will sue law-abiding U.S. companies. Another largely unspoken aspect of the story is Mexico’s draconian laws on private ownership of firearms. Guns are very hard to own legally in Mexico. So, the only people that have them are law enforcement and criminals. If it sounds like a recipe for disaster, it has been. And yet, instead of dealing with these problems, the Mexican government lobs a frivolous lawsuit at U.S. companies to deflect attention away from failures at home.
As the gun manufacturers said in a brief filed in February, this is a “clash of national values. Whereas the United States recognizes the right to keep and bear arms, Mexico has all but eliminated private ownership.” It’s baffling where this coalition of U.S. government lawyers fall with this.
It would be like if Mexican avocados were for some reason illegal in the United States. But whenever you go out you keep seeing avocado toast on the menu. ‘How are all these restaurants getting avocados when they’re illegal?’ you wonder. Then you see on the news, it seems avocados, which are legally grown and sold in Mexico, are being smuggled into the country and sold on the black market. Okay. So how do we fix this? We should probably go after the smugglers, right? And we should definitely enforce the laws already in place and stop restaurants from openly selling this illegal contraband. No. That would be too logical. What we should do, according to the top lawyers of twelve states, is sue the avocado farmer for making the product he lawfully grows and sells within his own country.
Perhaps avocados are a silly analogy. But to me, the lawsuit is silly. The fact that it’s about guns and not something else seems almost arbitrary. Really it could be about any product legally made and sold in one country, then smuggled into another. Take Cuban cigars. Perhaps, we should sue Cuban cigar makers for the illegal cigar market that exists in the states. After all, tobacco products have been known to cause cancer. Yes, I do believe I’m on to something. I’m dialing the Attorney General of Massachusetts right now.
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