Supreme Court throws out $10B Mexico lawsuit against US gun makers

Mexico can’t sue US gun manufacturers over the carnage inflicted by drug cartels because gunmakers are protected by a 2005 law that shields them from such liability, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday.

In a 9–0 decision, the high court spurned Mexico’s attempt to press forward with the $10 billion lawsuit alleging gun companies helped arm cartels that have ravaged America’s southern neighbor.

“Mexico’s complaint … does not plausibly allege such aiding and abetting,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote. “An action cannot be brought against a manufacturer if, like Mexico’s, it is founded on a third party’s criminal use of the company’s product.”

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“Recall that Congress enacted the statute to halt a flurry of lawsuits attempting to make gun manufacturers pay for the downstream harms resulting from misuse of their products.”

Defendants in the case had cited the US Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which gives gun manufacturers key liability protections. Mexico had pointed to a carveout in the law that permits lawsuits to advance if companies “knowingly violated” the law. 

“But that exception, if Mexico’s suit fell within it, would swallow most of the rule. We doubt Congress intended to draft such a capacious way out of PLCAA, and in fact it did not,” Kagan added. “The predicate exception allows for accomplice liability only when a plaintiff makes a plausible allegation.”

Mexico griped that some US gunmakers lure buyers with appeals such as pistols made with images of revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata and that they have sold firearms to straw men who turn them over to cartels. 

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The southern US neighbor had lodged the lawsuit against seven American gunmakers and a distributor in 2021.

During oral arguments in March, Supreme Court justices had sounded skeptical of Mexico’s position. 

The decision in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos comes amid tensions between the Trump administration and Mexico.

Earlier this year, Trump slapped a 25% tariff on imports from Mexico that aren’t subject to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. 

Trump claimed that the tariff, which also applies to Canada, was needed to pressure the US neighbors to do a better job of clamping down on the flow of fentanyl and illegal immigration across the border into America.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas both filed concurring opinions in the case. 

Thomas raised technical concerns about the language in the PLCAA and wanted the high court to provide more clarity about the exemption in PLCAA.

“In future cases, courts should more fully examine the meaning of ‘violation’ under the PLCAA. It seems to me that the PLCAA at least arguably requires not only a plausible allegation that a defendant has committed a predicate violation, but also an earlier finding of guilt or liability in an adjudication regarding the ‘violation,'” Thomas said.

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Jackson raised another technical point to stress that “the complaint’s core flaw is its failure to allege any nonconclusory statutory violations in the first place.”

Somewhere between 200,000 to 500,000 American-manufactured guns are estimated to flow into Mexico, and almost half of the firearms at crime scenes in Mexico were made in the US, data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives indicates.