By Jonathan Stempel
June 15 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court turned away on Monday a gun industry challenge to a New York law that permits lawsuits against gun makers, wholesalers and dealers for endangering people’s safety through sales of firearms and ammunition.
The justices declined to hear an appeal by an industry trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, of a lower court’s ruling upholding the law, which New York calls a public nuisance statute. The group had argued that the law unconstitutionally conflicted with federal law.
Gun companies including Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Beretta, Glock, Sig Sauer and Sturm joined the appeal.
The Supreme Court in 2025 spared Smith & Wesson from a lawsuit by Mexico’s government accusing the company of aiding illegal gun trafficking to drug cartels.
The New York law, signed by former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2021, requires the gun industry to use reasonable safeguards to protect against gun trafficking, theft and the use of “straw purchasers” who buy firearms for someone else. It allows civil lawsuits by New York state and local officials as well as members of the public.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation said the law was preempted by a 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that shields the gun industry from civil liability when its products are used in crimes.
Under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, federal laws take precedence over state laws that conflict with them.
The Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld New York’s law last year.
Circuit Judge Eunice Lee, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, wrote that Congress intended to preserve “at least some causes of action” when a defendant’s knowing violation of federal or state firearms sales and marketing laws was a proximate cause of harm.
Concurring, Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs, an appointee of Republican former President George H.W. Bush, agreed that the New York law was not preempted, but accused state lawmakers of having “contrived a broad public nuisance statute that applies solely to gun industry members and is enforceable by a mob of public and private actors.”
‘CRUSHING’ LIABILITY
The appeal did not hinge on the Constitution’s Second Amendment protections of the right to keep and bear arms. But the trade group said laws such as New York’s imperil such rights by allowing lawsuits that could saddle companies with “crushing liability” for crimes they had nothing to do with.
“This Court’s review is sorely needed to ensure that states hostile to Second Amendment rights cannot frustrate their exercise by trying to bankrupt the licensed (and heavily regulated) industry members that make the exercise of those constitutional rights possible,” it told the justices.
The group also said the so-called “predicate exception” in the federal law at issue subjected the industry to liability only for failures to comply with specific obligations or prohibitions within its control.
“The decision below blows a gaping hole in a statute that Congress enacted for the express purpose of protecting the firearms industry from exactly the kinds of lawsuits New York seeks to usher back in,” the group said, referring to the 2nd Circuit ruling.
SUPREME COURT PRECEDENT
New York called the ruling consistent with the Supreme Court decision in the Mexico case, and that the predicate exception allowed liability for some “downstream acts” of third parties.
It also said at least nine states have passed laws to satisfy the exception, and the Supreme Court should let challenges wend through the courts rather than declare New York’s law unconstitutional in every respect.
The gun industry appeal was supported in filings by the National Rifle Association, 24 Republican state attorneys general and several dozen Republican members of Congress.
The Supreme Court has expanded gun rights in three major decisions since 2008, when it found that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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