Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the Federal District Court in Boston dismissed Mexico’s lawsuit [against US gun makers], saying it was barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a 2005 law that prohibits many kinds of suits against makers and distributors of firearms. The law, Judge Saylor wrote, “bars exactly this type of action from being brought in federal and state courts.”
But a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, revived the suit, saying that it qualified for an exception to the law, which authorizes claims for knowing violations of firearms laws that are a direct cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.
Judge William J. Kayatta Jr., writing for the panel, stressed that the case was at an early stage, one in which Mexico’s description of the defendants’ activities must be credited. “We conclude,” the judge wrote, “that the complaint adequately alleges that defendants aided and abetted the knowingly unlawful downstream trafficking of their guns into Mexico.”
In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the gun makers said that “Mexico’s suit has no business in an American court.” Mexico’s legal theory, they added, was an “eight-step Rube Goldberg, starting with the lawful production and sale of firearms in the United States and ending with the harms that drug cartels inflict on the Mexican government.”
“Absent this court’s intervention,” the gun makers’ petition continued, “Mexico’s multibillion-dollar suit will hang over the American firearms industry for years, inflicting costly and intrusive discovery at the hands of a foreign sovereign that is trying to bully the industry into adopting a host of gun-control measures that have been repeatedly rejected by American voters.”
— Adam Liptak in Supreme Court to Decide Whether Mexico Can Sue U.S. Gun Makers
This suit has no business going forward. In fact, the Mexican government is pretty obviously corrupt. After dismissal, the Mexican government should required to pay ALL court costs and lawyers fees. What should also happen is the suspension of all aid, any weapons purchases, and near closure of the border. Exceptions should be for produce and automotive for US manufacturers.
“This suit has no business going forward.”
And it won’t under the current court make-up.
What ought to scare the crap out of every American gun person is that an AMERICAN court said it COULD go forward :
“But a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, revived the suit, saying that it qualified for an exception to the law, which authorizes claims for knowing violations of firearms laws that are a direct cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.”
Under a court selected by Hillary Clinton, care to speculate how the SCotUS would rule?
Trump being elected saved the American gun industry…