In 1999, when the rest of the country was fretting over the potential Y2K disruption of worldwide computer systems, the City of Gary, Indiana launched its lawsuit against handgun manufacturers, retailers and a wholesaler, raising claims of public nuisance, negligent design, negligent distribution, marketing and failure to warn, all aimed at making the firearm industry liable for harm allegedly resulting from the unlawful and reckless use of guns.
The case was one of dozens of substantially similar actions filed by local governments, supported by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and gun control group Brady, seeking to hold firearms manufacturers and local retailers liable under state tort law and eventually, bankrupt them out of business.
Prompted by this onslaught of gun control lawfare, a bipartisan Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) in 2005, a law that essentially codifies longstanding tort law principles of remoteness, proximate cause, and duty of care (that a defendant has no duty to prevent the criminal, intentional, or reckless behavior of a third party absent a special relationship between the defendant and either the injured party or the third party). As the preamble to the law itself points out, these liability actions “are based on theories without foundation in hundreds of years of the common law and jurisprudence of the United States,” and the “possibility of imposing liability on an entire industry for harm that is solely caused by others is an abuse of the legal system, erodes public confidence in our Nation’s laws, threatens the diminution of a basic constitutional right and civil liberty, invites the disassembly and destabilization of other industries and economic sectors lawfully competing in the free enterprise system of the United States, and constitutes an unreasonable burden on interstate and foreign commerce of the United States.”
The defendants in the Gary litigation raised the PLCAA as a defense, but the trial court concluded that the law was unconstitutional and the appellate court declined to overrule based on different grounds. Meanwhile, the Indiana General Assembly amended its own state-level version of the PLCAA (the immunity law) to read that as of August 1999, a person could not bring or maintain an action against the gun industry for lawful activities related to firearm and ammunition design, manufacturing, marketing and sales. In 2018, the court dismissed Gary’s lawsuit based on both the state immunity law and the PLCAA, which set off a fresh round of appeals and wrangling over the validity and applicability of these laws.
By 2025, six mayors and over a quarter century’s worth of taxpayer dollars later, Gary’s litigation was the last still-active municipal lawsuit. Now, it looks to be over.
On December 29, a unanimous Indiana Court of Appeals remanded the case to a lower court with instructions to dismiss after finding that a 2024 Indiana law barred the City from proceeding.
The law, HB 1235 (the reservation statute, codified as Ind. Code § 34-12-3.5-3), generally provides that only the State of Indiana may bring or maintain an action by or on behalf of a municipality or other political subdivision against a firearm or ammunition manufacturer, trade association, seller, or dealer concerning the listed matters, and it applies retroactively to any such “action or suit filed by a political subdivision before, after, or on August 27, 1999.” A political subdivision, the law emphasizes, “may not independently bring or maintain” any such action.
The Indiana Court of Appeals rejected the City’s arguments of “a legislative end-run around existing litigation” and found the legislature had expressly authorized the retroactive application. The City, being a political subdivision of the state, was “unique as compared to private citizens” as it “serve[d] but as an agency or instrumentality in the hands of the legislature to carry out its will in regard to local governmental functions.” The reservation statute was exactly that: “a substantive law that falls squarely within the legislative prerogative to determine public policy. It reconsolidates in the state authority that the legislature had previously delegated to political subdivisions.”
Further, the City held no “vested rights” that prevented the application of the reservation statute, as there could be no vesting of rights without a final unreviewable judgment or even a judgment on the substantive merits in the case. In the meantime, “as Defendants put it, the City is not ‘entitled to have the law as it existed in 1999 (or 2001) frozen in time for the duration of the lawsuit.’”
The litigation chalks up another victory this year against misconceived and baseless lawsuits aimed at the gun industry. In June, the United States Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that the PLCAA barred a lawsuit brought against seven American gun manufacturers by the Government of Mexico. The theory of liability in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos was that the companies “aided and abetted” the trafficking of their guns into Mexico by failing to prevent illegal sales that “funnel firearms to the cartels.” In her concurring opinion, Justice Jackson explained Mexico’s entire claim boiled down to an allegation that “firearms-industry wide practices—though lawful on their own—facilitated dealers’ unspecified downstream violations,” without tethering the claim to alleged statutory breaches. The lawsuit was “precisely what Congress passed PLCAA to prevent.”
Predictably, anti-gun activists and politicians have focused their attacks on the PLCAA. Former President Joe Biden repeatedly called repealing the law his “top priority,” and his administration collaborated with state Attorneys General on strategies for using state liability laws to undermine the PLCAA. The recent Indiana ruling likely represents the final chapter of this particular saga of gun control activism, but it certainly isn’t the end of weaponizing the courts and the legislatures against the Second Amendment.
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