The United States is unique among nations in many ways. One of those ways, though, lies in a constitutional amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, and it’s the part that guarantees the others: The Second Amendment.
That right to keep and bear arms, recognized in the Second Amendment, has been the focus of a lot of argument, litigation, legislation, and lawfare, so in 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. This law has been stupidy described as protecting gun manufacturers and sellers from liability, but in fact they face the same liability due to design or manufacturing flaws as the producers of any other legal item; what the act protects them from is liability for criminal use of their products, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
On Tuesday, the Second Amendment and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act will face a challenge in the United States Supreme Court, in a lawsuit brought by Mexico.
That’s right. The government of Mexico is suing the makers of a perfectly lawful product in America due to their inability to deal with Mexico’s horrendous crime rate.
Mexico is seeking billions of dollars from seven major U.S. gun makers and one gun wholesaler to recover costs related to gun violence and to stop the marketing and trafficking of illegal guns to Mexico. But the gun makers counter that the lawsuit “challenges how the American firearms industry has openly operated in broad daylight for years.”
Tuesday’s case is the first test before the high court of a federal law enacted in 2005 to protect the gun industry. The law includes a key carve-out that allows lawsuits when the harm at issue stems from a gun manufacturer’s knowing violation of U.S. laws.
Here’s the onion:
Mexico has very strict gun laws that make it almost impossible for criminals to obtain a gun legally there. There is only one gun store in the whole country, and the government issues fewer than 50 gun permits per year. But Mexico ranks third in the world in the number of gun-related deaths. In 2021, 69% of homicides were committed with a gun. Mexico contends that as many as 70 to 90% of the guns that police recover at crime scenes in the country were trafficked into Mexico from the United States.
Mexico contends that – but doesn’t mention the astounding amount or actual military-grade hardware in the hands of the cartels, including machine guns, grenade launchers, and land mines:
The equipment recovered after cartel battles, stashed in seized cartel caches and seen in their profligate online propaganda videos, was not—and could not have been—bought from U.S. retail gun stores.
There are 2nd- or 3rd-generation, fully automatic, belt-fed .50 caliber machine guns, World War II-era German MG 34 machine guns, rocket-propelled shoulder-fired grenade launchers, 40 mm rifle grenade launchers, and (reputedly) FGM 148 Javelin infrared-guided missile launchers—known as the most sophisticated shoulder-fired missile launcher in the world, with a range of a mile and a half—and Claymore M18A1 land mines. There are retired Israeli-made Galil ACE rifles, manufactured in Colombia as the official weapon for Mexican and Colombian law enforcement. And there are hand grenades made for militaries all over the world.
“That sh*t is not coming from the United States. You can’t get those weapons systems from American gun stores,” said retired Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence Captain Jaeson Jones, a Newsmax border correspondent and longtime student of Mexico’s cartels. “No one will ever talk about this, but those are coming from corruption in the Mexican military from their armories. Blaming the U.S. 24/7/365 isn’t going to cut it anymore today. The cartels are in a new world.”
None of those came from American gun dealers.
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This lawsuit is a shallow attempt by the Mexican government to evade its failure to keep order in its own country. The cartels run rampant, many of their weapons are stolen or purchased from Mexican law enforcement or soldiers; it’s not at all unlikely, given their resources, that the cartels could and may well already have set up arms factories of their own; even modern, military-grade weaponry isn’t inordinantly hard to build, as witness the ubiquitous AK-pattern rifles built all over the Third World.
Mexico is a failed narco-state. Their crime rate is truly horrifying, and they cannot blame guns for it any longer, not guns from America, nor guns taken from their cops and soldiers. They have to deal with the failures in their own system, and they have to deal – harshly – with the cartels. Until that happens, all the distractions in the world won’t fix Mexico’s problems.
