By John Kruzel and Blake Brittain
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court was set on Tuesday to hear a bid by two American gun companies to throw out the Mexican government’s lawsuit accusing them of aiding illegal firearms trafficking to drug cartels and fueling gun violence in the southern neighbor of the United States.
U.S. firearms maker Smith & Wesson and distributor Interstate Arms have appealed a lower court’s ruling that the lawsuit could proceed on the grounds that Mexico has plausibly alleged that the companies aided and abetted illegal gun sales, harming the Mexican government.
The arguments before the justices come at a fraught time for U.S.-Mexican relations as President Donald Trump pursues tariffs on Mexican goods and accuses Mexico of doing too little to stop the flow of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and migrant arrivals at the border.
At issue is whether Mexico’s suit should be dismissed under a 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that broadly shields gun companies from liability for crimes committed with their products – or whether the alleged conduct of the companies falls outside these protections, as the lower court found.
Mexico’s lawsuit, filed in Boston in 2021, accused the gun companies of violating various U.S. and Mexican laws. Mexico claims that the companies have deliberately maintained a distribution system that included firearms dealers who knowingly sell weapons to third-party, or “straw,” purchasers who then traffic guns to cartels in Mexico.
The suit also accuses the companies of unlawfully designing and marketing their guns as military-grade weapons to drive up demand among the cartels, including by associating their products with the American military and law enforcement.
Mexico is seeking monetary damages of an unspecified amount and a court order requiring Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms to take steps to “abate and remedy the public nuisance they have created in Mexico.”
Most of the 180,000 homicides involving guns in Mexico, a country with strict firearms laws, from 2007 to 2019 were committed with weapons trafficked from the United States, according to court papers.
The gun companies argue that they have done nothing more than make and sell lawful products.
“Every business knows its products may be misused – even criminally so – by customers downstream,” lawyers for the companies wrote in a Supreme Court brief. “But such knowledge has never been enough to generate criminal liability, lest the entire economy grind to a halt.”
Guns trafficked from the United States to Mexico – counting those made by the defendants and other companies – are valued at more than $250 million annually, according to court papers.
Mexico in a Supreme Court brief said the accused companies “deliberately sell their guns through dealers who are known to disproportionately sell firearms that are recovered at crime scenes in Mexico,” adding that they “intentionally do all this to boost their bottom lines.”
According to the lawsuit, gun violence fueled by trafficked American-made firearms has contributed to a decline in business investment and economic activity in Mexico, and forced its government to incur unusually high costs on services including healthcare, law enforcement and the military.
Mexico had originally sued seven U.S. gun manufacturers – Smith & Wesson, Barrett, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock and Ruger – as well as wholesale distributor Interstate Arms. Six gun manufacturers later were removed from the case on procedural grounds, leaving Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms as the remaining defendants.
U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor in Boston sided with the gun companies in 2022 and threw out the case, finding that the 2005 federal law “seeks to prohibit exactly the type of claim that is currently before this court.”
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Saylor’s decision in January 2024 and ruled that the suit could proceed. The 1st Circuit ruled that Mexico had plausibly alleged that the gun companies had aided and abetted violations of federal laws prohibiting the sale and export of guns without a license, and sales to straw purchasers – placing their alleged conduct beyond the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
The gun companies argued in a Supreme Court filing that Mexico’s suit seeks to “bully the industry into adopting a host of gun-control measures that have been repeatedly rejected by American voters.”
(Reporting by John Kruzel and Blake Brittain; Editing by Will Dunham)
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