SCOTUS Appears Ready to Sink Mexico’s Lawsuit Against U.S. Gunmakers

The Supreme Court appears likely to quash a lawsuit by the Mexican government accusing U.S. gun manufacturers of aiding and abetting traffickers who smuggle firearms across the southern border. 

During oral arguments in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos on March 4, a majority of the court expressed doubts that the Mexican government had offered specific enough evidence to move forward to a trial. Several justices — including Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh — seemed sympathetic toward the gun companies’ argument that the connection between their sales practices and Mexican cartel violence was tenuous at best.  

“Would your theory of aiding and abetting suggest that manufacturers should be concerned if their products, their lawful products, are sold in certain communities or certain neighborhoods where they’re more likely to be misused?” Kavanaugh asked the attorney representing Mexico at one point. “We manufacture knives, but there are a lot of stabbings in certain neighborhoods. Should we make sure our products aren’t sold there?”

The government of Mexico sued Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Colt, a number of other gun manufacturers, and one wholesaler in 2021, asking for $10 billion in damages and changes to the companies’ sales practices. A Massachusetts district court dismissed the case because of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which immunizes the gun industry against lawsuits stemming from the criminal misuse of its products. After a panel of the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston unanimously reinstated the lawsuit last year, the gunmakers asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

The main issue before the Supreme Court is whether the Mexican government’s claims fit a narrow exception in PLCAA. The law permits lawsuits against gun companies that violate state or federal laws related to the sale or marketing of firearms. In its lawsuit, the Mexican government accused the companies of doing business with retailers who they knew were engaging in illegal sales.

Andrew Willinger, executive director at the Duke Center for Firearms Law, told The Trace he had expected the Supreme Court to side with the gun manufacturers based on its rulings in previous gun cases, “but that’s even more the case after these oral arguments.” If the court rules against Mexico, that will likely spell the lawsuit’s end, Willinger said.

A decision is expected this summer.

Justices adjourned to deliberate as relations between Mexico and the United States continue to fray. In the past two weeks, the Trump administration has designated a number of Mexican cartels as terrorist groups and followed through with a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports. The president has touted the tariffs as a way to pressure Mexican authorities to crack down on fentanyl trafficking and illegal immigration.

Meanwhile, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum — who recently pledged 10,000 National Guard troops to the border — has promised retribution for the new tariffs and called on the U.S. to do its part to stem the flow of guns southward, which she blames for enabling the drug and immigration crises.

Though Mexico has just two gun stores and imposes strict regulations on gun buying, authorities in the country recover thousands of firearms in crimes each year. Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives suggests that nearly 70 percent of these weapons originate in the United States 

The weapons exact a terrible toll: According to Mexican law enforcement, more than 180,000 people were killed with guns in the country between 2007 and 2019. 

During the oral arguments, justices spent much of the hour and a half prodding Mexico’s attorneys about how gunmakers are supposed to know when retailers are aiding traffickers, and to what extent knowledge provides sufficient evidence of a manufacturer’s complicity.

In one notable exchange, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — one of the most left-leaning justices on the bench — repeatedly pressed the Mexican government’s attorney, Catherine Stetson, about whether PLCAA was intended to bar lawsuits like Mexico’s.

“I worry that we’re running up against the very concerns that motivated this statute to begin with,” Jackson said at one point. “All of the things that you ask for in this lawsuit would amount to different kinds of regulatory constraints that I’m thinking Congress didn’t want the courts to be the ones to impose.” 

Jackson’s comments spell almost certain doom for the Mexican government’s case, which must secure the votes of all of the court’s liberal justices as well as at least two of its more conservative members in order to prevail.

Stetson argued that the Mexican government’s lawsuit should be exempt from PLCAA because the gun manufacturers had facilitated gun sales at “bad apple” dealers and that trafficking was a “foreseeable” result.

But the justices repeatedly poked holes in Stetson’s argument, questioning whether it was plausible to accuse gun manufacturers of complicity in illegal sales without naming specific dealers or the specific sales in which they had allegedly participated.

After Justice Samuel Alito asked whether the Mexican government had made any allegations of gun companies knowingly selling to “specific red flag dealers,” Stetson cited a section of the lawsuit describing a pattern of sales practices that disregard dealer misconduct. 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett interrupted. “Justice Alito was asking you about specific red flag dealers,” she said, “but that paragraph doesn’t identify dealers.”

Stetson argued that specific instances of wrongdoing could arise during discovery, when the gun companies would be ordered to hand over internal records. But the justices appeared unmoved. 

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To bolster their arguments, both sides in the case have relied on two previous Supreme Court cases that dealt with the culpability of companies whose products were misused by customers. In Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, the court decided that the social media company was not liable for a 2017 terrorist attack in Istanbul simply because the terror group ISIS had used its platform as a recruiting tool. The other case is Direct Sales Co. v. United States, in which the justices found an opioid manufacturer liable for selling huge numbers of pills to a single doctor who could not have legally prescribed them all.  

Coney Barrett suggested that neither case offered a helpful analogy for the Mexican government’s suit, as both dealt with allegations of specific incidents of wrongdoing.

The Mexican government has accused dealers of specific crimes in another lawsuit, which the country filed in federal court in 2022. In that case, the government accuses five Arizona gun dealers of a pattern of unlawful sales between 2018 and 2022 that sent high-powered military rifles and ammunition to cartels.

Dru Stevenson, a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston who specializes in cases about firearm regulation, said it was odd that Stetson did not mention the Arizona lawsuit given that it might have resolved some of the justices’ concerns about specific allegations of wrongdoing. “It seemed like an obvious point to make,” he said.

On January 30, the Arizona lawsuit cleared an important hurdle after a judge ordered the  dealers to provide internal documents to the government of Mexico, potentially opening a window into their sales practices and moving the case one step closer to trial.