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There are a lot of bad tea leaves coming out of the Supreme Court about today’s DACA hearing. It certainly looks like the Court is going to end that program, one way or the other.
Let’s ignore that for the moment and talk about something good the Supreme Court did on guns. Yes, you head the correctly: The Supreme Court did something basically good on gun reform today.
They kept their hands off of a case. From the Washington Post:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a request from the gun industry intended to block a lawsuit from families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims.
The decision lets stand a groundbreaking ruling from the Connecticut Supreme Court that said the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle can be sued and potentially held liable for the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn.
I am shocked. I literally wrote about how this was unlikely to happen. I thought for sure that the Supreme Court, armed to be the most pro-firearms in American history, would grant review of this case. I thought they’d find a way to say that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), signed in 2005 by George W. Bush, prevented the kind of manufacturer liability the families of Sandy Hook victims are trying to achieve.
No justice weighed in on the cert denial, so we don’t really know how SCOTUS thinks the PLCAA is supposed to play out on the state level. But the fact that there evidently weren’t four justices who thought the PLCAA barred these kind of state suits is encouraging.
It’s also instructive for other states. I’m no big fan of federalism, but if the Supreme Court is saying that it won’t block state lawsuits against gun manufacturers, then every reasonable state needs to have a law allowing for liability suits against gun manufacturers.
I promise you, if gun makers know they can get their pants sued off in Connecticut but not in Texas, they’ll do everything they can to keep their weapons of mass murder out of Connecticut.
This is unexpected good news. Let’s use it.
Supreme Court allows families of Sandy Hook shooting victims to sue gunmaker Remington [Washington Post]