Supreme Court to Hear Mexican Government’s Firearms Lawsuit

Ryan J. Farrick — October 4, 2024

The Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. Image by Ryan J. Farrick.

“These allegations are baseless,” National Shooting Sports Foundation Vice President Lawrence G. Keane said in a 2021 statement. “The Mexican government is responsible for the rampant crime and corruption within their own borders.”

The Supreme Court has agreed to determine if the Mexican government can continue litigating its multibillion-dollar lawsuit against several of the United States’ most profitable gun makers and suppliers.

According to The Associated Press, the firearm manufacturers asked the justices to reverse a lower court decision allowing the lawsuit to proceed. Although the same appeals court dismissed most of Mexico’s claims, its ruling left room for appeal.

In its lawsuit, the Mexican government contends that the defendants knew, or should have known, that their firearms were being sold to traffickers. These traffickers would, in turn, smuggle them across the U.S.-Mexico border, whereafter they would be sold or redistributed to criminal organizations.

Attorneys for the Mexican government have said that about 70% of all weapons trafficked into Mexico originate in the United States, with a disproportionate number sold by a small number of licensed dealers located within driving distance of the border.

Image via U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. U.S. government work/public domain.

However, the defendants—which include companies like Smith & Wesson, Colt, Glock, and Baretta—say that the lawsuit fails to establish how their own negligence caused legally-manufactured and legally-sold firearms to fall into the hands of drug cartels.

“Mexico makes no secret that it abhors this country’s approach to firearms, and that it wants to use the American court system to impose domestic gun controls on the United States that the American people themselves would never accept through the ordinary political process,” the defendants’ attorneys wrote in court documents, stressing that smugglers commit “multiple independent criminal acts” that do not involve their clients or their clients’ subsidiaries.

Industry lobbyists have made similar claims since the Mexican government first filed its complaint.

“These allegations are baseless,” National Shooting Sports Foundation Vice President Lawrence G. Keane said in a 2021 statement. “The Mexican government is responsible for the rampant crime and corruption within their own borders.”

But representatives for the Mexican government have said that their lawsuit is not designed to overhaul American law.

“We don’t do it to pressure the United States,” said Alejandro Celorio, an advisor for Mexico’s ministry of foreign affairs. “We do it so there aren’t deaths in Mexico.”

The Associated Press notes that the lawsuit has been repeatedly dismissed, most recently in August. In that ruling, Boston-based U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor found that Mexico had not provided any concrete evidence that the defendants’ activities in the state of Massachusetts were a direct cause of violence on the other side of the border.