Illinois Judge Gives Go-Ahead to Lawsuit Against Gun Maker Over Mass Shooting

A circuit judge in Lake County, Illinois has given the green light for several families to sue gunmaker Smith & Wesson over the death of their loved one at the hands of a mass murderer in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park almost three years ago. The families, who are working with Everytown for Gun Safety’s legal arm as well as two other law firms, claim the gun maker marketed and sold its M&P-15 rifle to teenagers, violating an Illinois consumer protection law that bars the any advertising that promotes criminal use of a weapon.  

The lawsuit, which was filed back in June of last year, alleges that the company should have stopped the sale and manufacture of the rifle after its use in several mass shootings over the past ten years. The lawsuit also names Bud’s Gun Shop and Red Dot Arms as co-defendants, and the judge refused to dismiss them from the lawsuit as well. 

Lake County Judge Jorge L. Ortiz did dismiss the claim of deceptive business practices filed by the plaintiffs, but denied a motion to dismiss claims of unfair business practices and negligence on behalf of the gun maker and FFLs. 

In his order, Ortiz said the plaintiffs have “alleged sufficient facts to conclude that Smith & Wesson’s marketing strategies of targeting younger demographics and promoting unlawful military-type assaults created a foreseeable risk of injury to the plaintiffs,” even though the plaintiffs haven’t demonstrated that the Highland Park shooter even saw a Smith & Wesson advertisement before purchasing the rifle, which was bought more than two years before shooting. 

Ortiz, however, argued that the “Court can infer that an avid player of first-person shooter games was likely exposed to ads targeting that demographic and was prone to being motivated by ads mimicking those games”. 

There are millions of people who play first-person shooter games like Call of Duty online, and (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of M&P-15 rifles in the hands of gun owners across the country. The vast majority of gamers will never commit a violent crime, and semi-automatic rifles of all makes and models are used in a small fraction of violent crimes. If these ads were supposedly inspiring mass murderers to carry out attacks, then these kinds of shootings would be far more common than they are. Based on the judge’s rationale, virtually every gun maker in the country could be sued under the Illinois law so long as their products are illicitly used in an armed robbery, carjacking, or homicide. 

That, of course, is exactly what anti-gun lawmakers were hoping for when they voted for the bill empowering these kinds of junk lawsuits. What happened in Highland Park on July 4, 2022 was absolutely horrific. But Smith & Wesson is no more responsible for the actions of the shooter than Ford is for the actions of the man who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of people in New Orleans’ French Quarter on New Year’s Day a few months ago. 

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was meant to stop these types of frivolous lawsuits from moving forward, and Ortiz’s order allowing this litigation to continue will undoubtably be appealed. But Everytown Law and their anti-gun allies will also be carefully studying the judge’s decision in the hopes of using his same rationale to pursue other cases against other members of the firearms industry going forward. If they can’t ban the guns outright, bankrupting the companies that make them is the next best thing.