End-Around Efforts on PLCAA are End-Around Efforts on Second Amendment

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was created for one particular purpose. While anti-gunners claim it shields the firearm industry from liability, they neglect to point out that product liability laws are still in place. What it does is shield these companies from lawsuits that seek to punish them for third-party actions, punish them for things they did completely within the law, and simply eviscerate the lawful gun market.

I wish I were being hyperbolic, but I’m not.

And the truth is that states think they’ve found a way around that, and are trying to revive the litigious atmosphere which led to the PLCAA in the first place.

I’m not the only one who sees it that way, either.

Over at America’s 1st Freedom, NRA executive director John Commerford has a piece with his name on it that illustrates just how it’s happening.

In 2000, Smith & Wesson, then under different ownership, entered into an agreement with the Clinton administration while threatened with ruinous litigation. A White House press release from March 17, 2000, detailing the settlement noted that the company agreed to implement “new design standards,” including “internal locking devices” and using company resources to develop so-called “smart gun” technology. According to the release, the gunmaker also agreed to what the White House called “new sales and distribution controls” that included “safety training for purchasers,” restrictions on firearm distribution to dealers who sell at gun shows and “restrictions on multiple handgun sales.”

The lawmakers who enacted the PLCAA understood the threat uncodified gun controls, as exemplified by the Clinton administration agreement, posed to Second Amendment rights.

In a July 27, 2005, floor speech in support of the PLCAA, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) explained:

“Anti-gun activists have failed to advance their agenda at the ballot box. They failed to advance their agenda in the legislatures. Therefore, they are hoping these cases will be brought before sympathetic activist judges […] who will determine by judicial fiat that the arms industry is responsible for the action of third parties.”

Now, they’re back at it, and one prime example Commerford gives is New Jersey.

In 2022, New Jersey passed a law that requires companies that make up the gun industry to “establish, implement, and enforce reasonable controls regarding its manufacture, sale, distribution, importing, and marketing of gun-related products.”

Now, this seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. It’s actually remarkably vague, as it’s actually applied, because they’re the ones who get to decide what constitutes “reasonable controls.”

On July 22 of last year, a judge from the Chancery Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey granted AG Matthew Platkin’s motion for summary judgment against Butch’s Gun World of Vineland in an enforcement action of the “reasonable-controls” statute. The court also granted the AG’s request to force the shop to comply with a list of requirements that go well beyond codified law.

The case concerned two undercover buys from the shop by agents of the AG’s office. The first was a box of .223-caliber ammunition and a six-round magazine for a Walther .380 pistol. The second was a 1,000-round case of .223-caliber ammunition. The buyer in each of these purchases paid cash.

New Jersey law imposes various explicit (and likely unconstitutional) requirements for the sale of “handgun ammunition.” Sellers must be a licensed gun businesses. Buyers who are not so licensed must display a valid Firearms Purchaser Identification Card, a permit to purchase a handgun or a permit to carry a handgun. Retail sellers of handgun ammunition must record sales and make these records available to state authorities. Sales of 2,000 or more rounds must be “immediately” reported to the State Police.

Following the undercover purchases, the state AG initiated a civil enforcement action against Butch’s Gun World under the “reasonable-controls” statute. Significantly, the complaint did not claim .223-caliber ammunition or the Walther magazine were “handgun ammunition,” nor claim the sales were a direct violation of the “handgun ammunition” requirements. Instead, the complaint relied entirely on the idea that Butch’s Gun World had an affirmative duty under the “reasonable controls” law to apply additional safeguards to the sales of “gun-related products” beyond those specifically dictated by the New Jersey legislature. These “products,” moreover, include not just all types of firearms and ammunition, but “any … ammunition magazine, firearm component or part including, but not limited to, a firearm frame and a firearm receiver, or firearm accessory … .”

In other words, Butch’s Gun Store complied with the letter of the law, but because they failed to anticipate what the state itself decided constituted “reasonable controls,” they got hammered for not anticipating that they were supposed to do something beyond what is specified in state law.

This is what we’re up against.

Now, go back to the top and remind yourself of what the Clinton administration forced Smith & Wesson to swallow.

These measures that seek to get around the PLCAA won’t stop at local gun stores. They’re gearing up for something different. They want to force gun manufacturers to take various steps that will make guns less accessible to private citizens, less useful for self-defense, and overall ram through so many things that they’d never get through the legislature, and do it all under the guise of it being voluntary.

After all, they could have gone to court, right? They chose to settle instead.

That’s how it’ll be sold.

In the end, though, this is why the PLCAA happened. It was intended to stop this kind of thing from happening, especially when a company didn’t actually break the law in any way, shape, or form. Butch’s Gun Shop didn’t, and neither did Smith & Wesson back in the day. They were attacked simply because they refused to bend the knee to anti-gunners and embrace every form of control imaginable in anticipation that the would-be masters would want them in place.

When these states make their end-around on the PLCAA, it’s not because they think these companies really are doing something wrong. They’re doing it because they want to infringe on your ability to keep and bear arms, because they’ve already learned that they can’t infringe on the right itself. Not enough for their tastes, anyway.

So, if you interrupt our supply of guns, you don’t need to restrict our right to guns. It’s just that simple, and they know it.

Why infringe when you can just nullify it?

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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