Second Amendment Foundation, NRA Files Brief Supporting Gun Owners’ Privacy in Civil Lawsuit

Sig Sauer hasn’t been having the best decade, to say the least. Their P320 gets picked up by the military, which means massive contracts from Uncle Sam, as well as legions of private Americans picking the gun themselves because if it’s good enough for our boys and girls on the battlefield, it’s good enough for them.

Then there were questions about whether it was truly drop safe.

Then there were the unintentional discharges, many of which were caught on video that clearly showed no one was touching the gun when it happened.

And the lawsuits.

While Sig wants to brush this all under the rug, they can’t, and they’ve lost at least one case. Now, in another, the Second Amendment Foundation, along with the NRA, just filed a brief that is, ostensibly, on Sig’s side, though it takes no position on product liability.

They just want to protect gun owners’ privacy.

From a press release:

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in support of defendant SIG SAUER’s motion for reconsideration in Hall v. Sig Sauer, Inc., a product liability case in which plaintiffs seek to force disclosure of gun owners’ identities without their consent. 

SIG SAUER was ordered to divulge the identities of some of its customers to the Plaintiffs in the case as part of the discovery process and seeks reconsideration of that order. SAF is joined in the brief by the National Rifle Association. 

“The Second Amendment has always protected not just the right to keep and bear arms, but the privacy necessary to exercise that right without fear of government-compelled exposure or social ostracism,” said SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros. “Our history and tradition confirm that Americans reasonably expect their status as gun owners to remain private. Forcing a manufacturer to divulge customer identities in civil litigation – without consent or adequate safeguards – violates that long-standing expectation and infringes the right itself. We urge the Court to reconsider and protect gun owners’ privacy.”

This dispute is important to SAF as it threatens the privacy of law-abiding Americans who contact manufacturers for assistance with their firearms, possibly chilling them from seeking help with potential safety issues and exposing them to unwanted scrutiny. Moreover, it presented an excellent opportunity to assist in the development of privacy in gun ownership as an aspect of the Second Amendment right.

“We fought this same issue recently in our own lawsuits, and just like we argued in those cases, there is absolutely no need to hand over a list of gun owners’ names to the government,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “SAF is committed to ensuring that exercising this fundamental right does not come at the cost of forced disclosure to third parties. This brief defends the privacy that has always been inherent in the right to keep and bear arms.”

Now, there is a potential reason I can think of for why plaintiffs want this information. Because it’s a product liability thing, they may be looking to get enough other plaintiffs to make this a class action lawsuit, which means even bigger money.

The problem is that gun owner privacy actually matters. None of us like the idea of our private information being handed to a third party as a general thing, but when it comes to our gun ownership status, it’s particularly troubling. I mean, it’s not like no one has ever talked about going door-to-door to confiscate our guns or anything, now have they?

While I know I wouldn’t get a letter or anything from any of the attorneys suing Sig Sauer, I sure don’t want anyone else getting one and risking their privacy as a result.

A flip side for this, though, is that if this becomes a thing in product liability lawsuits against companies like Sig, which definitely seemed to have built a gun with a flawed design, then it will discourage lawsuits at all, simply because people value their privacy. This chilling effect could be detrimental to millions of gun owners who could be hurt by flawed designs or manufacturing. Instead of taking the issue to court, as they should be able to, they’d be hesitant to do so out of fear that other gun owners’ private information will be handed over to some lawyer who doesn’t give a damn about our privacy.

I don’t like it, and I’m glad both the SAF and NRA are standing up on this one.

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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