A federal judge dismissed the Mexican government’s lawsuit against six firearms manufacturers on Aug. 7, concluding Mexico lacked jurisdiction to bring their legal claims.
Mexico first brought the lawsuit before the Massachusetts U.S. District Court in 2021, arguing that gun-makers Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock, and Ruger, have been negligent in their firearms marketing and sales, resulting in cross-border arms smuggling that’s impacting Mexico. The Mexican government brought their case in Massachusetts, concluding each of the six gun-makers had sold products in the state that eventually found there way to Mexico.
“Plaintiff contends that this court has personal jurisdiction over the six moving defendants because each of them sold firearms in Massachusetts to resellers and—because of their allegedly unlawful distribution practices—some of those guns were trafficked into Mexico for criminal purposes,” Judge F. Dennis Saylor wrote on Wednesday, summarizing Mexico’s claim for jurisdiction.
Saylor, Massachusetts District Court’s chief justice, concluded this claim for jurisdiction by Mexico is “gossamer-thin at best.”
“The government of Mexico is obviously not a citizen of Massachusetts. None of the six moving defendants is incorporated in Massachusetts, and none has a principal place of business in Massachusetts. There is no evidence that any of them have a manufacturing facility, or even a sales office, in Massachusetts,” Saylor continued. “None of the alleged injuries occurred in Massachusetts. No Massachusetts citizen is alleged to have suffered any injury. And plaintiff has not identified any specific firearm, or set of firearms, that was sold in Massachusetts and caused injury in Mexico.”
Saylor further concluded there’s no evidence of a joint enterprise between the six named gun-makers. As such, he concluded Mexico would have to assert personal jurisdiction against each gun-maker separately, not together as one as they had.
The judge concluded Mexico had tried to make claims against the gun-makers based not on specific proof they acted negligently, but on a series of statistical probabilities.
“[Mexico’s] reasoning may be characterized as follows: (1) each of the six moving defendants sold firearms to distributors and retailers in each of the 50 states; (2) each of the six defendants sold some (undetermined) number of firearms to Massachusetts-based distributors or retailers; (3) some (undetermined) number of the firearms that were sold by each of the six defendants nationwide were illegally trafficked to Mexico; (4) some (undetermined) number of the firearms that were trafficked to Mexico caused injury there; and therefore (5) at least some of the firearms sold by each of the six defendants to Massachusetts entities must have caused injuries in Mexico.”
To back their probabilistic assertions, the Mexican government had relied on an analysis by Lucy Allen, a researcher with the National Economic Research Associates (NERA) consulting group.
Allen had relied on data regarding the number of firearms the named gun-makers had manufactured between 2010 and 2021, and a separate dataset kept by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that traced the number of firearms recovered in Mexico between 1989 and 2001. She then used this ATF dataset to postulate the number of firearms firearms from the named manufacturers that ended up in Mexico from 2010 to 2021.
“That report is problematic in multiple respects—beginning with the fact that Congress has prohibited the use of the ATF data in any civil action, and thus a critical foundation of her opinion must be disregarded,” Saylor wrote. “Furthermore, her opinion stops short of estimating the number of firearms manufactured by each defendant that actually caused an injury in Mexico—a critical link to connect defendants’ business in Massachusetts to plaintiff’s claims. Under the circumstances, her opinion is not sufficient to prove the necessary jurisdictional nexus.”
The judge also took issue with the time disparity between the two datasets Allen relied on for her analysis and noted differing analyses on the number of firearms trafficked into Mexico in more recent years.
Saylor’s ruling marks the second time he’s dismissed Mexico’s lawsuit. He previously dismissed the case in an October 2022 ruling, before the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his decision in January of this year. The defendant gun-makers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss the case, but their request is still pending.
Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of the industry trade group National Shooting Sports Foundation,welcomed Saylor’s latest ruling. Speaking with Reuters on Wednesday, Keane said Saylor was right to reject Mexico’s “obvious forum-shopping scheme” and expressed optimism the Supreme Court would also eventually reject Mexico’s legal claims.
This article was originally published by FreeBase News and is reprinted with permission.
