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FEATURE STORIES New Mexico Supreme Court Refuses to Disturb Ruling That Gun Manufacturers Can Be Held Liable For Unsafe Gun Designs The New Mexico Supreme Court has allowed the strongest gun safety appellate decision in the nation to stand, clearing the way for a trial in Smith v. Bryco Arms. The Legal Action Project represents a 14-year-old boy unintentionally shot by a friend who removed the ammunition magazine from a pistol, mistakenly believed the gun was unloaded, and pulled the trigger. In a decision that has national implications, the New Mexico Supreme Court refused to disturb the ruling of the state's Court of Appeals that gun manufacturers can be held legally liable for the unsafe design of their products.
The gun in this case lacked vital safety features, such as a chamber loaded indicator or magazine disconnect safety, that would have prevented the shooting, and would have cost only 30 cents per gun to install. (The photo above of a magazine safety device indicates just how simple these devices are.) The Court of Appeals of New Mexico had reversed a lower court's dismissal of the case, finding that the claims against the gun's manufacturer are "well within existing New Mexico products liability and negligence law."
Brady Center Criticizes 5th Circuit Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment in Emerson v. United States The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence today reacted to the Fifth Circuit Court's decision in Emerson v. United States. Although the court reinstated the charges against Timothy Joe Emerson for illegal possession of a firearm, it also found that the Constitution guarantees the right of an individual to bear arms for purposes unrelated to militia service. "The Fifth Circuit's ruling in Emerson v. United States achieves the right result for the wrong reasons," said Dennis Henigan, Director of the Brady Center's Legal Action Project. "We are pleased that the Court rejected the National Rifle Association's extremist view that would have guaranteed Timothy Joe Emerson his right to own an arsenal even though he was the subject of a domestic violence restraining order and had threatened his wife with a handgun." "But the Court's suggestion that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to be armed for reasons unrelated to organized militia service is based on a gross distortion of American constitutional history and the prior rulings of the United States Supreme Court. It is obvious that two judges of the Fifth Circuit sought to use this case to propound their theory of the Second Amendment, but it is a theory that has been soundly rejected by every other federal appeals court."
Municipal and State Lawsuits Against the Gun Industry: The Industry's Deceptive Scorecard The United States Supreme Court's recent refusal to hear the New Orleans lawsuit against the gun industry has prompted renewed public attention to the progress of the lawsuits against the industry by urban municipalities and the State of New York. On October 9, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association and one of the defendants in these cases, issued a press release accusing the Brady Center of misleading the public as to the status of these lawsuits. In the release, NSSF objected to our statement that courts thus far have been "pretty much split down the middle" in their ruling on the industry's various motions to dismiss these suits. According to NSSF, "there have been 18 suits decided so far and 17 have been fully or partially dismissed in favor of firearms manufacturers." (Italics added) Who is misleading the American public here? The NSSF statement is utterly deceptive and the deception is built into the phrase "or partially dismissed." Partial dismissal of a suit against the industry is not a victory for the industry; it is a defeat. In each of these cases, the industry sought total dismissal of the lawsuit before it could proceed into the pretrial discovery process where the defendant gun companies would be compelled to surrender internal company documents and produce their executives for deposition questioning under oath. In each case of partial dismissal, the industry failed to achieve this objective. Each of the suits brought by the cities asserts multiple legal claims against the industry. Partial dismissal means only that the court dismissed certain of the claims, but others were sustained as legally valid and the case was allowed to go forward. Of 18 cases (as listed by NSSF) in which motions to dismiss have been decided, 9 cases have survived such motions. Thus, Mr. Henigan's statement that courts have "split down the middle" is precisely accurate. Indeed, because some cases have multiple municipal plaintiffs, of the 32 cities and counties that brought suit, cases brought by 19 have survived industry attempts at dismissal. Legal Action Project Argues for Gun Safety in Two States' Highest Courts The Legal Action Project filed an amicus curiae brief in the Maryland Court of Appeals, urging the Court to reverse a trial court's grant of summary judgment for gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger. LAP argued that a jury should decide whether Ruger should be held liable for its failure to include feasible life-saving design features on a gun that a three-year-old unintentionally fired, killing him. The child was able to load and fire a Ruger pistol because it lacked safety devices to prevent even a three-year-old from operating the gun. LAP's brief also explained that Ruger has long known that children and others are needlessly killed because of its guns' lack of safety devices to prevent unauthorized users from firing them, and that it has long been feasible for Ruger to make it guns with these devices, yet it has simply chosen not to do so. The lower court's decision, argued LAP, wrongly created an exception to Maryland products liability law for gun manufacturers. The Court will hear the case in December. LAP also filed an amicus brief in the Indiana Supreme Court, urging the Court to overturn a lower court ruling that Indiana gun owners have no duty to exercise reasonable care in storing their guns. In Estate of Heck v. Stoffer, the parents of a drug-addicted felon gave their son free access to their home where they kept their unlocked handgun. One day after the son failed to appear at his sentencing hearing, he obtained his parents' gun and used it to shoot and kill a sheriff's deputy. LAP urged the Court to find that the felon's parents had a duty to exercise reasonable care in storing their gun to prevent persons likely to misuse it from gaining access to it. The National Rifle Association filed a brief with the Court arguing that gun owners should be permitted to store their guns how they see fit, even if this results in police officers being killed by felons given free access to unlocked guns.
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![Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence [logo]](http://www.gunlawsuits.org/common-images/bce_logo.gif){kind=logo}
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