“Nearly twenty years ago, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) to stop activist lawyers and anti-gun politicians from bankrupting America’s firearms industry through endless, politically motivated lawsuits.
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Now, a group of blue states thinks they’ve found a way to circumvent federal law, the will of the poeple, and bring those same attacks back through the side door.
The New Anti-Gun Playbook
Since 2021, ten Democrat-run states — led by New York and Connecticut — have passed legislation designed to pierce the federal immunity that protects lawful gunmakers and dealers.
Connecticut Democrats’ new law, which just took effect, lets anti-gun activists sue manufacturers if they don’t take “reasonable steps” to prevent firearms from reaching criminals or the mentally unstable — a standard so vague it could mean anything an anti-gun judge wants it to mean.
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Other states have copied New York’s so-called “public nuisance” theory, claiming that simply making or marketing firearms somehow endangers the public. These laws are already being used to target major manufacturers like GLOCK, not for breaking any law, but for the crime of existing in a state that hates gun ownership.
The Real Goal: Financial Harassment
The gun-control lobby insists these laws promote “responsibility.” But the real intent, as the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Lawrence Keane points out, is to drain the industry dry through perpetual litigation.
“They know these laws violate PLCAA,” Keane said. “They don’t care.”
Every dollar a gunmaker spends fighting in court is a dollar that can’t go into R&D, manufacturing, or jobs. It’s lawfare, plain and simple — using the legal system as a weapon against lawful American businesses.
History Repeats Itself
The 2005 PLCAA wasn’t passed on a whim. It came after cities like Chicago and New York tried to hold the entire gun industry liable for the acts of criminals — arguing that gun companies “should have known” their products would be misused.
President George W. Bush signed the law to stop those abuses, rightly noting that “our laws should punish criminals who use guns to commit crimes, not law-abiding manufacturers of lawful products.”
But that principle is exactly what these new state laws are trying to erase.
Courts Begin to Push Back
The federal courts have noticed. In July 2025, a panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said New York’s law wasn’t explicitly barred by PLCAA, but even one of the judges admitted it was “an attempt to end-run” federal protections.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court — still controlled by a constitutional majority — recently reaffirmed the spirit of PLCAA when it threw out Mexico’s $10 billion lawsuit against U.S. gunmakers. Writing for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan (a liberal justice, no less) emphasized that Congress never intended the law to be twisted into a blank check for foreign or domestic gun-control crusades.
The Bottom Line
This is not about “gun safety.” It’s about weaponizing state law to destroy the American firearms industry that, at the direction of “We The People”, Congress deliberately protected.
If these state-level attacks are allowed to stand, no lawful business — not just gunmakers — will be safe from being sued for the criminal misuse of its products. That’s a slippery slope straight to economic tyranny.
For now, the Supreme Court remains the firewall against this coordinated blue-state campaign. But make no mistake: this is the opening act of a much larger legal assault on the Second Amendment itself.”
