News from Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Superior Court, in a strongly worded decision, ruled Monday that a lawsuit filed by the parents of a 13-year-old Mount Pleasant boy who was killed accidentally when his friend fired a gun at him can move forward.
It is the first appeals court in the country to find that the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is unconstitutional and could, ultimately, have sweeping ramifications on suits brought against gun manufacturers.
“It is a huge deal,” said Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, who argued the case on behalf of Mark and Leah Gustafson.
The Gustafsons filed the complaint against Springfield Arms (sic) and Saloom Department Store in 2018, alleging negligence and strict liability for the manufacture and sale of a defective handgun.
J.R. was at a home in Westmoreland County on March 20, 2016, when his 14-year-old friend obtained the homeowner’s handgun and removed the clip. Believing the gun was unloaded, the friend, John Burnsworth III, pulled the trigger and shot J.R.
Burnsworth ultimately pleaded delinquent in juvenile court to involuntary manslaughter and served more than a year at a Cambria County reform school before his release.
In their lawsuit, the Gustafsons argued that the gun that killed their son had a design defect because it lacked a safety feature that would disable it from firing without a clip inserted.
However, the defendants filed preliminary objections and asserted immunity under the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
Westmoreland County Common Pleas Judge Harry F. Smail threw the case out, agreeing with the defendants that the act prohibited the lawsuit.
The Gustafsons appealed, arguing that the act is unconstitutional.
In a 63-page opinion filed Monday in Superior Court, a three-judge panel of the court agreed that it is.
“[T]he Act is unconstitutional in its entirety,” Judge Deborah A. Kunselman wrote. “The only portions of the [act] that do not offend the Constitution are its findings and purposes … and a few definitions.”
Instead, she said, it was an act of “constitutional overreach” and a violation of the Tenth Amendment, which gives power, such as the tort reform intended by the act, to individual states.
According to the court, the act in question says that a “’qualified-civil-liability action may not be brought in any federal or state court” against members of the gun industry. Such a lawsuit ‘shall be immediately dismissed by the court in which the action was brought or is currently pending.’”
There are enumerated exceptions in the act, which did not apply in the Gustafson case.
Instead, the Superior Court chose to address the constitutionality of the act, which was passed in 2005 after intense lobbying in Congress by the gun industry. Kunselman noted in the opinion that guns kill approximately 30,000 people annually.
“The act immunizes the gun industry from every conceivable type of joint and comparable liability known to the common law,” the court wrote, even if a product is faulty and causes harm.
The act, the opinion continued, is unsustainable, because “it grants the gun industry immunity regardless of how far removed from interstate commerce the harm arises.”
The decision can be found here. This paragraph struck me as presumptuous.
We find the logic of the Supreme Court of Alaska in Kim unpersuasive. That court erroneously believed that allowing claims for ordinary negligence (or any other cause of action based in negligence) would render the PLCAA’s exception for claims of negligence per se and negligent entrustment surplusage. That court and the trial court misunderstood the PLCAA’s goal, which is to protect only those members of the gun industry who obey state or federal statutes from common-law liability. As we will explain below, Congress passed the PLCAA to immunize what they considered to be law-abiding members of the industry — in Congress’s mind, those who follow federal and state statutes.
And this court happens to know better. And that “better” includes protection only of “law-abiding” manufacturers. The trick is to know that law, which in this case is decided by a court, i.e., that Springfield Armory designed an unsafe weapon.
So it’s left up to a court who has probably never used weapons to decide what’s safe and unsafe. Springfield Armory didn’t violate a single law in the design of this weapon, and Smith & Wesson (in the design of their M&P) and Glock also manufacture pistols that will discharge without a magazine being inserted.
There was nothing at all defective about this handgun, and nothing defective about the design. Don’t point guns at other people and pull the trigger. This case is remarkably different than the case against Remington 700, in that Remington had repeatable test cases where a rifle falling over, even with the safety on, caused a round to discharge, or the simple act of closing the bolt caused a round to discharge. Remington made a defective product. Springfield Armory did not.
Perhaps some users want that feature. It’s there for very good reason (e.g., tactical reloads where a previously unseen assailant is approaching and you need that round still left in the chamber before you get the reload accomplished).
Never mind training, never mind user desires for features, never mind the rules of gun safety, which if they had been followed would have prevented this event. The court knows better, that court being completely ignorant of gun designs.
This is why the law was passed to begin with. So their presumptuous attack on prior applications ends up hoisting them on their own petard.
But watch and see and heed this warning. I suspect Bloomberg money was behind this lawsuit, but in any case, yet another manufacturer will have to defend itself in endless court appearances, demands for discovery, and on and on the circus goes. Springfield Armory won’t be the last manufacturer to be hit with lawsuits like this one, and in the end, the controllers will demand a federal law for firearms design.
Court behavior most of the time would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad and farcical.
