The gun control lobby's campaign against Glock is being waged on a couple of different fronts. There's the legislative side, where groups like Everytown for Gun Safety are pushing bills to ban the sale of Glock handguns like the one recently signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Then there's the litigation side, where gun control groups are aiding cities and states that are using the courts to block the sale of some of the most popular handguns in the country.
The cities of Chicago, Baltimore, and Seattle have all sued the gunmaker, claiming its responsible for the illegal conversion of Glock handguns into full auto machine guns. The states of Minnesota and New Jersey are pursuing a similar strategy, and this week a county judge in the Garden State rejected Glock's motion to dismiss the case, allowing the lawsuit brought by Attorney General Matthew Platkin to continue.
Glock had offered a number of arguments as to why the case should be dismissed; the lawsuit violates the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the New Jersey statute used to go after Glock is also an unconstitutional infringement on the Constitution's Commerce Clause as well as the First and Second Amendments, and is also "impermissibly vague, subjecting manufacturers to liability based on subjective standards of 'reasonableness' without clear notice of prohibited conduct, thus encouraging arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.
Essex County Superior Court Judge Lisa Adubato denied each and every one Glock's claims. I won't quote every reason for her denial, but this was particularly interesting given the Supreme Court's unanimous decision earlier this year throwing out Mexico's lawsuit against U.S. gunmakers seeking to blame them for cartel violence.
Glock contends that general knowledge of third-party criminal misuse cannot suffice for liability. Smith & Wesson does in fact confirm that “anordinary merchant does not become liable for all criminal misuses of hergoods, simply by knowing that, in some fraction of cases, misuse will occur.” Aiding and abetting liability cannot rest on mere indifference. However, the Court did not hold that aiding and abetting liability is never available. When a plaintiff pleads that a defendant participated in the violation as “in something that he wishes to bring about” and “seek by his action to make it succeed” liability may attach. The standard requires plausible allegations of “pervasive, systemic, and culpable” participation.
Platkin (and the anti-gun groups backing this legal strategy) claims that Glock “deliberately designed” its handguns to be readily convertible to illegal machine guns, marketed those products in such a way that promoted their illegal conversion, and "failed to employ reasonable controls or modify the design despite numerous warnings and increasing harm."
For evidence that Glock is marketing the illegal use of their products, Platkin and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison have pointed to a pair of social media posts nearly a decade old; one that shows a sponsored competitive shooter using a full-auto Glock 18 at a range, captioned "@scuzi23 knows the only thing more fun than shooting a GLOCK is full-auto GLOCK," and another showing a G18 and G18C captioned "Double your pleasure, double your fun."
Does this really promote the criminal misuse of their firearms? I mean, shooting machine guns is fun. Me saying that isn't meant to encourage you, dear reader, from going out and illegally converting a pistol or rifle to fire full-auto. And what is the supposed motive for Glock intentionally designing its product to be illegally converted into a machine gun? Glock's design has been around far longer than these illegal switches, but we're supposed to believe that Glock configured its pistols so they could be illegally converted at some point in the future?
Glock is likely going to prevail in these legal challenges, at least eventually, but it's also likely to cost the company millions of dollars in legal fees before these lawsuits are dismissed. That's a win for the gun control lobby too; if they can't curtail the sale of some of the most popular handguns in the country, they can at least hurt the company's bottom line.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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