The state of Maryland isn’t exactly a place where gun rights are respected. They’re not as bad as some states, but that’s also not a ringing endorsement of the place, either. They’v done a lot of stupid things to gun rights, and they’ve been challenged on it.
The NSSF, in particular, is challenging a measure that seems to fly in the face of the Protection of Lawful Commerce of Arms Act that Maryland fully embraced.
Unfortunately, a federal judge just dismissed the case, and for what I happen to figure is a pretty dumb reason.
A federal judge dismissed a gun-rights group’s lawsuit challenging a Maryland law, saying the same issues are addressed in a state-court case brought by the state and Baltimore City.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation in April sued Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown and his office over the 2024 Gun Industry Accountability Act, which extended tort liability to gun manufacturers.
The law prevented them “from knowingly creating, maintaining, or contributing to harm to the public through the sale, manufacture, importation or marketing of a firearm-related product under certain circumstances.”
The NSSF, which has thousands of members and is also known as the Firearm Industry Trade Association, argued the state law is preempted by a federal law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects firearms manufacturers from liability for the criminal misuse of their products.
The NSSF sued about two months after Maryland and Baltimore City sued the Austrian gun manufacturer Glock, alleging its pistols are easy to modify with a small device that allows users to fire 1,200 rounds per minute, faster than many fully automatic firearms used by the U.S. military.
That case, the first under the Gun Industry Accountability Act, is pending in Baltimore City Circuit Court. The court heard arguments last month on Glock’s motion to dismiss and motion to stay the proceedings; the judge has not yet ruled.
I’m sorry, but while I get that the judge cited a doctrine of federal courts not ruling on cases that might interfere with state cases, I happen to think that matters of civil liberties are too important to just ignore.
And yes, this is a case of civil liberties.
What Maryland’s law really does is try to make it too expensive for companies to do business in the state at all, thus pushing them out. The lawsuit against Glock, for example, isn’t because Glock did anything wrong. It’s because some third party found a way to utilize Glock’s design in a way that turned out to be beneficial to criminals.
I fail to see how the lawsuit against Glock really is all that relevant, since it’s unlikely the state court will truly take the federal law into account fully. I might be wrong, but I’m probably not.
Then again, Glock changing their design is likely to be seen as an admission of guilt by some folks, even though again, it wasn’t Glock who developed the switch in the first place.
So yeah, I think this decision is stupid. It might have been better to just table the case pending the outcome of the state case, but that’s not going to happen.
Now, NSSF has to bank everything on the Glock case, at least for the time being, and hope that the court listens to reason. If that doesn’t happen, they get to go through this all over again, thus making things more costly for the firearm industry, which will eventually end up reflected in gun prices.
Of course, for the anti-gunners driving these suits, that’s a feature, not a bug.
