A lawsuit in the District against gunmakers was dismissed yesterday by a D.C. Superior Court judge who ruled that the suit was precisely the sort of claim that a new federal law was intended to block.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, signed by President Bush in October after winning easy House and Senate approval, enacted broad liability protections for the country's gun industry.
The suit filed by the District and gun violence victims was among the most aggressive of many such suits filed across the country. As with many of those suits, it claimed that the manufacturers create a public nuisance with their products and were conducting business with little regard for the risks their products created.
But the D.C. suit went a step further, arguing that under a 1990 District law, the manufacturer, dealer or importer of an assault weapon or machine gun can be held liable for damages arising from an injury or death that results from the discharge of a firearm in the District.
In 2002, D.C. Superior Court Judge Cheryl M. Long threw out the lawsuit, rejecting the nuisance and negligence claims and concluding that a 1990 statute, the Assault Weapon Manufacturing Strict Liability Act, was unconstitutional.
In 2004, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld much of Long's ruling but said the city could sue under the strict liability statute. In April 2005, the full Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, sending the case back to Superior Court.
After the new liability protections for the gun industry were enacted in 2005, manufacturers petitioned Superior Court to dismiss the suit. The plaintiffs countered that their suit met an exception in the new federal law and that the law was unconstitutional in any event.
Hedge rejected those legal arguments.
"The Court is faced with a classic tension between two elected branches of different governments, two equally clear legislative judgments, but each enforcing opposite policies," Hedge wrote.
"At bottom," she said, the federal law was enacted "to prohibit the very types of lawsuits the Strict Liability Act allows."
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