Daniel Defense headquarters in Georgia. Daniel Defense was named in a civil case that sought to bypass the PLCAA but a judge ruled in the gun manufacturer's favor.

As part of the war against the Second Amendment, the Biden-Harris Administration has made no secret of its antipathy to responsible gun owners and the firearm industry. Under the guise of “common sense” gun control, President Biden has made repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) a “top priority,” claiming, incorrectly, that the legislation gives gun dealers and manufacturers complete and unique immunity from lawsuits. In the meantime, the Biden-Harris Administration has pledged to collaborate with state legislators and Attorneys General on strategies for enacting and employing state liability laws to undermine the PLCAA, including using “generally applicable state consumer protection and nuisance laws to take action against gun manufacturers and gun dealers.”    

One such state-level effort to bypass the PLCAA, the Illinois Firearms Industry Responsibility Act (2023), was used by the City of Chicago and Bloomberg’s gun control group Everytown to file a lawsuit against Glock, Inc., seeking to hold the gunmaker responsible for harms caused by criminals illegally installing auto sears on Glock handguns. The House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability is now investigating“potential collusion” between the Administration (specifically, the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention, “overseen by Vice President Harris”), the City of Chicago, and Everytown and other “anti-Second Amendment plaintiffs” in the litigation.

A different civil case which sought to bypass the PLCAA was recently dismissed. In Lowy v. Daniel Defense, LLC et al., Civil Action No. 1:23-cv-1338 (E.D. Va. July 24, 2024), a federal court in Virginia granted the motion of all 15 defendants, including Daniel Defense, LLC; Centurion Arms, LLC; Magpul Industries Corp., Federal Cartridge Company, and others, to dismiss the case outright.

The case arose out of a shooting at a District of Columbia school in which the plaintiffs were injured, perpetrated by a 23-year-old man who committed suicide shortly after. The complaint, framed in negligence and Virginia consumer protection/false advertising statutes, alleged that the defendant manufacturers “have deceptively and unfairly marketed their assault rifles, rifle accessories, and ammunition in ways designed to appeal to the impulsive, risk-taking tendencies of civilian adolescent and post-adolescent males,” and rested on alleged links between the “perverse and pervasive marketing by Defendants and the gun industry at large” and the “idolized self-sufficient warrior mentality” that a “certain subset of youths” develop, that supposedly results in mass shootings. “Upon information and belief,” the plaintiffs claimed the assailant was one of the youths influenced by these marketing practices and that he relied on the defendants’ advertisements in purchasing his weapons in Virginia.

Court filings by defendant Daniel Defense noted that, independent of the PLCAA, dismissal was warranted because, as a threshold matter, there was no “factually plausible or legally cognizable connection” between it and the harm the plaintiffs suffered. “Every link in Plaintiffs’ paper chain of causation is based on mere possibility. Did the Assailant ever see a single Daniel Defense communication? Plaintiffs only speculate. Assuming he saw one, what impact, if any, did it have on him? Again, Plaintiffs only speculate. Assuming he purchased a Daniel Defense product as a result of seeing such a communication, Plaintiffs are still left with no way to cross the chasm between that purchase” and the assailant’s acts. “Instead of factual allegations, or even factual grounds for suspicion, Plaintiffs reply upon nothing more than layer upon layer of assumption and speculation.” Another defendant, FAB Defense, Inc., argued that the plaintiffs failed to specifically allege that any of its products were actually used by the assailant.

These threshold issues of standing and failure to state a claim, as well as the PLCAA, were all factors in Judge Claude M. Hilton’s decision to dismiss the suit.

The alleged chain of causation relied on the assailant, an unrelated third party not before the court, “to link defendants to plaintiffs’ injuries. Accordingly, to establish standing against defendants, plaintiffs must allege that defendants’ conduct had a determinative or coercive effect upon Shooter’s actions.” However, “no factual allegations in the complaint support the conclusion that Shooter relied on defendants’ marketing,” or that the marketing had a “determinative or coercive effect” on his subsequent criminal acts. The complaint “does no more than speculate that Shooter, like other young men in Virginia, observed defendants’ advertisements.” With just this to go on, the plaintiffs’ claims failed to rise above the speculative level and “can proceed no further.”

Even had the plaintiffs surmounted these threshold matters, the PLCAA blocked their lawsuit. That law contains various exceptions “to ensure that it does not insulate firearm companies against lawsuits resulting from their unlawful behavior,” but in this case, “the defendants qualify for the PLCAA’s protections, and plaintiffs fail to invoke the Act’s exceptions.”

One of the exceptions is the so-called “predicate exception,” as it relies on actions in which a manufacturer or seller of a qualified product knowingly violated a state or federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product (the “predicate” law), and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm underlying the suit. In Virginia, the “proximate cause of an event is that act or omission which, in natural and continuous sequence, unbroken by an efficient intervening cause, produces the event, and without which that event would not have occurred.”

The same lack of a causational link that doomed the threshold issues also foreclosed the application of the predicate exception. The assailant’s independent and voluntary criminal acts broke the chain of proximate causation. Even assuming that the plaintiffs adequately alleged violations of the Virginia consumer protection/false advertising statutes (“which the court does not decide”), they failed to adequately allege those violations proximately caused their injuries.

Nothing in the ruling diminishes the tragedy of the horrific event that gave rise to the lawsuit; however, the law (with and without the PLCAA) nonetheless obligated the plaintiffs to show that the manufacturers’ conduct had the necessary causal link to the assailant’s attack.

The case illustrates the insubstantial arguments being used to make the gun industry legally responsible for the acts of third party criminals. Defendant Daniel Defense described the lawsuit’s approach to liability as a “remarkable theory,” relying on “conclusory and generalized accusations that fall short of alleging any interaction between Daniel Defense and the Assailant.”

If flimsy arguments, speculation and guesswork can carry the day, one could argue that the District of Columbia – a jurisdiction that gun-control group Giffords describes as having “some of the strongest gun violence prevention legislation in the nation” – is theoretically as liable for the assailant’s crimes, because its extreme gun control laws give citizens the deceptive and unfair illusion of public safety. The pleadings in the case disclosed that, although the assailant’s (semiautomatic) firearms and ammunition had been legally purchased in Virginia, he had illegally transported the guns into the District and illegally converted the firearms into automatic weapons (which are prohibited in D.C.).

Rulings like these are critically important. Responsible Americans are now acquiring firearms at historically unprecedented rates. The objective of undermining and repealing the PLCAA is to make that impossible, by bankrupting the gun industry with company-killing litigation costs and extraordinary liability for third-party criminal misuse of lawful (and constitutionally protected) products. Without the ability to acquire arms, the right to keep and bear arms becomes meaningless.

Vice President Harris (now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee) has shown herself to be at least as hostile to gun rights as Joe Biden. If the Biden-Harris reformation of gun laws succeeds, it signals dark days ahead for American citizens and their Second Amendment rights.

—Courtesy NRA-ILA

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23 COMMENTS

  1. Unbelievable, but the tactics now of the left is to just ignore or undermine laws they don’t like.
    “no factual allegations in the complaint support the conclusion that Shooter relied on defendants’ marketing,” or that the marketing had a “determinative or coercive effect” on his subsequent criminal acts. OK so lets use this logic every time a fanatical leftist assaults or shoots a conservative politician. We should sue the mainstream media personnel and leaders of the democratic party like Pelosi have have been using violent rhetoric that encouraged the attackers to do their deeds.

    • This was the same theory used against Bushmaster in the Sandy Hook case. I could never see why the courts did not dismiss the case out of hand for a failure to make any plausible argument that the shooter, who did not purchase the rifle and killed his mother to gain its possession, was in any way shape of form influenced by advertising or marketing in engaging in a multiplicity of serious felonies. But the courts allowed the case to proceed to discovery phase, during which Plaintiffs engaged in an abusive campaign to force Bushmaster/Remington to produce all of its marketing plans and related documents, advertising, etc. etc. the defense of the case was costing millions. But that was the whole point, of course.

    • Pr0gtards will use lawfare until they decide lawyers are “inconvenient” and declare them “class enemies” for purging.

      That side always eats their own. Because it is a long established tradition they can’t help themselves.

    • Why be surprised. Historically Marxists ignore and violate the rule of law habitually. Marxists do what Marxists do. No lie is too big to use to take power away from the sovereignty of the people.

  2. We really need the equivalent of SLAPP statutes for 2A cases to go after parties who encourage and participate in these sort of actions.

    • We need laws against politicians undermining the constitution they took an oath to protect.

      • We need both. Article I Section 6 Clause 1 needs to be amended to fix it, though.

        Make it so that any congressperson that votes for a law that is found to infringe on citizens’ rights is forbidden from ever holding office or voting in any election. They take our rights, they lose their right to ever try doing it again. And they can count themselves lucky to still be alive inside this country.

        • While no typical politician would ever allow such a law to come close to being passed it would be a good idea.

        • No amendment needed; “felony” is listed, and it’s not like anyone is talking about misdemeanors.

          Administrative consequences are insufficient. People who swear to protect our rights, then make or enforce laws that violate them, should suffer at least the same criminal consequences as any other violator who did not swear the oath.

  4. Did the court aware damages to the defendants?

    That is what must happen to stop this lawfare in the future.

  5. Judge rules that green is not blue, and that east is not west. Leftist whackos decide to sue again for hurt fee-fees. More news at 11:00.

  7. A Loser Pays clause would cut these frivolous lawsuits down to nil. If the Filers had to pay the legal bills caused by this crap, justice would be served!

  8. “A Loser Pays clause would cut these frivolous lawsuits down to nil. If the Filers had to pay the legal bills caused by this crap, justice would be served!”

    Kinda limited thinking. The result would be that the non-wealthy could not sue for damages, against a big corp with unlimited money and lawyers, essentially priced out of the legal system.

    Maybe a limit to court awards to no more than $400,000, indexed to inflation?

  9. Surely the essence of a DEMOCRACY is to accept the Will of the Majority with protection for the MINORITY. In the case of firearm ownership there is a very great deal that could be done without compromising the Second Amendment and if push come to shove the 2nd Amendment which is after all an AMENDMENT itself can be cancelled or changed if enough people demand it ‘ The fact that the GUN OWBNERS aide and abetted by PAID MNEDIA HACKS as in these columns and by a POLITICALLY motivated POLITICAL and JUDICIAL SYSTEM for hire as part of the FIREARMS INDUSTRY MARKETTING strategy.
    I have never thought that the intent by the US GUN CONTROL Lobby was to BAN the use of firearms but unless there is more co-operation events may overtake good intentions.
    Meanwhile the rest of the World stand in wonder at how the USA still allows the continuation of the number of DEATHS as a result of GUN CRIME in the USA to continue at the present rate of around 25,000 per annum and climbing. It should be by now blindingly OBVIOUS to all but those with a vested interest that an INCREASE in GUN OWBNERSHIP does NOT result in a fall in that DEATH RATE

    • “It should be by now blindingly OBVIOUS to all but those with a vested interest that an INCREASE in GUN OWBNERSHIP does NOT result in a fall in that DEATH RATE”

      If you look at actual numbers, if anything more firearms in private hands per capita is associated with lower murder rates per capita. Though that correlation is weak, it holds across counties within the US, across states within the US, and across countries based on U.N. data. Again, that correlation is so weak that it would perhaps be more accurate to say there is no relationship between rate of private ownership and murder rate.

      If you want to account for variance among locations, population density is associated with rates of both murder and suicide. In high density areas, people are more likely to kill each other (murder is after all a social activity). In low density areas, people are more likely to kill themselves. Seasonal variation accounts for variance over time as well. Things cool down in more ways than one in the Winter (perhaps people get pissed off more easily when it’s hot, but also people are less likely to go out and interact with each other when it’s cold). Those factors certainly don’t account for all variance (so of course, one could find examples of cities with equal population density and different murder rates, for example).

      Regardless, availability of weapons accounts for little or no variance, unless one cherry picks locations, like saying “among these five nations…” in which case one can get the numbers to say anything you want them to; I’m referring to analyses that take account, for example, of all states within the US or all countries for which the UN has data.

      So, your claim that increasing ownership rates won’t result in fewer deaths could be true, though that point is arguable based on data. But there is nothing to indicate that increasing ownership would result in more deaths, or that decreasing ownership would result in fewer deaths. Saying that something is obvious doesn’t make it true, even if one types it in all caps. Unless one accepts a post-modernist definition of truth, i.e., that truth is whatever you can get people to believe.

    • “Surely the essence of a DEMOCRACY is to accept the Will of the Majority with protection for the MINORITY.”

      To begin with we are not “a DEMOCRACY”

      The United States is a constitutional republic. There is a difference one of which is in “a DEMOCRACY” the general public majority has the highest power, whereas, in a constitutional republic the constitution has the highest power.

      In the U.S., in our republic, the form of government is a representative democracy and not “a DEMOCRACY” as the left winger democrats keep referring to it. “a DEMOCRACY” and ‘a representative democracy’ are two different things.

      Calling our country “a DEMOCRACY” is a sleight of hand deception. “a DEMOCRACY” is another term to describe “socia-lism”.

      In “a DEMOCRACY” its 51% of the people can take away from or give to the other 49% and get to tell the other 49% what their ‘rights or privileges’ are and that 49% is never part of the majority and has no say in anything and are ‘second class citizens’ akin to a ‘serf’ class to serve the majority will and the ruling elite. And that’s why the Democrats keep referring to ‘our democracy’ or “a DEMOCRACY” or ‘constitutional democracy’ – its a deception turn of phrase intended to dupe people – its what the Democrats want, a country where they are the ruling elite supported by 51% of manipulated brain dead idiots dictating to the 49%, or in other words an over throw of the country to in effect do away with the constitution.

      You exposed your ‘marx-ist social-ist’ desires there Albert.

      • Prince Albert!! You’ve changed your handle (and you’ve vastly reduced the number of fumbled words, misspellings, and babbling idiocies – not eliminated, but reduced)!! Almost like you were actually a sane, rational commenter.

        First of all, Prince Albert, either you ARE a Limey (in which case, we stopped giving a sh*t about your opinion along about 1776), or you are the fake Limey, fake military liar that you’ve always appeared to be) . . . but maybe I should embrace the healing power of “and”?

        First of all, Mr. Genius, your understanding of the Constitution and the Amendment process is clearly as effed up as your “knowledge” of guns. ANY part of the Constitution, including but not limited to, prior Amendments, can be changed or superseded by a further amendment, FYI (c.f. Amendment 17). Now, take a look at the PROCESS, and try to form an intelligent (heh!!) apprehension of the likelihood of passage and ratification of an amendment eliminating or seriously weakening the 2nd. Chances are “slim” and “none” (OOPS! Looks like “Slim” just left the building!),

        Since, IF you are an irrelevant Brit, you would have no knowledge or understanding of this, our CONSTITUTION (I know, a foreign concept to you moronic, monarchy-worshipping clowns) is to establish LIMITS on what the government is allowed to do “for our own good”. Our Constitution is a compact of strictly LIMITED government powers, some substantial limitations on HOW they exercise those powers, and an existing, but VERY difficult, process for making changes.

        NO, the “business” of our government is NOT to ” . . . accept the Will of the Majority with protection for the MINORITY”. Wrong, Moosebreath!! See, we have this quaint concept of “inherent rights”, plus a few enumerated rights that the Constitution (i) tells the government that it cannot infringe, and (ii) specifically empowers the government to PROTECT. “Fear of guns” or “safety” are NOT among those rights, capisce?

        Further, and in recognition of the fact that the entire agenda of the Left IS to abridge those rights, we also have this cool document called the “Declaration of Independence”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it??? Most brilliant statement of the relationship between individuals and “government” ever penned, written by that polymath genius, Thomas Jefferson. One particular passage that MOST of us Americans take seriously is this – “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. ”

        So, the very EXISTENCE of the 2nd, and the fact that we enthusiastically exercise it, is designed for that EXACT purpose, to actually IMPLIMENT the “right of the people to alter or abolish it”. (Yes, AND for self-defense, and hunting, but then our Founders considered THOSE rights inherent, too). Read some of the debates about the Bill of Rights. You will find much interesting debate/discussion about the need for the second, but you know what you WON’T find? One single WORD suggesting that there should not BE such a right – after all, it was inherent – only about whether in needed to be, or should be, codified. Now, read what the Second actually SAYS, and the whole thing becomes quite simple. The government has NO POWER to regulate (and in the real world, no actual ability to regulate) the ownership of firearms or other “arms” – that’s what the whole “shall not be infringed” part was all about.

        So, I simply DON’T CARE what some other clown thinks his/her “rights” are (especially a fictitious “right” to be free of “gun violence”, which isn’t a “right” for anyone. How can you have a “right” which is functionally INCAPABLE of being provided??). If someone wishes to assert THEIR inherent right that I not, for example, bring a firearm into their house, because I do respect the rights of other individuals, I don’t carry in their property – I simply don’t go to their house.

        I know this whole concept is just beyond comprehension to you Brits and all the other Marx-fellating Euroweenies, and we mostly pity you for that. That you expect us to give a sh*t WHAT your “opinion” is, is simply totes adorbs!!! We. Don’t.

        Nice chat! Come back again the next time you have something stupid and ignorant to say!!

  10. I call out BS. They are unconcerned, however, that Big Pharma is shielded from any liability for its poisonous toxins that are injected into peoples bodies. I lost two relatives from these OSW injections, and we are unable to appeal to our government that is supposed to be protecting us from anything that is harmful. Make no mistake about it. They want to disarm us so we have no recourse to take our government back if need be by the populace, so they can subvert and control us even more. Again, I call out BS. They can’t have it both ways.

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