Gun Rights Groups Want Supreme Court To Shoot Down Suit Against AR-15 Manufacturer Over Ads

Two pro-Second Amendment organizations asked the Supreme Court to shut down a lawsuit against a firearms manufacturer in a brief filed Monday.

The Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., said in an April 2022 release that Raymond Spencer fired over 200 rounds from an apartment in the direction of a school, wounding four people, including Karen Lowy, who sued multiple firearms industry companies over the incident. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) argued that the suit should be thrown out in a brief filed Monday.

“That theory mistakes a centuries-old form of firearms advertising for a causal connection to a particular crime,” the groups said in the brief. “Military themes have long accompanied civilian firearms commerce appropriately so, since the Second Amendment itself declares the necessity of the militia.”

“The exercise of the right to keep and bear arms has always had a synergistic relationship with military use of arms,” the groups continued. “In the colonial and Founding eras, militiamen had to provide their own arms, suitable for military use.”

While a federal district judge tossed the lawsuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sided with Lowy, prompting the firearms companies to appeal to the Supreme Court in August, citing a conflict with three other federal appellate courts. When appellate courts differ on how to approach similar cases or constitutional issues, the Supreme Court is more likely to take the case to resolve the “circuit split.”

“The Fifth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits all hold that when a third party not before the court directly caused the plaintiff’s injuries, Article III requires the plaintiff to show that the defendant’s challenged conduct had a determinative or coercive effect on that third party,” the companies’ petition said. “The Fourth Circuit expressly rejected that standard here, joining the Second Circuit in holding that traceability is satisfied in such cases so long as a plaintiff plausibly alleges that the defendants’ conduct had some kind of ‘predictable effect’ on the individual who actually injured them. And since the decision below came down, the Ninth Circuit has cast its lot with the latter group.”

“There is thus now a 3-3 split on the appropriate standard for determining whether traceability is satisfied in cases where someone other than the defendant bears direct responsibility for the plaintiff’s injuries,” the petition continued.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied New Jersey’s effort to block a suit by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) against a law allowing the state to sue gun stores and firearm manufacturers in an opinion released Sept. 8. Congressional Democrats previously targeted firearms manufacturers over their advertisements, with Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts claiming during a 2022 hearing that the ads featured “white supremacist” imagery.