A legal battle that began before the iPhone was invented ended Thursday as the Indiana Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the city of Gary over a ruling that killed a lawsuit against 11 gun manufacturers.
The city initially filed its suit in August 1999 seeking not just money for alleged damages caused by the gun manufacturers’ “negligence,” but also for the court to order the manufacturers, including Smith and Wesson, Glock and Beretta, to take various measures that anti-Second Amendment groups had not been able to achieve via legislation. In a statement released Thursday, Brady United, formerly known as the Brady Campaign and Handgun Control, Inc., decried the court’s 4-1 decition to reject the appeal of a December ruling from the Indiana Court of Appeals.
“What are the gun industry defendants so afraid of? We feel so disappointed today for our client, the City of Gary, which has made near insurmountable strides in reducing gun violence in recent years,” Brady United President Kris Brown said in the statement. “Meanwhile, they have also fought hard for the last 25 years simply to tell their story and have a jury of Hoosiers decide what accountability gun companies should face for the public health crisis and trail of terror their negligence created.”
Update: In a 4-1 vote, the Indiana Supreme Court has denied Gary’s petition to appeal the decision. https://t.co/OtvZyOy16P pic.twitter.com/TKE6PHk1Uy
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) May 21, 2026
“What happened here should shock and terrify anyone wanting to access the courts to seek accountability,” Brown fumed. “In no uncertain terms: the gun industry defendants got the legislators whose campaigns they fund to pass five separate laws over 25 years to end legitimate lawsuits like Gary’s.”
The state had passed multiple laws to bar lawsuits like Gary’s, starting in 2001, according to the December ruling, but courts repeatedly kept Gary’s suit alive until a 2024 revision to the state’s version of the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was signed into law.
“The legislature can legally do exactly what it did in this case, and we cannot second-guess its public policy determinations in this regard. On remand, the trial court is directed to dismiss this action,” the ruling from the appeals court states.
Some officials backing the lawsuits explicitly said they were seeking to use litigation to implement restrictions that were unable to be passed via the democratic process due to pro-Second Amendment majorities in Congress and many state legislatures. The restrictions included limiting handgun sales to one gun a month, limits on magazine capacity and the use of so-called “smart gun” technology.
“They’ve always very effectively, with big money, lobbied the legislature and kept laws from being passed,” Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim told The New York Times in 1999.
Former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration, also got involved in the litigation, vowing that gun manufacturers would face “death by a thousand cuts” if they didn’t accept the terms demanded by anti-Second Amendment organizations.
“If you do not sign, your bankruptcy lawyers will be knocking at your door,” then-Democratic New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer told Glock at one point regarding a settlement.
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