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U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Mexico’s Gun Lawsuit
July/August 2025
By Libby Flatoff
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit filed by Mexico that aimed to hold top U.S. gun makers and distributors responsible for facilitating the flow of guns to Mexican drug cartels and the pervasive violence that the cartels engender.
In a unanimous decision June 5, the court affirmed a U.S. law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which shields the gun makers from liability in certain instances.
The law passed by Congress in 2005 to limit the liability of gun manufacturers for the misuse of their products was upheld in the case of Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., et al. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos.
Mexico filed its original lawsuit in Massachusetts in 2021, but it was dismissed by a district court for falling within the PLCAA protections. (See ACT, September 2021.)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the district court decision and allowed the case to go forward, noting that the PLCAA was designed only to protect lawful firearms-related commerce and not the problems Mexico identified of gunmakers aiding and abetting illegal gun sales and facilitating the trafficking of firearms into the country. (See ACT, March 2024.)
Mexico tried to use this exception to assert “that all the manufacturers assist some number of unidentified rogue dealers in violation of various legal bars.” The government also alleged that gun manufacturers have failed to impose controls on distribution and directly made “design and marketing decisions” to appeal to cartel demands, according to the Supreme Court ruling written by Justice Elena Kagan.
The ruling said that Mexico “does not plausibly allege that the defendant manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers.”
In response to the ruling, Johnathan Lowy, president of Global Action on Gun Violence, said that “while we strongly disagree with the court’s decision, [the court] did not dispute Mexico’s detailed claims that the U.S. gun industry deliberately supplies the crime gun pipeline to profit from the criminal market.”
Mexican officials, citing U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives statistics, have said that about 70 percent of the firearms seized at crime scenes in Mexico are traced to the United States. Many of these weapons are military grade and wreak remarkable havoc. (See ACT, September 2022.)
Mexican officials also claimed that between 2006 and 2021, trafficked firearms were used to kill 415 federal police and national guard members in Mexico and that in 2019, more than 3.9 million crimes in Mexico were committed with a gun traced to the United States.
Between 2015 and 2021, at least 140,000 civilians were killed with a firearm in Mexico, they said.