Mexican drug cartels run rampant in Mexico, controlling large segments of Mexico’s population, territory, and economy through brutal violence and intimidation. The Mexican government’s failure to restrain the cartels has devastated not only Mexico, but areas of the United States as well.

Mexican cartels operate in every U.S. state, fighting turf wars and fueling a fentanyl crisis that now claims over 80,000 American lives per year. Rather than taking accountability for the cartel crime plaguing both countries, the Mexican government is blaming lawful American firearm manufacturers for the lawlessness within its own borders.

In a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, the Mexican government sued several American firearm manufacturers attempting to hold them liable for the violence committed by Mexican cartels in Mexico.

The Mexican government is seeking billions of dollars in damages from these American manufacturers as well as the imposition of various gun control laws in America—including a ban on “assault rifles” and standard-capacity magazines, limits on multiple-gun sales, and extensive background checks for firearm purchases.

The Mexican government’s allegations, however, run head-on into the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The law prevents lawsuits attempting to hold lawful firearm manufacturers responsible for the third-party misuse of their products — for the same reason that Ford is not liable when a drunk driver causes an accident using one of its vehicles.

The bipartisan filibuster-proof majority in Congress who passed the law recognized that “The possibility of imposing liability on an entire industry for harm that is solely caused by others is an abuse of the legal system, erodes public confidence in our Nation’s laws, [and] threatens the diminution of a basic constitutional right and civil liberty.”

Congress enacted the protections for the firearms industry in response to an onslaught of abusive litigation brought by gun control advocates and anti-gun governments in the 1980s and 90s. These weaponized lawsuits involved a variety of frivolous claims, including that guns were “defective” because criminals sometimes used them, that the manufacture of handguns constituted “ultrahazardous activity,” that firearms were public nuisances, and that firearm manufacturers should refund governments for the medical expenses incurred for crime victims.

The plaintiffs in these cases never prevailed — with a single exception — but the goal was not to win a verdict. Rather, the goal was to eliminate firearms from American society by bankrupting the firearms industry through litigation costs — as Andrew Cuomo explained as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to inflict “death by a thousand cuts.”

The abusive lawsuits were effective. Many firearm manufacturers went bankrupt defending against them. Others were on the brink of financial ruin. Colt, unable to obtain loans to support its manufacturing, stopped producing handguns for the public. Smith & Wesson was nearly coerced into self-imposing gun controls in exchange for relief from the unmeritorious suits.

The bipartisan Congress, with the support of the Department of Defense — which recognized the national security threat posed by a depleted firearms industry — halted the abusive suits by enacting the liability protection law. But now the Mexican government seeks to reopen the floodgates, and the First Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals allowed the case to proceed, despite it being precisely the type of abusive case the law was enacted to prohibit.

The Mexican government’s attempt to cripple a lawful American industry that is essential to constitutional rights and national security is the main takeaway from this case. But because the Mexican government attempts to blame the manufacturers for an increase in homicides in Mexico, it is important to acknowledge the Mexican government’s own responsibility for the violence.

The Mexican government has fostered cartel violence by failing to prosecute violent criminals, thus creating a culture of impunity and criminality. Additionally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the Mexican government has fueled violence by committing human rights violations, including “unlawful or arbitrary killings by police, military, and other governmental officials”; “forced disappearance by government agents”; “torture or cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment by security forces”; “arbitrary arrest or detention”; and “serious acts of government corruption,” among others.

What is more, while Mexico’s constitutions have guaranteed Mexican citizens the right to keep arms since 1857, the Mexican government has effectively nullified that right, boasting in its lawsuit that it “has one gun store in the entire nation and issues fewer than 50 gun permits per year.” Mexican citizens have nevertheless formed autodefensas, or self-defense groups, to protect their communities from cartel violence, but the Mexican government often thwarts them.

So, at the same time the Mexican government allows violent crime to flourish, it forbids citizens from defending themselves, in violation of their constitutional rights. Through its lawsuit against America’s leading firearm manufacturers, the Mexican government aims to eliminate the American right as well.

— John Commerford, Executive Director of NRA-ILA