U.S. Gun Companies Fight Mexico’s Lawsuit at the Supreme Court

The Washington Post

12:32 JST, March 4, 2025

RIO RICO, Ariz. – U.S. gun companies are asking the Supreme Court this week to stop an unusual lawsuit from Mexico, a case that coincides with a critical moment for relations between the two countries.

The lawsuit seeks to hold major firearms manufacturers accountable for gun violence in Mexico, testing long-standing protections from liability for the nation’s firearms industry as President Donald Trump separately promises to take on Mexican drug cartels and illegal immigration.

Trump is adding U.S. troops to the southern border and says he will impose tariffs on Mexico starting Tuesday, the same day the lawsuit against the gunmakers will be argued at the high court.

For years, Mexico’s drug cartels have obtained most of their guns from the United States, according to U.S. and Mexican officials, in what anti-violence activists refer to as an “iron river” of weapons.

As fentanyl and other narcotics flow north, they say, the guns flow south.

“Just as [American officials] are worried on the movement of drugs from Mexican territory to the United States, we are worried and working on the entry of weapons from the United States to Mexico,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a recent news conference. “A lot of the drug abuse is in the United States, while the violence, the loss of lives, is in Mexico.”

Mexico alleges that U.S. firearms manufacturers know their guns are trafficked into Mexico and make deliberate design, marketing and distribution choices to retain and grow the profitable but illegal market.

There’s a special-edition Colt handgun known as the Super El Jefe pistol, a term used to refer to cartel bosses, and the Emiliano Zapata 1911 pistol, engraved with the Mexican revolutionary’s pronouncement: “It is better to die standing than to live on your knees.”

Lawyers for the gun manufacturers – including Smith & Wesson Brands, Beretta USA, Glock and Colt’s Manufacturing Co. – declined to comment for this article. In court filings, they say the Mexican government is using the litigation to limit Second Amendment gun rights in the United States, rights that the conservative Supreme Court has expanded in recent years.

They warn of harmful implications for other U.S. companies if the justices allow the foreign government’s case to proceed.

“In its zeal to attack the firearms industry, Mexico seeks to raze bedrock principles of American law that safeguard the whole economy,” wrote Noel J. Francisco, who is representing the companies and was solicitor general during Trump’s first term.

There is good reason Mexican narcos seek U.S. weapons. Under Mexico’s strict gun laws, it is extremely difficult for citizens to purchase a firearm. The country has only two legal gun stores – both run by the Mexican military. It can take months to complete the requirements for a purchase.

While there are no firm figures on weapons trafficked from the United States into Mexico, a 2013 study by the University of San Diego estimated the number at 253,000 a year. Only a small fraction are confiscated. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has found that at least two-thirds of the roughly 30,000 weapons seized in Mexico and sent for tracing per year originated in the United States.

For two decades, U.S. law has provided broad protection for gunmakers from civil lawsuits filed by people injured by their firearms. Mexico’s lawsuit is the first filed by a foreign government in U.S. courts over gun violence abroad.

A U.S. district judge in Massachusetts dismissed the complaint in 2022, finding that the companies were shielded from liability by the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit reversed the judge’s decision based on a narrow exception to the law that allows suits against a gunmaker that knowingly violates state or federal statutes. The appeals court said Mexico had sufficiently alleged that the companies have been “aiding and abetting” the illegal trafficking of guns by supplying dealers known to sell guns that cross the border.

The gun companies are “not mere passive observers of the buyer’s illegal activity, but more akin to a calculated and willing participant in the supply chain that ends with a profitable illegal firearm market in Mexico,” the unanimous three-judge panel wrote.

Rings of gun buyers

Most American weapons seized in Mexico originate in Arizona or Texas. The most active gun-trafficking route runs from Phoenix to the Nogales border, U.S. officials say.

Last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped a vehicle heading across the border with 42 AK-47 rifles. “That’s a significant load of dangerous or powerful firearms,” Michael Humphries, the CBP director in Nogales, Arizona, said in an interview. “We’re not getting stuff that they’re going to go dove hunting” with.

Such weapons are often trafficked through “straw purchasers” – U.S. citizens with no criminal records who are recruited to buy weapons for others who aren’t eligible.

Criminal cases in U.S. courts illustrate how the illicit market works.

Javier Ramos-Velderrain was a 19-year-old college student when he walked into a gun store in Tucson in June 2020. Employees were happy to sell him an AK-47-style semiautomatic rifle.

Within four days, he returned for another.

Then, in a shop outside Phoenix that fall, he purchased a .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle, capable of shooting armor-piercing bullets the size of carrots. Three weeks later, CBP officers spotted the weapon in a blue bag in a Chevy Suburban van crossing from Nogales, Arizona, into Mexico. It turned out to be one of 15 rifles and pistols packed into the vehicle, bound for Mexican crime groups.

Arms smugglers will often assemble a ring of buyers like Ramos, then gather the weapons and transport them over the border.

At the time of his arrest, Ramos was working part time at Panda Express and at a call center. He spent $15,833.97 on firearms from a variety of stores during a period in which he earned only a few thousand dollars from his legitimate jobs, prosecutors said in court records. Ramos was paid $1,000 per gun purchase, they said.

He was convicted in October 2023 of making a false statement while buying the sniper rifle and sentenced last year to 21 months in prison. His lawyer, Charles Thomas, declined to comment.

The driver of the van packed with the 15 weapons had an even more surprising profile. Luis Manuel Bray-Vazquez was a Mexican employed as a driver for the U.S. consulate just over the border from Nogales, Arizona, according to court documents.

He used official U.S. vehicles to smuggle weapons to a criminal organization in Mexico, earning $150 for each rifle and $50 for each pistol he ferried, according to a U.S. criminal complaint. Bray-Vazquez pleaded guilty to weapons smuggling charges and was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.

The legal argument

As part of its lawsuit, Mexico is seeking billions in financial damages to account for the cost to its military, police and judicial system from cartel violence fueled by U.S.-made weapons.

Nearly half a million Mexicans have been killed since the government declared a “war on drugs” in 2006, including politicians and journalists. More than 100,000 people are registered as disappeared.

The appeals court said the government’s suit could proceed despite strong federal protections for the gunmakers because it was “foreseeable that Mexican drug cartels – armed with defendants’ weapons – would use those weapons to commit violent crimes” that caused the Mexican government to incur costs.

Jonathan Lowy, president of Global Action on Gun Violence, who is co-counsel to Mexico, said the issue before the Supreme Court should have broad appeal.

If people are concerned about the trafficking of fentanyl and overdoses in the United States or migration from Mexico to the United States, he said, “they should also be concerned about stopping the crime-gun pipeline to Mexico, because that pipeline facilitates all of those problems.”

The gun manufacturers say their alleged connection to the harm is too tenuous, noting that Mexico has not shown that the firearms industry is coordinating with illicit sellers, smugglers or cartels.

When a criminal misuses a lawful product, the companies say, the criminal is responsible for his actions, not the manufacturer or seller. They argue that under Mexico’s theory, a company like Budweiser could be liable for failing to cut off the supply of beer to college town bars filled with underage drinkers.

David Kopel, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, joined a brief on behalf of the National Rifle Association in support of the companies. It says that Mexico-style cases could “bankrupt the American firearms industry … despite failing to allege that the manufacturers violated any law, were aware of any unlawful sale, or took any affirmative act intended to further a crime.”

An interstate lined with gun shops

On the U.S. side of the border, there are more than 100 gun stores tucked along the 70-mile stretch of Interstate 19 from Tucson to Nogales, according to a separate lawsuit filed by Mexico against several Arizona gun dealers.

Many are low-key establishments in shopping plazas or on quiet roads.

The suit says the vast majority of guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico come from a small number of U.S. dealers.

At Baja AZ Guns, a few miles from the Mexican border, Susan Andersen says she watches for suspicious types – the young person who wants to buy a $15,000, top-of-the-line .50-caliber sniper rifle, or the purchaser who comes in often buying a lot of weapons.

With gray hair and rhinestone-trimmed glasses, she looks like a grandmother, she acknowledges. But her earrings are tiny jeweled handguns, and she’s got a pistol strapped to her ankle. She’s a New Yorker and a former corrections officer at Rikers Island.

If she can help it, no one will get away with anything at her shop in Rio Rico, Arizona, she said.

“Am I psychic? No. I do the best I can.”

Unlike a popular stereotype, “we’re not here handing guns out to people,” Andersen said. “The vast majority of gun shops follow the rules.”