24 Time November 4, 2019
A law protecting
gunmakers faces
a fight in court
By Melissa Chan
^
Jai Gillard visits
a memorial on
May 21, 2018, for
the 10 victims of
a shooting three
days earlier at
Santa Fe High
School in TexasTheBrief Nation
OrlandO pOlice Officer adam Gruler was in charGe Of
security at the Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016, when he heard
gunfire on the dance floor, followed by a chorus of screams in
the dark. He sprang into action, authorities say, exchanging
gunshots with the shooter and calling for backup. He was in-
stantly dubbed a hero, receiving a valor award and an invita tion
to the State of the Union address. Praise came from all over.
Then Gruler was sued. Nearly two years after the massacre,
a group of survivors claimed in federal court that Gruler didn’t
do enough to stop the gunman, Omar Mateen, who killed
49 people and injured 53 others. The victims said Gruler “aban-
doned his post” at the front door, allowing Mateen to stroll into
the crowded nightclub with a handgun and a semi automatic
rifle. The suit also named the city and 30 police officers, accus-
ing them of not entering the club fast enough to “neutralize”
Mateen, who died in a shootout with police. “We deserved bet-
ter,” survivor Keinon Carter said at a news conference in June
2018 when the lawsuit was announced.
Family members of slain Pulse victims and survivors also
sued Google, Facebook, Twitter, the gunman’s employer, his
wife and Pulse owner Barbara Poma in separate lawsuits. “I
know that she is not a bad person,” Aryam Guerrero, whose
brother was killed at Pulse and whose family is among those
suing Poma, says of the club owner. “But in this day and age,
with all the mass shootings, there should have been more secu-
rity there. She should have known better.”
A flurry of lawsuits were also filed after 58 people died at a
music-festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017. More than 450
survivors sued the owners of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Ca-
sino, where Stephen Paddock opened fire into the crowd; the
promoters of the country-music festival; and Paddock’s estate.
On Oct. 3, MGM Resorts International, which owns Mandalay
Bay, said it would pay up to $800 million to families of those
killed and hundreds who were injured.
Notably absent from any of the defendants were makers of
the weapons used in the deadly rampages, who are shielded by
the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). The
federal law largely safeguards firearm and ammunition manu-
facturers and sellers from liability when their products are used
in crimes, but in what could prove a precedent-setting case, rel-
atives of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting are suing
Remington Arms, which made the Bushmaster rifle used in the
killing of 20 first-graders and six educators in Connecticut in
- They allege Remington violated state law in its market-
ing tactics and hence is not protected by the PLCAA.
Josh Koskoff, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families, says
the PLCAA has opened the door to “scapegoating” of people
who bear no blame for mass shootings. Robert Spitzer, a gun-
policy expert and chairman of the political-science department
at the State University of New York at Cortland, agrees. While
America is a famously litigious society, he says, lawsuits such as
those filed after the Pulse and Las Vegas
shootings are not frivolous. Instead,
they’re by-products of the lack of legis-
lation that might prevent mass shoot-
ings. “The legal avenue becomes a way to
try and at least hold people responsible
when the political system has failed to a
great degree to act,” Spitzer says.
The PLCAA was enacted in 2005 fol-
lowing pressure from the firearms indus-
try after a series of lawsuits against major
gunmakers, including a groundbreaking
1999 case in which a Brooklyn jury de-
cided that more than a dozen gun manu-
facturers were liable in shootings be-
cause of negligent distribution practices.
The verdict was overturned on appeal in
2001, but the case shook gunmakers.
Since becoming law, the PLCAA has
deterred families from suing gunmak-
ers even when they feel they’re the big-
gest culprits in a loved one’s death. That
was the case for Christine Leinonen,
whose only child, Christopher “Drew”
Leinonen, 32, died in the Pulse shooting.
“I had to look at what exactly happened
and why did it happen and who had a
duty to my son and who reneged on that
duty,” Leinonen says. The gunman was
dead, so she focused blame on his weap-