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Federal Appeals Court Rejects
Camden County Gun Suit
In one of the most strongly worded opinions to date from
an appellate court ruling in the municipal lawsuits against
the firearm industry, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
not only rebuffed Camden County, New Jersey’s “public nuisance”
claims, but flatly rejected as an “absurdity” the novel public
nuisance theory of holding legitimate manufacturers of non-defective,
legal products liable for actions beyond their control.
The unanimous decision, handed down by the three-judge panel
on Nov. 16, upheld an earlier federal trial court’s dismissal
of the county’s suit. The appellate court ruled that the attempt
to stretch public nuisance law “to embrace the manufacture
of handguns would be unprecedented under New Jersey state
law and unprecedented nationwide for an appellate court.”
Furthermore, the court observed, “ . . . if public nuisance
law were permitted to encompass product liability, nuisance
law ‘would become a monster that would devour in one gulp
the entire law of tort.’ If defective products are not a public
nuisance as a matter of law, then the non-defective, lawful
products at issue in this case cannot be a nuisance without
straining the law to absurdity.”
The attempt to extend public nuisance law and apply it to
the firearm industry is one of various novel theories being
brought in numerous politically motivated municipal suits
against gun makers.
“The Third Circuit’s decision is the latest in an unbroken
string of appellate court defeats for those that would hold
manufacturers of legal, highly regulated, non-defective products
responsible for the criminal misuse of their products. The
courts have thoroughly discredited this notion,” said Lawrence
G. Keane, vice president and general counsel of the National
Shooting Sports Foundation. “The time has come in America
for those few remaining politicians to drop their frivolous
suits.”
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