Sanders’ vote in favor of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) has been much discussed in the context of the litigation brought by the family of Sandy Hook victims against gun manufacturers. On the eve of the New York primary, let’s look at how the PLCAA helped derail a promising legal fight by New York City against gun manufacturers who knowingly or with willful ignorance continuously sold their goods to dealers who fed the black market.
According to Pema Levy in Mother Jones,
In the fall of 2005, the city of New York was preparing a mammoth lawsuit against 14 gun manufacturers and 27 distributors and dealers. The suit set out to prove that the gun industry bore a responsibility for the volume of guns illegally trafficked into the city.
To make its case, the city had marshaled significant evidence showing that gun manufacturers were unwilling to take simple steps to keep their guns out of criminals' hands—and even knowingly fed the criminal gun market. The lawsuit highlighted federal data from 1996 to 1998 that had traced more than 34,000 guns used to perpetrate crimes back to just 137 dealers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms informed gun manufacturers every time a gun used in a crime was traced to their companies, information that would have made it easy for manufacturers to determine which of their distributors and dealers were supplying the black market, yet manufacturers continued to sell guns to those "bad apple" dealers.
However,
...the trial never came. In October 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), granting sweeping legal immunity to the gun industry. Gun manufacturers who lobbied for the bill warned that suits like New York's were a scheme hatched by activist lawyers and judges to bankrupt the gun industry. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), named the New York case on the Senate floor as an example "of the predatory lawsuits" that the PLCAA aimed "to provide for the dismissal of."
After the PLCAA passed, New York's case was thrown out. The city never got its day in court.
...Recently, Clinton has accused Sanders of bowing to the National Rifle Association on this key piece of legislation. Sanders, who hails from a rural state with lax gun laws, has defended his vote as a way to protect the "small mom-and-pop gun shop" in Vermont from frivolous lawsuits.
But Sanders' argument obfuscates the true impact of his vote—namely, that the lawsuits he helped derail once represented the most viable effort in decades to stem the flow of guns onto the black market.
Many of Sanders’ defenders on the gun issue claim that it was legitimate for him to support the PLCAA because a manufacturer shouldn’t be held liable for the misuse of its product (i.e., the use of a gun to murder someone instead of for target practice or hunting). However, as you can see from the above, the PLCAA has been used as a shield for more than just protecting a manufacturer from the misuse of its product. In the case of New York, it prevented the city from going after gun manufacturers who knowingly continued providing their product to unscrupulous dealers who accounted for the vast majority of guns ending up in the black market. Clearly, if the intent of the law was merely to protect “mom and pop” shops, it was vastly overbroad and ill-conceived.
Moreover, it is worth noting that while Sanders was concerned about protecting the gun industry from being sued over harm caused by its products, he had no such sympathy for many other industries, including the fast food, telemarketing, and machine tool manufacturing industries. It appears that for Senator Sanders, his vast distaste for corporations and business interests for some reason fails to extend to gun manufacturers.