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District of Columbia v. Beretta4/21/2005
the legislative and executive branches were "vastly better suited to address" the "societal problems associated with, or following, legal handgun manufacturing and marketing," "problems which may be as remote from a defendant's conduct and control as these." Id. at 203.
We agree with this reasoning, and are similarly unwilling to recognize a claim of common-law public nuisance that disregards, or greatly dilutes, the liability-limiting factors applied in part III, supra. The sheer number of causal links, and resulting attenuation, that underlie the District's claim of injury from the defendants' invasion of a public right were described by the Supreme Court of Connecticut in a similar suit brought by the city of Bridgeport:
The manufacturers sell the handguns to distributors or wholesalers and . . . those sales are lawful because federal law requires that they be by licensed sellers to licensed buyers. The distributors then sell the handguns to the retailers, sales that, again, are required by federal law to be by licensed sellers to licensed buyers. The next set of links is that the retailer then sells the guns either to authorized buyers, namely, legitimate consumers, or, through the "straw man" method or other illegitimate means, to unauthorized buyers, sales that likely would be criminal under federal law. Next, the illegally acquired guns enter an "illegal market." From that market, those guns end up in the hands of unauthorized users. Next, either the authorized buyers misuse the guns by not taking proper storage precautions or other unwarned or uninstructed precautions, or the unauthorized buyers misuse the guns to commit crimes or other harmful acts. Depending on the nature of the conduct of the users of the guns, the plaintiffs then incur expenses for such municipal necessities as investigation of crime, emergency and medical services for the injured, or similar expenses. Finally, as a result of this chain of events, the plaintiffs ultimately suffer . . . increased costs for various municipal services, . . . injuries and deaths of Bridgeport's residents, . . . and a negative impact on the . . . ability of the residents to live free from apprehension of danger.
Ganim v. Smith & Wesson Corp., 780 A.2d 98, 123-24 (Conn. 2001). The court rejected a claim of public nuisance brought by "a plaintiff situated as remotely from the defendants' conduct as these plaintiffs are, or who present a chain of causation as lengthy and multifaceted as these plaintiffs have." Id. at 133.
Other courts likewise have rejected public nuisance as a basis for holding gun manufacturers and distributors liable, either because they found no duty owed to the public at large to prevent guns from ending up in the hands of criminal wrongdoers, or for reasons of attenuation, remoteness, or inability of those defendants to control the nuisance. See generally Tioga Pub. School Dist. #15 v. United States Gypsum Co., 984 F.2d 915, 920 (8th Cir. 1993) (" iability for damage caused by a nuisance turns on whether the defendant is in control of the instrumentality alleged to constitute a nuisance, since without control a defendant cannot abate the nuisance."). The court in Camden County Bd. of Chosen Freeholders v. Beretta, U.S.A., Corp., 273 F.3d 536 (3d Cir. 2001), for example, recited "a chain of seven links" necessary to "connect the manufacture of handguns with municipal crime-fighting costs," and held that his causal chain is simply too attenuated to attribute sufficient control to the manufacturers to make out a public nuisance claim. In the initial steps, the manufacturers produce lawful handguns and make lawful sales to federally licensed gun distributors, who in turn lawfully sell those ha
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