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District of Columbia v. Beretta4/21/2005
ndguns to federally licensed dealers. Further down the chain, independent third parties, over whom the manufacturers have no control, divert handguns to unauthorized owners and criminal use.
Id. at 541. The same court in City of Philadelphia v. Beretta, U.S.A., Corp., 277 F.3d 415 (3d Cir. 2002), rejected the city's attempt "to shorten the causal chain by arguing that the 'thriving illegal market . . . injures , even before any guns acquired in the illegal market are actually used in the commission of a crime.'" Id. at 424. This assertion, the court explained, "does not reduce the links that separate a manufacturer's sale of a gun to a licensee and the gun's arrival in the illegal market through a distribution scheme that is . . . lawful" and a succession of unlawful third-party acts (such as straw purchases) "likely [to be] . . . long and . . . varied." Id. (footnote omitted).
Most recently, the Supreme Court of Illinois unanimously rejected a public nuisance claim by the City of Chicago almost identical to the one made here (unlike in the present suit, the defendant-class there included retail gun dealers as well as manufacturers and distributors). See City of Chicago v. Beretta, U.S.A. Corp., 821 N.E.2d 1099 (Ill. 2004). Recognizing first that the gun manufacturers and distributors were "highly regulated by state or federal law," the court held that a claim for public nuisance could be brought against them only if, at a minimum, they had negligently conducted their business operations, which in turn presupposed that they owed a duty to the Chicago public "to exercise reasonable care to prevent their firearms from ending up in the hands of persons who use and possess them illegally in the City of Chicago." Id. at 1109. The court found no such "duty [of the manufacturers and distributors] owed to the public at large," explaining:
It is reasonably foreseeable, in a nation that permits private ownership of firearms, that criminals will obtain guns and it is not only likely, but inevitable, that injuries and death will result. It is less foreseeable to these defendants that the criminal conduct of individuals who illegally take firearms into a particular community will result in the creation of a public nuisance there. Further, despite plaintiffs' suggestion that the only burden they would place on defendants is the loss of sales to criminals, the magnitude of the burden that plaintiffs seek to impose on the manufacturer and distributor defendants by altering their business practices is immense. Finally, plaintiffs predict only positive consequences if this duty is recognized - the city will be safer and lives will be saved. Such positive consequences are speculative at best, being based on the assumption that criminals will not be able to obtain guns manufactured by other companies and sold by other dealers. The negative consequence of judicially imposing a duty upon commercial enterprises to guard against the criminal misuse of their products by others will be an unprecedented expansion of the law of public nuisance.
Id. at 1126 (emphasis added).
Even as to the retail dealer defendants, alleged (inter alia) to have sold firearms regularly to Chicago buyers although "the words or behavior of the buyers indicate an intention to use the weapon illegally," id. at 1107, the Illinois court rejected the claim that they were the "legal cause" of the public nuisance alleged. The court pointed to "the link between the questions of the existence of a duty and the existence of legal cause" inasmuch as " oth depend on an analysis of foreseeability." Id. at 1136. It noted that it was "not faced with the question of whether a gun dealer might be held liable for neglige
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 District of Columbia Personal Injury Attorneys
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