dk-corriveau
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Despite some questionable quotes from the judge, this is a great ruling. 
D.C. Lawsuit Against Gun Makers Dismissed
Judge: Federal Law Protecting Manufacturers Trumps Local Law Protecting Residents
By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 22, 2006; 2:57 PM
A lawsuit in the District against gun makers was dismissed today by a D.C. Superior Court judge who ruled that the suit was precisely the sort of claim that a new federal law was intended to block.
In a 37-page opinion, Judge Brook Hedge wrote that the city and the federal government had two competing policies, and only one could prevail.
The D.C. Council, she wrote, had determined that assault weapons have "little or no social benefit but at the same time pernicious consequences for the health and safety of District residents and visitors." But Congress, she wrote, "has trumped local law by passing legislation to protect the profits of such manufacturers."
The suit, by the city and by victims of gun violence and their families, was aimed at holding gun manufacturers liable for the flow of firearms into the District and for the carnage created by the sale of illegal weapons.
Under D.C. law, only law enforcement officers are permitted to carry firearms in the District. But gun violence is a chronic problem in the city, nourished by a steady supply of weapons from Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and other states with more relaxed gun laws.
District of Columbia v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp , filed in 2000, was an attempt to address that issue. The plaintiffs faced formidable challenges in the courts and on Capitol Hill, and an act of Congress last year appears now to have sealed the fate of the lawsuit and others like it.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, signed into law by President Bush last October after wining easy approval in House and Senate, enacted broad liability protections for the country's gun industry.
Gun-control advocates blame gun makers for lax distribution systems that allowed criminals easy access to assault weapons. Local governments sued to force changes in the way guns are sold and to recoup some of the costs of treating people shot, particularly by high-powered weapons.
The suit filed by the District and gun violence victims was among the most aggressive undertaken. Like similar suits around the country, it claimed the gun manufacturers were creating a public nuisance with their products and that they were conducting business with little or no regard for the risks their products created.
But it went a step further, arguing that under a 1990 District law, the manufacturer, dealer or importer of an assault weapon or machine gun can be held liable for damages arising from an injury or death that results from the discharge of the firearm in the District.
In 2002, D.C. Superior Court Judge Cheryl M. Long threw out the lawsuit, rejecting the nuisance and negligence claims and concluding that 1990 statute, the Assault Weapon Manufacturing Strict Liability Act, was unconstitutional.
In 2004, a three- judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld much of Long's ruling but said the city could sue under the strict liability statute. Last April the full court of appeals upheld that ruling, sending the case back to Superior Court.
After Congress passed the new liability protections for the gun industry in 2005, and after the president signed them into law, the gun manufacturers petitioned Superior Court to dismiss the suit.
The plaintiffs countered that their suit met an exception in the new federal law, and that in any event the new federal law was unconstitutional.
But Hedge rejected the plaintiffs' legal arguments.
"The Court is faced with a classic tension between two elected braches of different governments, two equally clear legislative judgments, but each enforcing opposite policies," Hedge wrote.
"At bottom," she said, the federal law was enacted "to prohibit the very types of lawsuits the Strict Liability Act allows."
And unless she was persuaded that the federal law was unconstitutional -- which she was not -- the federal law would prevail, she wrote.
