Dive Brief:

• The Firearm Industry Responsibility Act signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom July 12 dodges gun manufacturers’ federal liability protection by holding them responsible for marketing and distribution practices that lead to the use of guns in ways that violate state regulations.
• The law creates a standard of practice that exposes companies to lawsuits if they don’t take reasonable steps to keep others from using their products in illegal ways, not unlike the way pharmaceutical companies are expected to keep drugs from being misused or consumer companies are expected to keep products intended for adults out of the hands of people under 21.
• “Nearly every industry is held liable … guns should be no different,” Newsom said in a statement.

Dive Insight:

The goal is to deter manufacturers from supplying the fraction of dealers responsible for selling the vast majority of guns used in crimes, Tanya Schardt of the Brady gun-control advocacy group told The Los Angeles Times.

“This is just making sure the gun industry is not insulated in ways that every other industry is not,” she said. 

Standard of practice

Gun manufacturers have been protected against criminal liability for crimes committed with their products since 2005, when the federal government enacted the Federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. 

The California law shifts the liability risk away from that by enabling lawsuits against companies that, in contrast to those that put controls in place, don’t try to prevent their products from getting into the wrong hands, such as a straw buyer or a firearm trafficker, or a consumer who’s been prohibited under state or federal law from possessing a gun or someone who’s known as a risk for suicide or violence. 

“Such failures … provide an unfair business advantage to irresponsible firearm industry members,” the law’s preamble says.

As part of their scope, the controls should try to prevent the loss or theft of guns and they shouldn’t let them go to companies in the distribution chain that don’t try to prevent the loss or theft of guns or that try to keep them from being used illegally.

“The firearm industry member,” the law says, should not “sell, distribute, or provide a firearm-related product to a downstream distributor or retailer … who fails to establish, implement, and enforce reasonable controls.”

Eye on “assaultive purpose”

The law also takes aim at what it calls abnormally dangerous guns, which it defines as those intended for “assaultive purposes” rather than self-defense or recreation, like hunting. The ban extends to products, like bump stocks, that convert guns into assault weapons. 

The state, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, already prohibits assault weapons, but gun-rights advocates achieved a big win last year when a federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional. That ruling has since been stayed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but efforts to get the ban lifted continue. 

If it is lifted, gun advocates could try to get the effort to impose liability on companies for guns with “assaultive purpose” lumped into that. 

The new law is already expected to be a target on constitutional grounds. 

Rick Travis, legislative director for the California Rifle and Pistol Association, told the Times the law interferes with 2nd Amendment rights.

“The threat of liability discourages gun manufacturers from making legal products available to Californians,” the Times reported him saying.