March 22, 2005

Rep. Chris Cannon, Chairman
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law
House Judiciary Committee
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Rep. Cannon:

I write in support of H.R. 800, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, on which the Subcommittee earlier this month held a hearing. As you may recall, I was a witness at the April 2, 2003 hearing on the predecessor bill, then styled H.R. 1036. (my testimony then). This brief note is just to emphasize that the passage of time has made the case for this measure even stronger.

In the intervening two years, the courts have continued their record of overwhelmingly rejecting requests to invent new law so as to hold gun manufacturers and lawful gun sellers liable for later criminal misuse of guns. Unfortunately, it has always been the strategy of some anti-gun litigators 1) to count on getting lucky somewhere, most likely in a court predisposed by local political climate against the majority view; 2) to use the expense and distraction of litigation itself as a club with which to demand settlement. And unfortunately, there is reason to believe that both of these strategies remain a material danger to the business of lawful gunmaking and -selling.

 In recent years, anti-gun forces have pushed a third line of attack, namely trying to persuade jurisdictions sympathetic to their case (typically cities) to enact punitive new liability rules of interstate application. An especially egregious example of this trend is New York City’s enactment of what it calls the Gun Industry Responsibility Act, which purports to impose liability on gunmakers and sellers for entirely lawful sales in other states.  So extreme and ill-considered is GIRA that it has drawn pointed criticism even from legal scholars otherwise well disposed toward firearms litigation. As I point out in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, GIRA and similar legislation elsewhere make it clear that some anti-gun enclaves intend to impose their desired gun-selling laws on the rest of the country.  H.R. 800 is an appropriate -- perhaps the only appropriate -- response.

Yours sincerely,

Walter Olson
Senior Fellow
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Author, “The Rule of Lawyers” (St. Martin’s, 2003)

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