The Mexican government is seeking billions of dollars in damages for arms suppliers’ role in cross-border gun trafficking.
The government of Mexico is suing U.S. gun-makers for their role in facilitating cross-border gun trafficking that has supercharged violent crime in Mexico.
The lawsuit seeks US$10 billion in damages and a court order to force the companies named in the lawsuit – including Smith & Wesson, Colt, Glock, Beretta and Ruger – to change the way they do business. In January, a federal appeals court in Boston decided that the industry’s immunity shield, which so far has protected gun-makers from civil liability, does not apply to Mexico’s lawsuit.
As a legal scholar who has analyzed lawsuits against the gun industry for more than 25 years, I believe this decision to allow Mexico’s lawsuit to proceed could be a game changer. To understand why, let’s begin with some background about the federal law that protects the gun industry from civil lawsuits.
Yeah, I suspect most guns are obtained unlawfully via two means: theft and undocumented pass-offs. Part of why serial numbers are removed is so the route by which the gun got to someone is obscured. You have someone willing to lawfully buy firearms or burglarize them, dremmel off the serial numbers so they’re harder to trace, then sell it off for whatever at a profit.
Also, I think when they say ‘removeable serial number’, they are absolutely counting dremmel-able numbers on the body. I could see manufacturers being able to embed a copy of the serial number; either throughout body of the part or inside the body of the part. For example: every printer in the US has a signature of dots it leaves on the copies it prints, which allow that copy to be traced back to that specific printer. That would undoubtedly complicate manufacturing, though. You’re going from precision milling some billet to all of sudden having to embed some signature into/onto that billet.