Gun control advocates often claim that the firearm industry enjoys a level of protection that no other industry has. That’s not entirely true, but the exceptions are few. What they fail to understand, though, isn’t that the gun lobby was simply so powerful that it forced lawmakers to extend that protection to them. Instead, it was a reaction to anti-gun groups suing stores and manufacturers over the actions of third parties. Someone shot up a neighborhood with a gun, and they wanted to sue the people who made the gun.
So, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was passed.
Still, anti-gunners keep trying to find a way around the PLCAA, and the University of Wyoming’s Firearms Research Center actually has an interesting case study of what that looks like.
The Philadelphia case, City of Philadelphia v. Tanner Operations, LLC et al. (C.P. Philadelphia County, Docket No. 230702394), was filed in July 2023 against three area firearms retailers: Tanner’s Sport Center, Frank’s Gun Shop & Shooting Range, and Delia’s Gun Shop. The complaint was co-authored by Everytown Law and the Manhattan firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, and it accused the defendants of facilitating straw purchases—transactions in which a nominally eligible buyer acquires firearms for transfer to someone who cannot legally purchase them. The legal theory sounds deceptively pedestrian. The mechanics of how it was pleaded, and the result it produced, expose the strategy’s purpose with uncomfortable clarity.
The PLCAA Bar and the “Predicate” Workaround
PLCAA provides that a “qualified civil liability action”—defined broadly to encompass any suit against a firearms manufacturer or dealer for harms caused by third-party criminal misuse—“may not be brought in any Federal or State court.” 15 U.S.C. § 7902(a). The statute’s one meaningful opening is the “predicate exception,” which permits a suit to proceed where the defendant “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing” of the firearm, and that violation was a proximate cause of the harm alleged. 15 U.S.C. § 7903(5)(A)(iii).
To exploit that opening, the Philadelphia complaint carefully alleges that each defendant “knew, reasonably should have known, or deliberately avoided knowing” that its customers were engaged in illegal straw purchasing. That disjunctive formulation is not an accident. The “reasonably should have known” and “deliberately avoided knowing” prongs are constructive-knowledge formulations—they describe what a dealer could have deduced from aggregate market signals like time-to-crime statistics and multiple-sale patterns, not what any dealer actually knew about any specific transaction. Importing those prongs into a PLCAA predicate claim stretches “knowingly violated” until the word loses meaning. The Supreme Court, speaking unanimously last year, called that stretch exactly what it is.
This is essentially the same line of “reasoning” that Mexico attempted with its lawsuit against Smith & Wesson. The basic idea is that because they should have known that some stores had a history suggesting they were bad actors, the manufacturer should have acted accordingly. Their supposed failure to act in what Mexico and its attorneys thought was an appropriate manner constituted complicity in the crimes committed.
That was shut down entirely and loudly by a unanimous Supreme Court. Even the liberal justices couldn’t buy that crap.
But when you look at what happened in Philadelphia, we see that it’s not really about having a jury reach a verdict blaming the gun industry for misdeeds. It’s about punishing the industry until it falls apart entirely.
On May 1, 2026—four days before a trial that had been pending for nearly three years—Delia’s Gun Shop filed for Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy. The other two defendants, Frank’s Gun Shop and the successor entity to Tanner’s Sport Center, agreed to settlements containing a provision that neither defendant’s owners could characterize as anything other than business-ending: permanent prohibition from participating in the firearms industry in any capacity.
In other words, the process was the punishment.
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to face a lawsuit, then you know how expensive it can be. It’s stressful, sure, but the cost for attorneys can get ridiculous, and that’s before you ever set foot in a courtroom. In a case like this, anti-gun attorneys will generate as much work for your lawyer to do so that your bill keeps skyrocketing while theirs are paid with donations from anti-gun supporters.
In short, they use their deeper pockets to put you deeper in the hole, until there’s no choice but to shut down. Essentially, three businesses were shut down without having been proven to have done anything wrong. While it’s easy for someone to say, “If they’re in the right, why didn’t they keep fighting?” but when the bank account has dwindled to nothing, you don’t have a lot of options.
This is lawfare. This is the goal of the anti-gun lawsuits.
It’s not about making victims’ families whole, or even about punishing actual bad actors. It’s about punishing anyone who might not be willing to bend the knee to the anti-gun world they want to create.
Over a long enough timeline, every gun store will probably make a sale that turns out to be a straw purchase. More than one, most likely. Even the most conscientious dealer will unknowingly make that sale, and what these people do is swoop in with Everytown’s playbook, say that they should have known, and because they didn’t, they’re responsible.
Since most gun stores are mom-and-pop operations, a lawsuit can devastate them, and that’s the point.
They don’t need gun control if no one is willing to sell guns in the first place. Writer Jonathon Goldstein notes, “Justice Jackson, concurring in Smith & Wesson, identified the phenomenon precisely: such suits seek ‘to turn the courts into common-law regulators’ and to compel the industry to adopt practices that ‘legislatures and voters have declined to prohibit.'” It’s rare you’ll see me agree with Justice Jackson, but in this case, she’s absolutely correct. That’s part of the attempt.
But that’s not all of it. They want to make it untenable for anyone to enter the firearm industry in the first place. They want to intimidate everyone to either stay out or to leave it, all so they can have their way without worrying about that pesky Constitution.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
Help us continue to report on and expose the Democrats’ gun control policies and schemes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Read the full article here
