Something many of us have been warning about keeps unfolding. While attempts to pass any sort of direct gun bans through Congress have been stymied for a long time and Supreme Court decisions like New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen have been instrumental in overturning unconstitutional state gun control laws, it is clear that the anti-2A forces are not giving up and are instead increasingly doing an end-around on Congress via lawfare.
This is something I wrote about back in 2021, comparing the tactics of gun grabbers to those of pro-life groups before the overturning of Roe v Wade: Two Can Play That Game. The name of the game is incrementalism, making it slowly more difficult to do business. Pro-life groups did this by pushing small restrictions on abortion, adding rules and regulations that made it more costly and therefore less profitable to murder unborn children. It works the same way with gun control advocates. Back in the post I mentioned, I wrote about Gavin “Gruesome” Newsom and his efforts to make it easier for private citizens to sue gun manufacturers when Da’quimby kills La’smegma in a drive-by.
Anyway, this will be the model for lawfare on the state level against the 2nd Amendment going forward. If you can make it prohibitively expensive to manufacture and sell firearms to civilians, companies will stop doing it or at least make it so costly that consumers won’t be able to afford them. This will work not only with actual firearms but also with ammo, parts, accessories, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Holosun or some other optics company being sued after a shooting for making a firearm “more lethal”.
Here is the latest effort on the lawfare front….
Families of the children who survived the 2022 Robb Elementary mass shooting and parents of those who died have filed a lawsuit against UPS and FedEx, claiming the shipping companies played a part in the massacre that left two teachers and 19 children dead by transporting the rifle and trigger accessories to the gunman.
The lawsuit, filed in Bexar County last month, seeks a jury trial to determine compensatory and punitive damages. The suit claims that the actions of the shipping company caused the families to “suffer and sustain severe physical, mental, and emotional harm” that has resulted and will continue to result in medical expenses and losses of income throughout their lives.
FedEx delivered the AR-15-style rifle to Oasis Outback, which is where the shooter picked up the firearm, the lawsuit said. UPS sent the Hell-Fire trigger modification, which allows a semiautomatic rifle to shoot at a faster rate of speed, to the shooter.
https://archive.vn/dm8He
The lawsuit would seem to be without merit. Both the AR-15 and the trigger modification are perfectly legal products, shipped under tight controls. All firearms shipped in the U.S. must be delivered to a valid Federal Firearms License (FFL) holder and those FFLs are subject to strict rules about transfers and are under the oversight of the ATF. Meritless or not, frivolous lawsuits like these might find a sympathetic activist judge and jury who will go along, and even if that doesn’t happen there is an enormous cost to defending a company against lawsuits like this.
For now UPS and FedEx are both saying they are going to fight these baseless lawsuits but at some point these lawsuits will become more expensive than it is worth for FedEx and UPS to keep shipping firearms. The current CEO of FedEx is a desi named Raj Subramaniam who was born in India. At UPS the CEO is Carol Tomé (born Carol Louise Buchenroth, you can draw your own conclusions). Neither strikes me as someone naturally inclined to stand up for gun owners. There is a whole other conversation to be had about the shifting of corporate leadership away from heritage Americans and what that means, but not for today.
Part of what makes this the golden era for gun buying is that you can buy pretty much any legal firearm you want, from high end AR-15s and hunting rifles to pistols in every caliber, configuration and price-point under the sun to old surplus firearms, and have them delivered to your local FFL for a modest transfer fee (we still only charge $20). Companies like Palmetto State are mostly direct to customer outfits, making tens of thousands of AR-15s and AKs and pretty much shipping them right from the manufacturing floor to the local gun shop. If PSA and others like CMMG can’t ship direct to local gun stores, their business model will be severely hampered. Even your local FFL is getting their firearm inventory shipped by their wholesalers almost exclusively via UPS and FedEx. Without those two shippers (USPS also ships firearms but is a much smaller player), the ability of gun stores to get inventory is going to be kneecapped. The holds true for ammo and parts.
While these lawsuits are partly a money grab (the families are also suing Instagram and Activision along with Daniel Defense because the Uvalde shooter played Call of Duty), they are also aimed at shutting down a critical pipeline for gun-owners. It won’t happen with this lawsuit but just as the Firearms Policy Coalition likes to meme, the lawsuit printer runs non-stop, and it works for gun control groups just as much as it does for pro-2A groups like the FPC and GOA.
I keep saying we are in a unique window right now for buying firearms and while most of you presumably already have a bunch, now is the time to make sure you have the right firearms and ammo and accessories. Maybe it is time to upgrade your main rifle or your everyday carry pistol. Perhaps an upgraded trigger? You can always use more magazines. Or spare parts, Big Country did a good post the other day about what bits and bobs you should have for your AR: Needed Some Time Off and What to Have to Service Your Boom-Stick. Point is, don’t take for granted how awesome things are for gun buyers right now, it will not last.
You have been warned. What you do with that warning is your bidness.
Those attorneys are just throwing sh*t at the wall of anybody possibly connected that has deep pockets in order to use the threat of putting crying parents and dead kids in front of a jury for the sympathy vote to get a settlement. It is a perfect example of just how screwed up our legal system is, and since our legal system is run by and for lawyers it is not going to get changed anytime soon. It is just like asking government to fix itself and is actually a very closely related part of that problem as well.
The sad part is that it will probably work.
In this case, I don’t really blame the companies if they decide not to handle firearms in the future. To their mind, it will constitute reputational risk all out of proportion with the revenue from that small portion of their overall business and I think they would be correct in that assessment.
The attorneys undoubtedly have financial arrangements with anti-gun groups so that they get paid for these legal shenanigans either way.
BITFD, it can’t be saved.
It’s a multipronged attack that has been going on for decades. Lawfare and bills and NGOs which still somehow are funded by the govt but totally aren’t the govt and media pushes and so on. It’s been used against everything They’re against and Arthur’s right about loading up on what spare parts/accessories/guns you can.
Printing is an excellent tool as well with how much it has evolved since the Liberator.
delivered to your local FFL for a modest transfer fee (we still only charge $20)
Sheesh. Academy Sports charged me $60 for a transfer from PSA on a Remington 870. Wish you were operating in my A.O.
I’d still like to see how that little shit with no job, no money, no diploma, no resources, and no driver’s license was able to buy thousands of dollars of high end gear. There was definitely some wind-up toy thing going on from the available evidence. Maybe the “families” should sue the FBI for information instead.
Have the families of the Uvalde victims sued the monumentally/criminal & cowardly police department for their craven behavior on that day?
The families are way off the correct targets.
Right answer.
Qualified Immunity means those cops will never be held accountable no matter what. Born in racism in 1967 when white Supreme Court justices invented it out of thin air to protect white police officers from the repercussions of the 1871 KKK Act after they arrested black ministers for walking into a Whites Only area in protest. We’ve been paying for that racist mistake ever since. Just like the judicial overreach of Roe v Wade finally was fixed, it needs to die.
@ take:
The parents have sued the Texas DPS (DEI statie trurds).
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/22/uvalde-shooting-texas-dps-lawsuit/
I have no sympathy for the parents, as they are part of the problem. They will probably sue everybody from God on down.
Go ahead and grind UPS and FedEx down to a halt. Along with every other useful private organization. But please make sure the police at all levels have the most difficult scenarios to operate. It only speeds up the inbound demise and chaos.
Pedos want to outlaw guns, free speech, the right to assemble, and rights to privacy for normal people while advancing infanticide, child sex abuse and all manner of criminality for leftists and foreign invaders. The matter is insane and infuriating. In other news, I am daily finding it more and more hilarious how Caitlyn Clark is causing so much angst amongst the government sponsored victim class in the wimmins sportsball league. CC is well positioned to be the color-barrier-breaking athlete of our generation, facing the insults, epithets and ill will of her jealous and insecure fellow athletes. I hope she burns that league to the ground with excellence, effort and class and then, having burned it to the ground, turns her back on it all in order to have a mess of White babies.
(((Lawyers))) and (((judges)))
(((Every.)))
(((Single.)))
(((Time.)))
Pretty soon they’ll sue the paving company and the water department.
FedEx already changed their rules almost two years ago to require that all firearms be shipped from FFL to FFL, even though Federal law allows firearms to be shipped direct from owner to the manufacturer’s service point for repair and directly back to the owner.
UPS discontinued allowing owners to ship firearms back to the manufacturer for repair years ago and the UPS Store locations never have allowed it.
The USPS has never allowed non FFL holders to ship firearms, in my memory. Not that I would trust anything but certified, Express mail, even if I did. Theft is rampant in the USPS.