A 26-year effort by the city of Gary, Indiana, to bring a dozen firearms manufacturers and distributors to court over gun violence seemingly came to an end Monday, after the Indiana Court of Appeals dismissed the city’s long-running lawsuit — citing a 2024 state law that bans cities from suing firearms companies.
Attorneys for the city had accused lawmakers of targeting Gary’s 1999 lawsuit with the Firearms Lawsuit Act, which applies to lawsuits filed in or after August 1999, and called the law unconstitutional.
A trial court denied a motion by the companies, including gunmakers Smith & Wesson, Colt and Beretta, to dismiss the case under the act in 2024 and wrote that quashing the decades-long case would be a “manifest injustice.” This week, a three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s law is constitutional and ordered the lower court’s judgment reversed.
“Unfair as it may appear, the legislature can legally do exactly what it did in this case,” the judges wrote in a unanimous decision.
Critics of the lawsuit had called the Gary case the last remnant of a decades-old campaign by American cities to sue firearms companies that mostly faded after Congress passed a law shielding the companies from liability suits. They celebrated the Indiana ruling as the final blow to that movement.
“This is a tremendous day for the rule of law, common sense and the firearm industry,” Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president of the firearms trade association the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said in a statement.
Attorneys for Gary said they would coordinate with the city to decide how to proceed.
“We just want the people of Gary to have their day in court,” said Douglas Letter, chief legal officer at Brady, a gun-control nonprofit representing Gary. “As opposed to having the legislature come in and say, ‘Gary, the residents of Gary, cannot pursue this perfectly normal type of lawsuit.’”
Attorneys for the companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) celebrated the ruling.
“This result helps to ensure that firearms remain available to law-abiding citizens, preventing a single city or handful of cities from using lawsuits to force changes to the way they are sold,” he said in a statement. “Our office will continue defending your constitutional rights and keeping firearms accessible to responsible, law-abiding citizens.”
Gary filed its lawsuit in August 1999, accusing national gunmakers and local firearms sellers of negligence and creating a public nuisance by allowing guns to proliferate in the city. The city had seen a soaring homicide rate in the years preceding the lawsuit, and the Chicago Tribune deemed Gary the murder capital of the nation in 1994. (Violent crime in Gary and Lake County has decreased in recent years, authorities said in December.)
Police investigations in Gary before the 1999 lawsuit had found that gun stores in the city were lax in vetting potential buyers and allowed restricted purchasers, like juveniles or felons, to acquire guns by having others buy them, ProPublica reported in 2024.
The Gary case joined a wave of similar lawsuits around the country that sought to hold gunmakers accountable for gun crimes. Most of the cases were stymied when Congress passed a law shielding gun companies from liability suits in 2005. The defendants in the Gary case argued they were not liable for the actions of their customers. But Indiana courts upheld the case after several previous attempts to dismiss it.
The wrangling over the Gary lawsuit stretched over two decades. The case had proceeded to discovery by 2023, and attorneys for the city accused the defendants of not complying with discovery orders, according to court documents. Rokita, the Indiana attorney general, said in a 2024 interview that the city’s discovery requests, including for information about gun owners, were unreasonable.
In January 2024, Indiana lawmakers proposed a Firearms Lawsuit Act that permits only the state to bring civil lawsuits against firearms companies and prohibits any other “political subdivisions” from doing so.
State Rep. Chris Jeter (R), who introduced the bill, said in a hearing that month that the proposal aimed to quash the Gary lawsuit to align with federal laws and stop the disclosure of information about “lawful gun owners.” He added it was unusual that the lawsuit had continued for 24 years.
“It just will not go away,” Jeter said. “The courts keep kind of finding these loopholes to keep the case alive.”
Mayor Eddie Melton, in a statement that month, called the proposal a “morally bankrupt bill that protects the rights of manufacturers and disregards the lives of people in communities like Gary.”
The Firearms Lawsuit Act passed and was signed into law in March 2024. In their brief to the Indiana Court of Appeals last year, attorneys for Gary argued that the law is unconstitutional because it specifically targeted the city’s case.
“The Firearms Lawsuit Act is clearly not a statute primarily designed to establish substantive rights or responsibilities for the citizens of Indiana,” the attorneys wrote. “Instead, it was quite explicitly intended to thwart a particular, ongoing action.”
The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s legislature was within its rights to impose the restriction and that it did not single out Gary because it applied to all cities and counties across the state.
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