Frightening decision in District of Columbia v. Beretta, U.S.A. today: the highest court in D.C. upheld the legality of a provision that allowed victims of gun violence to sue gun manufacturers for the misuse of their products. (The law in question applies only to “machine guns”, but then defines “machine guns” to include semi-automatic weapons with large magazines.) As Professor Volokh notes, this has the effect of permitting the D.C. city council to regulate gun sales nationwide. The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy and Robert A. Levy have written elsewhere that national litigation reform legislation to bar such gun lawsuits is a violation of federalism principles, but the Beretta case shows how misguided that position is: individual states (and, in the case of DC, a single city) can create liability regimes that affect interstate commerce nationally. Healy and Levy suggest that the remedy for businesses is to “withdraw from doing business in a state that has an oppressive tort regime” but that doesn’t help gun manufacturers who don’t do business in the District of Columbia to begin with.

Filed under: federalism, guns