Congress does not pass many laws that announce their purpose as plainly as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005. Supporters of the law have long described the idea in straightforward terms: if a firearm is made and sold legally, and then later misused by a criminal, the manufacturer should not be treated as the deep-pocket stand-in for the wrongdoer.
Now that promise is being stress-tested in a fight out of New York. The case is National Shooting Sports Foundation v. James, and the underlying question is the kind that always sounds technical right up until it becomes national policy: Can a state re-label gun lawsuits as “public nuisance” claims and, in practice, revive the very liability Congress tried to shut down?
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is the party asking the Supreme Court of the United States to take the case. Rep. Russell Fry of South Carolina is supporting that push by leading an amicus brief joined by 54 House members, urging the Court to review the Second Circuit’s decision that let New York’s law stand.
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The move
New York enacted a public nuisance statute aimed at “gun industry members.” The theory is not that a manufacturer pulled a trigger, but that it supposedly behaved “unreasonably” in the way it made, marketed, or sold a product that later ends up being misused in New York.
The NSSF, the trade association at the center of the case, describes the law as creating “a new civil action under which ‘gun industry members’ may be forced to redress criminals’ misdeeds, on the theory that they ‘unreasonably’ made, sold or marketed a firearm that is later misused in New York.”
That framing is not accidental. “Public nuisance” is a flexible concept in American law. It has historically been used for things like pollution, obstruction of public ways, and threats to public health. The power of the label is that it can turn a broad social harm into a courtroom claim, even when the chain of causation is long and messy.
That flexibility is precisely why PLCAA exists, according to its defenders. The federal statute, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005, was designed to stop a wave of lawsuits that sought to blame lawful gunmakers and sellers for third-party crimes.
What Fry wants decided
Rep. Fry is not a party to the case. He is leading an amicus brief, joined by 54 House members, urging Supreme Court review of the Second Circuit ruling that allowed New York’s public nuisance law to stand, despite the NSSF’s argument that PLCAA preempts it.
Here is the heart of the argument, stripped of the legal pleasantries: federal law is supposed to win when state law directly conflicts with it. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause arrangement means Congress can set a national rule, and states cannot reach the same forbidden result by changing the label on the complaint.
Fry and the House signers warn that if the Second Circuit’s approach is left in place, it becomes more than a New York problem. In their words, Supreme Court review is necessary because the decision “provides a roadmap to other states and localities that wish to impose the very liability that the PLCAA ‘prohibit[s].’”
The bigger tension
This case is not formally a Second Amendment case. It is a preemption case. It is about whether a federal statute blocks a state statute.
But it would be naive to pretend the Second Amendment is not the background music. PLCAA was enacted in a context where lawmakers believed that expansive tort theories could function as a substitute for gun regulation, driving lawful businesses into bankruptcy through litigation pressure rather than through legislation.
That is why Fry’s brief frames the dispute as a clash between a federal law “designed to protect a constitutional right” and state legislation “designed to make the right’s exercise practically impossible.” You do not have to accept every word of that characterization to see the structural concern: if states can impose sweeping, third-party-crime liability through nuisance theories, Congress’s attempted national settlement is not really a settlement at all.
Why it matters
The most important word in this story is not “guns.” It is circumvent.
If a state can repackage a barred cause of action into a different cause of action and still reach the same damages, then federal preemption becomes a paper shield. Today it is firearms. Tomorrow it could be any industry Congress chooses to protect, for any number of policy reasons, from novel liability theories.
That is why this case should interest people who do not own a gun and do not belong to a gun rights group. It is a test of whether Congress can make a national rule about liability and have that rule mean what it says.
The coalition
On Capitol Hill, the amicus effort is not limited to the House. Sen. Ted Cruz is leading a separate Senate-side amicus brief joined by multiple Republican senators, including Jim Banks, John Barrasso, Ted Budd, Shelley Capito, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, Kevin Cramer, Mike Crapo, Steve Daines, Lindsey O. Graham, Chuck Grassley, John Hoeven, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Jim Justice, James Lankford, Mike Lee, Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, Pete Ricketts, James Risch, and Tim Sheehy.
Rep. Fry’s House brief was filed on March 30, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. The timing suggests a coordinated effort to get the Court to take the case and to frame it as something larger than one state’s experiment.
NSSF senior vice president and general counsel Lawrence Keane praised Fry’s efforts to get the Court to step in and review the Second Circuit’s decision. Keane warned, “New York’s law, and several other states that have enacted virtually identical unconstitutional laws at the behest of gun control groups, has already launched a new wave of frivolous lawsuits against our industry that the bipartisan PLCAA was enacted in 2005 to inter.”
The civics question
When Congress passed PLCAA in 2005, it tried to draw a line: criminal misuse is the criminal’s responsibility, not a manufacturer’s automatic liability simply because its product exists.
New York is testing whether that line can be moved by state legislative creativity. The NSSF is asking the Supreme Court whether that is lawful, and Rep. Fry is urging the Court to take up the question by backing the NSSF through an amicus brief.
So here is the uncomfortable civics question: If you believe in federalism, what do you do when a state uses its powers to nullify a federal policy without ever saying the word “nullify”? However the Court answers, it will not just shape gun litigation. It will shape the credibility of Congress itself.