Firearm industry 'responsible controls'
legislation is existential threat to gun owners

Anti-gun activists think they have figured out a way around the Second Amendment, democratic accountability, and the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) to impose a limitless raft of 'gun control' on the American people.

The strategy is to enact what civilian disarmament advocates term "firearm industry responsibility" laws in anti-gun states. These laws impose a duty on members of the firearms industry to institute "reasonable controls" over the sale and distribution of their products, on top of the mountains of explicit state and federal statutes and regulations they are tasked to comply with, lest they face ruinous civil liability.

The term "reasonable controls" is vague and ill-defined, resulting in the decidedly unreasonable circumstance where gun industry members can't know how to comply with the law. These statutes empower anti-gun government officials to abuse the vague language in a manner that imposes ever-expanding restrictions on the industry and its customers, limited only by the officials' imagination. Moreover, this legislation impacts not just firearms dealers, manufacturers, and distributors as they would be understood under federal law, but includes any business involved in the stream of commerce for ammunition or any other firearm-related products.

The goal is to use the threat of devastating civil liability to force the firearms industry to restrict the rights of themselves and their customers by instituting gun controls that were not enacted (and often rejected) through the democratic process and may be found unconstitutional if imposed directly by government. …