The Illinois Supreme Court ruled 11/18/04 that a public nuisance theory of liability cannot be used against a company that lawfully manufactures and non-negligently sells products -- here, handguns – when there is an intervening transfer of the product to a third party and that person criminally misuses the product. The case had threatened to undermine the ability of any manufacturer to produce and sell products that are lawful and non-defective, simply because they may be criminally misused by some remote possessor of the product, even many years after the original sale by the manufacturer. Most courts have rejected the public nuisance theory in such cases, but a few troubling jurisdictions that are allowing these cases to proceed could wreak havoc on manufacturers. The Court based its ruling on the legal definition of public nuisance. The claim requires proof of a public right, the defendant’s substantial and unreasonable interference with that right, evidence that such interference proximately caused an injury, and the fact of an injury. Examining only the proximate causation issue, it ruled that the acts of the manufacturers do not constitute a legal cause of injury because the causation between their acts (manufacturing the products and selling them to dealers) and the ultimate injury was broken by the intervening criminal acts of third parties not under their control. Those criminal acts are not reasonably foreseeable, just as it is not reasonably foreseeable that an automobile owner who lends his car to another would reasonably expect that person to lend it to a third person who will use it to commit a crime. Any other rule would make the manufacturer of a car liable for the acts of anyone who drove the car, a strict liability rule that is goes beyond reasonable foreseeability. In this case, some of the guns used in the crimes went through six or eight sets of hands before reaching the ultimate criminal users.
The court recognized the highly regulated nature of the firearms industry, and concluded that legal liability for the misuse of guns is a legislative decision and is not within the province of the judicial branch to create.
The NAM filed an amicus brief 3/26/03 urging the Illinois Supreme Court to rule the way it did.