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Consumer protection group warns of leftists’ new gun-grabbing tactic – Nuisance lawsuits

March 11, 2023 | | Print Article

The Alliance For Consumers (AFC), a consumer protection group, warned Republican governors in a letter on Friday that leftist attorneys are attempting to use nuisance lawsuits to backdoor the outlawing of guns in an effort to weaponize the judicial system against conservatives.

The warning comes as many state legislatures flipped red in the last election. The admonishment to GOP legislators is advising them to be on the lookout for progressive activists bent on attacking gun rights through legal actions.

“With victories through the legislative process becoming harder to achieve, the progressive left is increasingly looking to an alliance of activists, officials, and trial lawyers to weaponize the judicial system against conservatives and impose key policy priorities by way of public nuisance lawsuits,” AFC president O.H. Skinner urgently wrote.

“Under the guise of compensation for injuries to the overall public interest, these lawsuits open the door to courts imposing sweeping policy solutions outside the traditional governmental processes or otherwise reshaping the economy through massive money transfers,” he noted.

The use of public nuisance laws is wickedly ingenious even though they vary from state to state. They have been used previously to purportedly protect consumers and individuals against things like pollution and hazardous public spaces.

Skinner pointed out that “activists have found a way to use the court system as a weapon to force companies and consumers to comply with a progressive worldview without legislative oversight or public scrutiny.”

“If you hear someone say ‘we should bring a nuisance case,’ that is a Trojan horse to accomplish something that you probably don’t agree with,” he told Fox News Digital in an interview.

He continued by charging that “the true goal of most nuisance suits over things like plastics, fossil fuels, or firearms is seemingly to remove products and services from in the market that do not align with the progressive agenda.”

Just as leftist attorneys have made the case that fossil fuels and plastics are bad for the environment, Skinner believes they will also claim that guns can cause public harm, and therefore, courts should curb their use because of this “public nuisance.”

Skinner highlights the fact that this is already occurring. In a case from last year, a leading personal injury law firm, Napoli Shkolnik, filed public nuisance suits on behalf of New York cities Buffalo and Rochester. That suit asserted that major American firearms manufacturers’ work to design, produce, market, and sell has “created, contributed to, and maintained the public nuisance of unlawful possession, transportation and disposition of firearms, and the utilization of guns in the commission of an offense.”

“Activists have largely been able to hide the ideological aspects of public nuisance litigation,” he commented. “But make no mistake: public nuisance claims are about liberal control, not just about money, and certainly not about helping consumers.”

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen told Fox News Digital in an interview that while public nuisance laws “have their place and are a tool that needs to exist,” governors and state legislators should consider changing such laws so they cannot be abused.

“We see these progressive groups getting creative and trying more and more different alternative avenues they can to get around some of these preemption laws,” Knudsen remarked.

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