Indiana has finally ended one of the country’s longest running courtroom fights over gun violence, shutting down a lawsuit that the City of Gary first filed against major handgun makers in 1999. The case survived more than two decades of procedural attacks, only to be cut off by a new state law that rewrote who is even allowed to sue the firearms industry. At the center of the story is a legal shield that did not exist when Gary went to court, but now reaches back in time to erase the city’s last remaining claim.
The result is more than a local loss for one struggling industrial city. It is a test of how far state lawmakers can go in retroactively protecting a powerful industry from civil liability, and a signal to other cities weighing similar strategies that the rules of the game have changed. I see it as a turning point in the long tug of war between municipal “lawfare” against gunmakers and state efforts to keep those fights out of court altogether.
The lawsuit that outlived political eras
When the City of Gary filed suit in 1999, it joined a wave of big city efforts to treat gun violence as a public nuisance created in part by manufacturers and distributors. Gary officials accused 11 leading handgun makers of flooding the market with cheap pistols, failing to monitor suspicious dealers, and knowingly allowing weapons to flow into illegal channels that plagued neighborhoods with shootings. The complaint targeted companies such as Smith & Wesson, Beretta and Glock, and it framed their business practices as a threat to public safety rather than a series of isolated crimes by individual buyers.
That strategy kept the case alive through more than 25 years of motions and appeals, even as other municipal suits fizzled out or were blocked by new federal protections. Legal scholars have noted that Gary’s case survived “After 25 years of legal wrangling” because Indiana courts repeatedly allowed its public nuisance theory to proceed despite industry efforts to shut it down, turning the file into a kind of time capsule of late 1990s gun policy debates that never quite reached a jury verdict. The city’s persistence made the lawsuit a symbol of resistance to broad immunity for gunmakers, which is why a new state statute was eventually drafted specifically “aimed at extinguishing the suit,” as one analysis of the Gary litigation has explained.
How Gary tried to blame the gun industry
At the heart of Gary’s complaint was a simple but controversial premise: that gunmakers and wholesalers should share responsibility for the predictable criminal misuse of their products when they ignore obvious warning signs in their distribution networks. Blaming individual shooters, the city argued, ignored the way certain manufacturers allegedly courted “Saturday night special” markets and tolerated dealers with long records of crime-linked sales. In September 1999, Gary framed this as a public nuisance, saying the companies’ conduct imposed heavy policing and health costs on residents who never touched a firearm…