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. The entire enterprise is a grotesque and cynical evasion of democratic accountability and constitutional review.
So far, 10 states have enacted versions of this legislation, with extremist gun control advocates in Virginia also seeking to enact a variant (HB21) at present.
New Jersey is the roadmap
To illustrate how gun control advocates seek to use this legislation, consider New Jersey.
The Garden State has some of the nation’s strictest gun control laws; it is difficult even for well-meaning people and businesses to thread their way through them to exercise their Second Amendment rights. On top of those laws, in 2022, the state enacted new requirements for each “gun industry member” to “establish, implement, and enforce reasonable controls regarding its manufacture, sale, distribution, importing, and marketing of gun-related products.”
On July 22, 2025, a judge from the Chancery Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey granted Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s motion for summary judgement against Butch’s Gun World of Vineland in an enforcement action of the “reasonable controls” statute. The court also granted the AG’s request to force the shop to comply with a list of requirements that go well beyond codified law.
The case concerned two undercover buys from the shop by agents of the AG’s office. The first was a box of .223 caliber ammunition and a 6-round magazine for a Walther .380 caliber pistol. The second was a 1,000 round case of .223 caliber ammunition. The buyer in each case paid cash.
New Jersey law imposes various explicit (and likely unconstitutional) requirements for the sale of “handgun ammunition.” Sellers must be licensed gun businesses. Buyers who are not so licensed must display a valid Firearms Purchaser Identification Card, a permit to purchase a handgun, or a permit to carry a handgun. Retail sellers of handgun ammunition must record sales and make these records available to state authorities. Sales of 2,000 or more rounds must be “immediately” reported to the State Police.
Following the undercover buys, the state AG initiated a civil enforcement action against Butch’s Gun World under the reasonable controls statute. Significantly, the complaint did not claim .223 caliber ammunition or the Walther magazine were “handgun ammunition” nor claim the sales were a direct violation of the “handgun ammunition” requirements.
Instead, the complaint relied entirely on the idea that Butch’s Gun World had an affirmative duty under the reasonable controls law to apply additional safeguards to the sales of “gun-related products” beyond those specifically dictated by the New Jersey legislature. These “products,” moreover, include not just all types of firearms and ammunition, but “any … ammunition magazine, firearm component or part including, but not limited to, a firearm frame and a firearm receiver, or firearm accessory ….”
The complaint asserted, for example, that Butch’s Gun World should have understood the “reasonable controls” statute as extending certain requirements of the “handgun ammunition” statutes to ALL “gun-related products,” even though there is no language in the laws that actually specifies this.
Indeed, it would be odd (to say the least), that the New Jersey legislature would have been so specific as to the sales requirements for “handgun ammunition” if it had meant for the same sales requirements to apply to EVERY conceivable “gun related product.” This would violate the ancient legal principle of expressio unius est exclusio alterius, which means the express mention of one thing in a legal enactment implies the exclusion of all others.
To give such a reading to these two laws would seem, instead, to attribute to the legislature an intent to hide the ball and deceive gun industry members as to their legal responsibilities.
Ultimately, New Jersey’s anti-gun AG managed to get a court to extend statutory requirements that apply to one specific category of ammunition to a whole universe of products never actually subjected to those requirements by the legislature. Butch’s Gun World must, according to the AG’s office, now comply with the following requirements for sales of ALL gun-related products:
- Sell gun-related products only to (a) fellow licensed firearms businesses, or (b) persons who hold and possess a valid New Jersey firearms card or permit and first exhibit the card or permit to staff;
- Ask for a government-issued photo identification, such as a driver’s license, if a potential buyer presents a card or permit that lacks photo identification;
- Keep records for all sales of gun-related products detailing the verification means used for each sale and, for three years, transmit those records to the [Statewide Affirmative Firearms Enforcement Office]; and
- Write a set of policies used to educate and train each of its staff on the terms of the injunction and post those written policies in a space accessible to staff during business hours.
In essence, the AG’s office is making up the laws on firearms commerce one enforcement action and court decision at a time. What future requirements might be added are only limited by their imagination.
This is why the PLCAA was enacted
The PLCAA was expressly enacted to preclude this current gun control gambit.
The PLCAA was enacted to both prevent anti-gun politicians and their tort attorney collaborators from bankrupting the U.S. firearms industry and to keep firearms regulation (to the extent it comports with the U.S. Constitution) subject to the democratic process.
Consider the history.
In 2000, Smith & Wesson, then under different ownership, entered into an agreement with the Clinton Administration while threatened with ruinous litigation. A White House press release from March 17, 2000, detailing the settlement noted that the company agreed to implement “new design standards” including “internal locking devices” and using company resources on developing so-called “smart gun” technology. The gunmaker also agreed to what the White House called “[n]ew sales and distribution controls” that the press release stated included “[s]afety training for purchasers,” restrictions on firearm distribution to dealers who at sell at gun shows, and “[r]estrictions on multiple handgun sales.”
The lawmakers who enacted the PLCAA understood the threat to Second Amendment rights posed by non-legislated gun controls exemplified in the Clinton Administration agreement.
In a July 27, 2005 floor speech in support of the PLCAA, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) explained:
Anti-gun activists have failed to advance their agenda at the ballot box. They failed to advance their agenda in the legislatures. Therefore, they are hoping these cases will be brought before sympathetic activist judges - activist judges -who will determine by judicial fiat that the arms industry is responsible for the action of third parties.
Later, the senator pointed out, “plaintiffs in these suits demand enormous monetary damages and a broad variety of injunctive relief relating to the design, the manufacture, the distribution, the marketing, and the sale of firearms.” Coburn went on to list a host of gun control demands backers of this type of litigation sought to impose, including changes to how firearms are designed and distributed and firearm rationing (“one-gun-a-month”).
Further, the PLCAA’ s findings section noted in reference to this litigation that “The liability actions commenced or contemplated by the Federal Government, States, municipalities, private interest groups and others attempt to use the judicial branch to circumvent the Legislative branch of government to regulate interstate and foreign commerce through judgments and judicial decrees…”
Congress’s intent with the PLCAA to halt the type of gun control by civil liability gamesmanship embodied in “reasonable controls” legislation is undeniable.
Last year the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged the importance of the PLCAA with a 9-0 decision in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos (2025). In a concurrence, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recognized, “Activists had deployed litigation in an effort to compel firearms manufacturers and associated entities to adopt safety measures and practices that exceeded what state or federal statutes required.” And the “PLCAA embodies Congress’s express rejection of such efforts—stymying those who, as Congress put it, sought ‘to accomplish through litigation that which they have been unable to achieve by legislation.’”
The federal judiciary should make clear that these state “firearm industry responsibility”/“responsible controls” statutes are an invalid means of subverting federal law. However, gun owners cannot afford to rely on federal judges to do the right thing. Gun rights supporters must do everything in their power to inform others of the wide-ranging threat posed by “reasonable controls” statutes and mobilize to oppose such legislation.
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