The Supreme Court has denied certiorari in National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc. v. James, No. 25-1026, leaving in place a New York statute engineered to dismantle the legal shield that keeps the American firearms industry solvent. The denial, entered June 15, 2026, carried no noted dissent and no written statement. It is not a ruling on the merits, and it sets no precedent. But its practical effect is real: the Second Circuit’s July 10, 2025 decision upholding New York General Business Law §§ 898-a to 898-e now stands as controlling, and the law remains in force. I will not pretend this one does not sting. An attack on the gun industry is, in the end, an attack on the Second Amendment, because without a domestic industry there are no guns to keep and bear.
Why the Gun Industry Is a Second Amendment Issue
The right to keep and bear arms is not self-executing. It presupposes arms, and arms presuppose an industry capable of making and selling them. That is why Congress enacted the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005, codified at 15 U.S.C. §§ 7901–7903. Before PLCAA, anti-gun officials spent the better part of a decade weaponizing tort law against manufacturers, betting that the cost of defending frivolous suits and insuring against them would do what legislation could not. The point was never to win on the merits. The point was to bankrupt.
A robust domestic firearms industry is not a partisan convenience. It is a strategic necessity. Our military and our law enforcement agencies depend on it, and so do ordinary Americans who exercise a constitutional right. The alternative to a healthy American industry is dependence on foreign suppliers for the instruments of an enumerated freedom — an intolerable prospect. PLCAA understood this, which is why it generally bars suits seeking to hold industry members liable for the criminal misuse of products they lawfully made and sold.
How New York Tried to Drill a Hole in PLCAA
PLCAA is not absolute. It contains a “predicate exception,” 15 U.S.C. § 7903(5)(A)(iii), which permits suits where a manufacturer or seller knowingly violated a statute applicable to the sale or marketing of a firearm, and that violation was a proximate cause of the harm. The exception is meant for clear, concrete prohibitions a company can actually know it is breaking — selling a regulated NFA item without the required process, transferring a handgun to someone the law forbids. Black-and-white rules, knowingly violated.
In 2021, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed New York’s answer: General Business Law §§ 898-a to 898-e, a “public nuisance” statute aimed squarely at the gun industry. Cuomo himself described the law as designed to “reinstate the public nuisance liability for gun manufacturers” that Congress had prohibited in PLCAA. New York’s theory is that by singling out firearms in a statute, the State drags garden-variety tort liability within the predicate exception. That is not a clear, knowable prohibition. It is fuzziness by design — broad enough that companies never know where the line is, which is precisely the condition that makes years of ruinous discovery possible.
What the Petition Argued
The petition was filed by Paul Clement and Erin Murphy of Clement & Murphy, PLLC — the same firm that won NYSRPA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), with Clement a former U.S. Solicitor General. Their argument was that the Second Circuit had blown the predicate exception wide open. As they framed it, the decision below lets a State nullify the very federal statute Congress passed to stop States from abusing tort law to bankrupt a lawful industry, reading the exception to license the same tort-style suits PLCAA was meant to foreclose so long as the State dresses ordinary tort principles in a law that singles out the firearms business. NSSF also pressed that the ruling had split the circuits. That circuit-split claim is NSSF’s contention, not a settled fact; the Second Circuit is the first federal appeals court to squarely uphold a statute of this kind. But the diagnosis is right. If a State can escape PLCAA merely by naming the industry in the caption of its tort law, the statute protects nothing.
Why a Denial Now, and What Comes Next
I am not surprised the Court passed. Three things counsel patience from the justices, none of them an endorsement of New York’s law. First, the Court resolved a PLCAA question only last year in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 605 U.S. 280 (2025), and it rarely revisits the same statute in back-to-back terms. Second, this was a facial, pre-enforcement challenge, and those are always a harder sell. Third, the issue may need more percolation in the lower courts before the Court weighs in.
Smith & Wesson itself is instructive. Justice Kagan’s unanimous opinion turned on Mexico’s failure to plausibly allege aiding and abetting under the predicate exception; the Court did not squarely decide proximate cause. It was, candidly, a narrower decision than I would have liked. That narrowness is part of why a statute like New York’s remains on the books and enforceable today.
A denial signals nothing about the merits, and the predicate-exception question is not going away — I expect it back before the Court within a few years on a cleaner vehicle. In the meantime, New York’s design proceeds as intended: not a bug in the system, but a feature. The industry pays, and the right pays with it.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.