USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, has been coming under more intensive fire since Joe Biden was declared President of the United States, and it’s our own fault.

The PLCAA should just be the PLCA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce Act. The only reason the words “in Arms” were included, was specifically to make the bill a “gun bill,” to help motivate the troops and provide brownie points and bragging rights to politicians and lobbying organizations.

The introduction of the PLCAA was a legitimate response to the lawfare waged against the gun industry, but the legislation should have been much broader, encompassing all lawfully manufactured and sold products. By focusing the bill exclusively on the arms industry, proponents made garnering support for it a bit easier within the gun-rights world – while at the same time focusing opposition – and they avoided generating additional opposition from the powerful trial lawyers’ lobby, which opposed the bill, but didn’t put a lot of effort into their opposition.

They also painted a big, bright bullseye on the back of the law, and that’s what the Biden administration is aiming at now.

The above points were argued by Neal Knox back in 2004 when the PLCAA was first introduced. He reasoned that a broader bill would be somewhat harder to sell, and would run up against some stronger opposition, but that it would also bring in additional allies, and result in better law in the end.

The core premise of the PLCAA is that a manufacturer or seller of a lawful product, which is not defective and was not marketed under false pretexts, should not, and indeed may not, be held responsible for the misuse of that product by a third-party actor.

This should be true, regardless of what the product is. In fact, in most of the lawsuits that have been brought seeking to hold a manufacturer or seller of a lawful product accountable for the actions of someone misusing their product, the courts have ended up throwing the suits out as “frivolous” or unreasonable. But “most” is not good enough, and in the case of firearms and ammunition, the suits were becoming more and more frequent, and were well-funded, often with taxpayer dollars. They weren’t just occasional, random attempts by unscrupulous attorneys taking pot-shots at gun companies in hopes the companies would settle before the cases got tossed. The litigants acted with a clear and coordinated intent to bankrupt the firearms industry, not necessarily through winning, but by forcing the industry to defend itself. Repeatedly.

In any civil litigation, there’s a calculation that has to be made, weighing the cost of the litigation against the cost of settling early. Often the settlement costs are substantially lower than the litigation costs, even if the case is eventually tossed by the judge.

What the PLCAA effectively does is create a pretrial reality check, requiring the judge to look at the case right at the outset and determine whether there is a reasonable claim, or whether it is a case of someone trying to hold an innocent party responsible for the actions of an unrelated guilty party.

This should be standard procedure in all civil litigation. No individual, group, or government entity should be able to weaponize the courts as a way of beating down a person, business, or industry.

Along with the protections of judicial review up-front, before a whole lot of money has been spent on attorneys, and the restitution of those attorney fees if the case gets tossed, there should also be protections on the backside of civil litigation, in the form of restitution of legal fees for the prevailing party. That’s something the trial lawyers’ lobby has opposed for decades because it would cause many of their clients to hesitate before going forward with frivolous and abusive litigation.

The most prevalent talking point from opponents of the PLCAA, As we just heard again from Governor Cuomo in New York, is that the gun industry is the only industry in the US that enjoys protection from civil suits. While that’s not really true, the perception of imbalance is unacceptable, so it’s time to protect all lawful businesses from predatory legal assaults. While we continue to defend the PLCAA, The Firearms Coalition is proposing that members of Congress start working on the Protection of Lawful Commerce Act, shielding all lawful businesses from abusive lawfare attacks based on the actions of unrelated third parties. The PLCA would provide restitution of legal fees to victims of such abuse, both upfront, and on the backside of these attacks if they are allowed to proceed.

We might not have the votes to pass it until 2023, after the next congressional election, but let’s get it started right now.

You can help. Send a letter to your friendly Representative and Senators, urging them to support the Protection of Lawful Commerce Act. Include a copy of this article or a link to it, so they can see how and why it makes sense.

You are the Gun Lobby. Use your influence to get solid pro-rights legislation introduced and passed, even if it doesn’t mention guns.

We’ll have more to say about this proposal soon, so stay tuned.

USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- By now you’ve probably heard, or heard about, some of the outrageous statements made by President Joe Biden in his widely-touted speech to address the nation’s sudden spike in violent crime. The whole dog and pony show – led by the lying dog-face pony soldier in chief – was focused on gun control, specifically to distract from the other aspects of Biden’s initiative, and the dismal state of things in general under the Biden administration.

Even though the press conference was an unmitigated disaster, with Uncle Joe wandering so far off a script that even the historically protective “fact-checkers” were forced to rate some of his statements, such as the claim that; “The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own,” as 4 Pinocchio, pants on fire, falsehoods – in other words, lies. Biden went on to claim that at the time the Second Amendment was written, “you couldn’t buy cannons,” which is also unquestionably untrue.

Biden also wandered off-Teleprompter to take another crack at a line that had bombed for him during primary season, Jefferson’s famous quote about the “blood of patriots and tyrants.” This is as close as I can transcribe it from several video replays:

Those who say the blood of liberty… the, uh… blood of patriots… you know, and all this stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government… Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there’s never been – if you wanna – think you need weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons. The point is, there’s always been the ability to limit – to rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.

What?

Once you sort through the babble and get a grasp on what he’s intending to say, it’s easy to understand how his previous attempt at this statement concluded with him garnering only 8.4% of the vote in the New Hampshire Primary, far behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and even Elizabeth Warren, leading many analysts to declare his campaign for President dead at that point. In that instance though, Biden couched his argument in more cogent, and even more threatening terms, when he said;

“Those who say ‘the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots’ – a great line – well guess what: The fact is, if you’re going to take on the government you need an F-15 with Hellfire Missiles. There is no way an AK-47 is going to take care of you if you’re worried about the government knocking down your door.”

Resident Biden’s mental decline in the past 18 months, is both obvious, and scary. This is the “leader of the free world?” The man who has Armageddon following him in a briefcase everywhere he goes, and who’s supposed to have certain nuclear launch codes memorized? […not a chance]

Vladimir Putin must be shaking in his boots after their recent meeting.

The brightest political strategist in the country couldn’t have come up with anything for Biden to say that would have outraged knowledgeable gun owners and history buffs more than these statements did. His nonsense rant guaranteed that irate gun guys would be howling for weeks, refuting Biden’s comments with tidbits from history, to prove how smart and knowledgeable we are, and how ignorant and out-of-touch he is. Unfortunately, all of this outrage and fact-checking is doing little more than to distract from the things the Biden team wants to keep under wraps.

The whole press conference, with its focus on the gun control aspects of the “Biden Plan” to stem violent crime, was definitely intended to distract from the other serious problems that are burning out of control around the country since Biden took over.

Biden and his crew have been dismantling anything and everything with President Trump’s fingerprints on it, regardless of how good or effective it might have been. The economy, inflation, astronomical debt, the border crisis, tensions in the Middle-East, tensions with Russia, tensions with China, the embarrassing Fauci “lab leak” theory, and just about anything and everything that the Biden administration has weighed in on, demonstrates a reverse Midas touch.

The problems that Trump seemed to have corralled, or at least damped down, all exploded with the advent of the Biden-Harris team, especially those things that Biden and Harris most harshly criticized Trump about.

But Biden’s biggest problem isn’t inflation, continuing unemployment, the slow economic recovery, world instability, or the growing number of kids in cages on the border. His biggest problem is the big divide within his party. The brains behind Biden-Harris – which we know don’t reside in the skulls of Biden or Harris – have recognized that the Democrats’ “woke” progressive wing, represented by academia, Silicon Valley, and a gaggle of radicals that unapologetically cite Marx and display the hammer and sickle, are fully at odds with the voting base of the Democratic Party. The adults among the Democrats – and there are some – recognize that the most important thing needed to reduce crime is more and better policing and putting bad actors in jail for extended periods. That view directly contradicts the idea of defunding the police, which is a major factor – maybe The major factor – in the current violent crime surge.

So Biden’s crime reduction plan not unreasonably includes increased funding for police, along with funding for various social programs, violence intervention, mental health, job training, and other programs. Some of it is potentially worthwhile, while a lot of it is just throwing money at the problem, creating opportunities for corruption and cover for the bad actors.

Their big worry for the press conference was to keep the focus away from the refunding of police, and far away from the root causes of the surge in violent crime: support for criminals, violent rioters, and looters, over the police and property owners.

Just as the “Broken Window” theory of policing shows that enforcing minor laws reduces the frequency of violations of major laws, the inverse is also true. Ignoring minor and major crimes has sent a clear signal to criminals and the criminally minded, that it’s open season. By bailing out violent rioters and looters – as Kamala Harris encouraged – and reducing or eliminating bail, reducing major felonies down to minor misdemeanors, releasing violent criminals early, and refusing to prosecute violent criminals, calling that “justice reform,” prosecutors, judges, and politicians have thrown the lid off of Pandora’s box, and invited career criminals and their young thug proteges, to do as they will and fear no consequences.

That’s the big truth that Joe Biden’s handlers don’t want penetrating into the public psyche, so they focus their attention on an issue that has a pretty clear, preexisting, culture war divide: gun control.

The tactic worked to some degree, but the American people are beginning to realize that they made a huge mistake last November, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do about it.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. The main thing is to support Republican obstructionism, to keep the damage done by the extremist Democrats to a minimum. Then, in November of 2022, we can send a loud and clear message to DC, that we want no part of the crazy, criminal-empowering Democratic agenda.

It seems like a far-off objective, but believe me, the 2022 elections will be here before you know it, and GunVoters need to be ready and already engaged when they get here.

Stay tuned and stay armed.