Harnessing the Legal System to Create a Future Free from Gun Violence
I’ve spent years working in the gun safety movement. My time at GIFFORDS showed me a new strategy to saving lives.
GIFFORDS is the strongest bet we have to build a future free from gun violence.
I know that because I’ve spent years working in the gun violence prevention movement—and because my time at GIFFORDS fundamentally changed how I think that future will be won.
When I joined the organization in 2024, I thought I understood what it took to confront America’s gun violence epidemic. But in reality, I’d only seen a fraction of what’s possible. Grassroots organizing, lobbying, and defending lifesaving gun laws in the courts are without a doubt critical, impactful tools to pass and protect policies that make our communities safer. But they aren’t the only ways to do so, and these methods often position gun safety advocates on the defensive—fending off the expansion of gun rights, fighting to preserve hard-won progress, and responding to crises after they’ve already emerged.
There is an additional way to approach this work: holding the gun industry accountable for its role in American gun deaths.
That’s what makes GIFFORDS unique. As a survivor-led organization, GIFFORDS understands that a crisis as complex as gun violence demands a comprehensive response. Rather than focusing only on how to respond to yesterday’s tragedies, our organization forges new solutions that can prevent tomorrow’s. Passing new gun laws, funding community violence intervention, electing gun safety champions, and supporting advocates all play a role in building a safer future and have been a core part of the mission at GIFFORDS for years. More recently, we’ve stepped up our affirmative litigation practice, using the courts to take an offensive stance against gun violence and the forces that fuel it. Namely, the gun industry.
Our litigation team files affirmative lawsuits against gun companies whose irresponsible conduct has allowed the gun violence epidemic to unfold. These cases rely on new, creative legal theories that challenge longstanding assumptions about what is and is not possible under the law. In doing so, we’ve moved the needle and opened up new lanes of justice for victims and survivors of gun violence who for too long have felt justice was beyond their reach.
For years, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), passed by Congress in 2005, has been regarded as a broad federal immunity law unique to the gun industry, shielding gun companies from civil actions related to the violent crimes made possible by their weapons. But our team refused to concede that PLCAA was meant to provide the gun industry a blank check to act as recklessly as they wish without any legal consequence.
We’ve helped pass state-level industry accountability laws that established standards of conduct for the gun industry. We’ve identified exceptions within PLCAA to bring lawsuits against companies that willfully violated the law’s standards in pursuit of profit. And in the states where accountability laws do not yet exist, we developed new legal theories that utilize existing consumer protection statutes and traditional tort law to bring our suits forward—because survivors’ access to justice shouldn’t be dictated by which state they live in.
In Minnesota, for example, GIFFORDS serves as counsel to the state in its lawsuit against major gun manufacturer Glock over the company’s role in fueling the spread of illegal machine gun conversion devices known as “Glock switches.” While the Minnesota legislature has yet to pass a state industry accountability law, we found a novel yet ironclad way to bring claims under existing state statutes. Established laws govern the advertising, sale, and marketing of consumer products in the state, and guns are undeniably a consumer product and therefore must be regulated as such. The court agreed with us, and as a result, Minnesota has survived a motion to dismiss the case, with the judge explicitly rejecting the defenses Glock raised under PLCAA.
Thinking creatively and boldly about the challenges our communities face from gun violence does more than help win individual cases—it creates precedents, expands accountability, and opens entirely new pathways for future litigation. Similar lawsuits have been filed across the country since we launched ours in Minnesota in 2024, and subsequent courts have cited our case in reaching similar rulings. These novel legal outcomes protect real lives by curbing the illegal conduct of gun companies and providing monetary relief to those affected most by the harms these companies have caused.
This work has helped GIFFORDS shepherd a new frontier for the gun violence prevention movement. Even as we continue working tirelessly to defend gun laws in the courts after the Supreme Court’s decision expanding gun rights in NYSRPA v. Bruen in 2022—filing more than 130 amicus briefs in key gun safety cases—we haven’t let that distract us from going on offense to achieve positive change. We’ve filed several important lawsuits in the past four years, and we’re just getting started.
GIFFORDS has also worked to provide more tools for our movement. Our newly unveiled Second Amendment expert witness reports database and gun industry accountability lawsuits tracker (the latter developed in collaboration with Everytown) are first-of-their-kind resources that help attorneys, governments, and advocates identify legal theories, expert testimony, and emerging case law.
These public-facing resources are critical extensions of the work we do in the courts, making it easier for other organizations and advocates to defend communities large and small, bringing the fight directly to the gun companies that enabled so many senseless, preventable deaths.
The legal arm of our organization, GIFFORDS Law Center, was founded in the wake of a mass shooting at a San Francisco law firm in 1993. The legal community, devastated by the shock of mass murder, came together with the idea that lawyers and the courts were in a unique position to fight back against the seemingly intractable and uniquely American problem of gun violence.
The organization has grown and evolved in the ensuing decades, all the while building up the next generation of changemakers and advocates, preparing them to harness the legal system to ensure that all Americans will one day be able to live our lives free from the shadow of gun violence. GIFFORDS’s investment in building strength across the movement—not simply in winning individual cases—is part of what makes this team exceptional.
In fact, working alongside the incredible attorneys and experts behind the scenes as a litigation project manager inspired me to attend law school—and that’s where I’m headed this fall, saying goodbye to GIFFORDS and the gun violence prevention space (for now). I’m excited to start this new journey with the knowledge and understanding that the law is not merely a mechanism for seeking justice after the fact, but can—and should, and must—be wielded as a proactive tool to reshape the systems that produce injustice in the first place. GIFFORDS taught me that, and I’m eager to see what our litigation program does next.
LItigation
the courts
Explore our work defending lifesaving gun laws in the courts and fighting to debunk the gun lobby’s dangerous arguments about the Second Amendment.
