Again, I'm not a lawyer. I'm just a nerd. With every election cycle, PLACCA comes up.
This is something that I care about. I get pissed off when people lie about it, or get their facts wrong.
The way that mostly Democrats explain PLACCA is that it provides immunity from lawsuits to gun manufacturers.
That's egregiously false. Some of the people saying this are just getting it wrong. Most of the people in government are lying. You can't have a team of advisors without having one person who has raised his or her hand and said, "Ummm, Remington was sued into bankruptcy, and Daniel Defense just paid out a multi-million dollar settlement."
Just to use a fairly recent case as a point, in the Alec Baldwin shooting, his defense tried to argue that the gun that Baldwin was holding was either defective or altered.
It would be dumb for Baldwin and his team of lawyers to file a lawsuit against Pietta for a lot of reasons. Baldwin is off scott free, and the evidence avaliable says that the gun was functioning correctly.
Still, the lawsuit wouldn't be thrown out via PLACCA.
Still, PLACCA doesn't protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits if they fuck up, and that fuck up results in injury or death.
PLACCA is basically an understanding of how American rights and unscrupulous American politics work.
Before PLACCA, anti-gun groups were trying to sue gun manufacturers into oblivion. It was a way of violating the Second Amendment while avoiding the Democratic process.
The reality of civil law is that it doesn't cost anybody much to file a lawsuit. If you're the plaintiff, you can easily find a lawyer who will represent you on a basis of, "I don't get paid unless you win." If you're getting sued, it's usually cheaper to just pay the plaintiff than it is to pay lawyers to defend you -- that's even if the lawsuit is frivolous.
The point of PLACCA was, and is, about protecting gun manufacturers from legal liability when they've broken no laws.
It's been said accurately that PLACCA can be compared to protections of car manufacturers.
If a guy gets behind the wheel of a Ford, and willfully drives the car through a crowd of people, killing many of them, Ford isn't liable so long as the car functioned the way it was supposed to. The person responsible is the driver.
If it's found that the dude who drove a Ford through a bunch of people tried to step on the breaks, but the breaks weren't working because of a factory defect, people could absolutely sue Ford.
The same applies to gun manufacturers.
The opposition to PLACCA isn't about accountability. It's not about "common sense" gun laws. It's definitely not about "gun safety" laws.
It's about Democrats opposing democracy.
Yes, they're lying about this.
Even if they dared to tell the truth, they would say that their opposition to PLACCA is built around the fact that they want to circumvent the law and democracy in order to bankrupt gun manufacturers, not because they did anything wrong or illegal, but because they don't like guns.