President Biden and the Democrats, in the wake of the killings at Buffalo and Uvalde, are targeting the American gun industry’s immunity from lawsuits by gun violence victims — a campaign that the National Rifle Association tells the Sun is designed to “drive the industry out of business.”

The first legal action — a petition for information — to emerge from the massacre in Texas was filed Thursday by a staff member at the Uvalde school where 21 persons, including 19 pupils, were killed, according to a report Friday by the National Broadcasting Company.

Mr. Biden, in nationally broadcast remarks Thursday, urged Congress to repeal a federal law passed in 2005 that grants the industry protections from liability suits. The law has already been brushed aside in at least two cases, one brought by victims and one by gun makers.

In 2019, the Supreme Court refused to shield a gunmaker from a lawsuit filed by parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. On Thursday, Mr. Biden declared flatly, “We should repeal the liability shield that often protects gun manufacturers from being sued for the death and destruction caused by their weapons.”

Mr. Biden was referring to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. It was passed by a bipartisan majority of Congress to protect gun manufacturers from civil liability in state and federal lawsuits in which firearms were used to commit criminal offenses. To pass the measure, 14 Democrats joined the GOP in the Senate and 59 in the House. 

Mr. Biden, then in the Senate, was among the senators who opposed the bill. “Imagine,” he said Thursday, “if the tobacco industry had been immune from being sued, where we’d be today.” The tobacco cases were used by state governments to take over billions of dollars in cigarette revenues, effectively putting them in the cigarette business.

A spokesman for the NRA, Lars Dalseide, challenged Mr. Biden’s characterization of the immunity law. “The only thing PLCAA does,” he said, “is prevent manufacturers from facing frivolous lawsuits specifically designed to empty the companys’ bank account — suits manufacturers from other industries never face because their products aren’t as politically charged.” 

The immunity law has shielded gun manufacturers from litigation except in narrow circumstances. They include, say, the violation of the law during the sale or marketing of a firearm, a defect in the product leading to physical harm, or the maker’s  knowledge that a firearm was being procured for a criminal purpose.  

Mr. Biden has acknowledged that overcoming a filibuster, which would require 10 Republican votes plus all 50 Democrats in the Senate, makes repeal of the immunity law unlikely. Some states, though, have enacted exceptions to the immunity law to okay lawsuits in circumstances not explicitly barred by federal law.

One such law in New York was recently upheld in federal court.

That law added certain marketing and sales practices by firearms manufacturers to the state’s “public nuisance” statute. It requires gun makers to exact “reasonable controls” to prevent illegal sale and possession of firearms in the state. 

In cases where they fail to do so, they can be subject to lawsuits by both private individuals and public officials. A legal challenge launched against the law by several gun makers, including Smith & Wesson Brands Inc. and Sturm, Ruger, & Co. Inc., alleged that the law violated the supremacy of the federal immunity law.

The gun makers contended the state measure does not fall under the federal law’s exception for cases “in which a manufacturer … knowingly violated a state or federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the firearm and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.”  

The manufacturers cited a 2008 case, City of New York vs. Beretta U.S.A. Corp., in which the riders of the Second United States Appeals Circuit threw out the city’s case against Beretta. Yet in a different case, in the Northern District of New York, Judge Mae D’Agostino ruled against the manufacturers.

In that case, which followed revisions in New York’s law, the judge claimed that since the public nuisance statute was updated in 2021 to contain an explicit regulation of firearms, the Beretta case is no longer applicable. The gun makers have announced plans to appeal the decision.

Should New York be upheld in its attempt to evade the protections established for gun makers by Congress, the strategy could be followed by other states through the use of public nuisance statutes. Mr. Dalseide warns that more laws like New York’s would “basically make it illegal to advertise or sell a firearm, which will ultimately drive the industry out of business.”

In Uvalde, the “petition for information” that has reportedly been filed is described by NBC as “a pre-suit petition that seeks to determine if the gunmaker can be sued for how it markets its weapons.” 

After Uvalde, California renewed efforts to expand its public nuisance statute in a fashion similar to that of New York. 

The California measure would allow suits against makers marketing firearms toward children or others who cannot legally possess them or “in a way that ‘foreseeably promotes’ their conversion into an illegal weapon,” such as an automatic weapon, news organization CalMatters reports. 

Earlier this year, victims of gun violence also prevailed in a case that centered on the existing exemptions in the federal immunity law. Attempts to sue within the narrow exemptions have been mostly unsuccessful.  That changed after 2019, when the Supreme Court flinched, declining to hear the case against Remington.

Remington declared bankruptcy in 2020. Its insurers eventually agreed to pay $73 million to settle a lawsuit brought by parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook in 2012. It was the first time since the passage of the federal immunity law that a gun maker settled with victims of gun violence, Reuters reported.

The Sandy Hook families’ lawsuit was built around an exception to the provision of immunity, which did not protect manufacturers in instances in which they “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the … marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm.”  

The Sandy Hook families argued that the Bushmaster, the rifle used to carry out the attack, was marketed as “a weapon of war” and that advertisements of the gun — including one with the slogan, “Consider your man card reissued” — appealed to troubled young men and encouraged them toward violence.