Gary's Historic Fight Against Gunmakers Faces New Challenge
The city of Gary's historic lawsuit, which has entangled courts and lawmakers for decades, now hinges on the appellate court's view of a newly passed state law that could abruptly end the case. The lawsuit, initially filed in 1999, seeks to hold gunmakers accountable for their role in supplying firearms to criminals in a city that once bore the grim title of the nation's 'murder capital.' As Gary continues its fight against gun violence, the case remains a symbol of the broader struggle between local governments seeking accountability and state lawmakers siding with the firearms industry.
'The state legislature — acting on behalf of the everyday Hoosiers who elect its members — confers to cities and towns certain powers and functions,' Rokita said after submitting a brief for dismissal.
'The City of Gary cannot, then, choose to exercise powers that the legislature expressly has forbidden.'
Rokita is referring to Indiana House Bill 1235, which then-Gov. Eric Holcomb signed last year. The law prohibits Indiana municipalities from suing firearm manufacturers, dealers, or trade groups. It also applies retroactively to August 27, 1999 — just three days before Gary filed its original lawsuit.
While he acknowledged the constitutionality of the bill, Judge Sedia, in his ruling, highlighted that Gary and its residents are the true parties affected by gun violence, meaning the city has a legitimate claim and not the state.
'It [the Indiana General Assembly] cannot end this lawsuit, which the Appellate Courts of this state have found to be permitted by prior statute. To do so would violate years of vested rights and constitutional guarantees set forth so eloquently in Gary's memorandum of law,' Sedia said in his ruling.
'Gary made its decision to file and pursue this lawsuit on behalf of its residents against the defendants for damages sustained as a result of gun violence. Although the Court of Appeals has narrowed the scope of the claims, those remaining have been found to be legitimate.'
A spokesperson with the attorney general's office told Capital B Gary shortly after Sedia's ruling: 'The General Assembly passed a common-sense law, and we were pleased the court agreed with our office on its constitutionality. This lawsuit, which was filed a quarter-of-a-century ago, is an embarrassing example of inefficient courtroom posturing and hollow anti-gun activism.'
In 2023, Sedia ruled to open discovery — a process requiring the exchange of evidence between plaintiffs and defendants — potentially leading to the disclosure of decades of internal records for gun companies like Smith & Wesson, Glock, and Beretta.
In court, Gary's attorney, Phillip Bangle, argued that HB 1235 responded directly to that court order.
'The defendants call [House Bill] 1235 a restoration statute, but its real title should be the Judge Sedia Discovery Order Override Act. That's what it is, and that's what it does,' Bangle said during oral arguments.
Bangle also pointed out that the state legislature had multiple opportunities to pass similar laws in previous years, but only introduced HB 1235 in 2024 after the court ordered the discovery process.
'No one introduced 1235 in 2021, 2022, or 2023. Four years passed — four legislative sessions came and went — and suddenly, in January 2024, we have 1235,' Bangle argued.
The bill's passage places Gary in a legal battle on two fronts: one against the gun companies and, at least for now, another against the state, as it attempts to squash the lawsuit.
'Supporters of the bill say Gary's lawsuit is 'frivolous.' But there is nothing frivolous about taking away the power of Hoosiers and violating our Constitution,' said Gary Mayor Eddie Melton.
'It's simple. You should not be able to change the law to avoid losing a lawsuit. But that is the sole goal of HB 1235.'
Paul Helmke, director of the Civic Leaders Center at Indiana University Bloomington and former president and CEO of the Brady Center, sees the state bill as a hurdle that distracts from the lawsuit's merits.
'We need to get to the crucial point, which is that gun dealers, through their negligence, are they contributing to the gun violence in cities like Gary and neighboring communities?' Helmke told Capital B Gary.
'If you've got gun dealers who are irresponsible and negligent, that leads to more gun violence in our communities in Northwest Indiana, across the state, and across the region. And they should be liable for that,' Hemke said.
In 1999, Gary officials strategically attempted to expose that alleged negligence through the lawsuit, which originated from an undercover sting operation called Operation Hollowpoint. Undercover officers conducted stings at several gun stores in the region, posing as suspicious buyers and successfully making straw purchases, where one person illegally buys a firearm for someone who is not legally allowed to purchase one.
State Rep. Ragen Hatcher believes the lawsuit's mere existence has positively affected the city.
'I was in school in 1999, and at that time, Gary was the murder capital of the world. Gary has improved immensely since then, in part due to this lawsuit,' she said. 'This lawsuit warns firearms manufacturers that we noticed their predatory practices. We noticed that they were pumping guns to retailers, even though our community was suffering.'
Gary shed its 'murder capital' label decades ago — indeed, 2024 Gary Police Department data shows a 10% drop in nonfatal shootings and a 23% decline in homicides compared to the previous year. Nonetheless, gun violence remains a concern for lawmakers.
'The City of Gary is committed to public safety and improving the health and well-being of its residents,' Melton said.
'Guns, however, do not respect municipal borders. We have seen many tragic instances in which guns sold by irresponsible dealers were trafficked into the hands of our citizens, resulting in terrible tragedies.'
During this year's legislative session, state Rep. Earl Harris, chair of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus, authored House Bill 1095, which extends the Indiana Crime Guns Task Force into Lake County to help prevent gun violence in the Region. The bill has passed both chambers of the legislature and now awaits the governor's signature.
'While homicides in Lake County have dropped in recent years, it's still imperative that we find ways to mitigate gun violence and enhance public safety in our community,' Harris said.
'This bill will help us get illegal guns and dangerous narcotics off our streets and make Lake County a safer place to live and raise a family.'
'I'd like to thank my sponsors in the Senate for their work to get this across the finish line, and I now look forward to working with Gov. [Mike] Braun to get this legislation signed into law.'
State Sen. Rodney Pol, who served as a city attorney on the case, said he believes its significance lies at the heart of American democracy, and hopes the appellate judges share his perspective.
'My hope is that they see that no other industry gets to go and get out of court cases that are ongoing by going to the legislature and saying, 'Hey, we can't get a court to dismiss this based on … the merits of the case, can you just go ahead and dismiss this?'' Pol said.
'I think that is a massive disruption in the separation of powers, which is the foundational aspect of our government. My hope is that you have the courts that will look at this clear-eyed and can see the forest for the trees on that.'
The post Gary's Historic Fight Against Gunmakers Faces New Challenge appeared first on Capital B Gary.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Why rising Black unemployment should worry us all
There's an old saying in the Black community: last hired, first fired. And the way the U.S. labor market is looking there might be reason to believe that is happening. Greetings, This Is America readers, Phillip M. Bailey here. There are plenty of reasons the job market is being called resilient, but a noticeable crack has emerged among Black Americans, who have reached their highest level of unemployment since the COVID-19 pandemic days. The jobless rate for hit 7.2% in July among Black workers, up from 6.3% a year ago and 6.8% the month before, according to the most recent jobs report. It's a troubling sign mainly because historically speaking Black people are often hit first economic downturns. "The Black unemployment rate is always the first to go up. That's always the canary in the coal mine, Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told USA TODAY. For more on what's happening in the U.S. economy, check out the USA TODAY Network's coverage: Trump's political war in Texas is escalating Don't take your eyes off Texas and their attempts to redraw congressional maps. This is a fight that could determine the future of Donald Trump's presidency, but also one that might open up a larger conflict among Democratic and Republican-controlled states. Prompted by the prospect of losing control of Congress, the president wants a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas, where Republicans have come up with boundaries for U.S. House districts that could give the GOP five more seats. Now more than 50 Texas Democratic legislators have skipped town to break quorum, and Trump's allies want to send the FBI after them in order to bring them back to Austin, the Lone Star State's capitol. Both parties are portraying this as a battle for the future of the country that could expand to other states, as Trump administration officials -- namely Vice President JD Vance -- visited Indiana to urge Republicans there to do the same thing as Texas. Asked if any agreement had been reached on making new maps for the Hoosier State, Gov. Mike Braun said "we listened." Don't forget blue state governors in California, Illinois and New York are thinking about adopting this same strategy, which ultimately will make Congress even more divided. Thanks for reading! See you back next week with more stories of justice from across the country. You can find me on social @phillipmbailey.
The Intercept
2 hours ago
- The Intercept
Trump Is Putting Confederate Statues Back Up. Here's Why They Must Fall Again.
The statue of Confederate Albert Pike, toppled overnight by protesters outside of Judiciary Square one street over from D.C. Police Headquarters, on June 20, 2020, in Washington. Photo: mpi34/MediaPunch/IPx via AP Images The Trump administration announced this week that it would be restoring two Confederate monuments in Washington. One, a statue of Confederate general and likely Ku Klux Klan member Albert Pike was torn down by protesters with ropes and chains during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. The other, the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, originally commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was removed on the recommendation of an independent commission in 2022. At a moment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mass round-ups, thoroughgoing assaults on civil rights and welfare, and an ongoing U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, the return of Confederate statues may seem a minor insult atop grave injuries. The struggles to keep our neighbors safe, to protect imperiled people are without question more urgent. The monuments, however, are more than a symbolic, base-baiting distraction. They are part of the architecture of President Donald Trump's re-whitening of America. They must fall again. Monuments to racism license racist violence. White supremacists, for their part, know this well. When hundreds of far-right extremists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting 'Jews will not replace us,' they saw the removal of Confederate statues as a material challenge to white power. Affirming a renewed Trumpian era of unconstrained white supremacist organizing, the deadly Unite the Right rally had been called under the banner of protecting the city's statue of Robert E. Lee, which had been ordered for removal. Trump infamously used the statue protest to launder white supremacist violence. 'Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,' the president said. 'The press has treated them absolutely unfairly,' he said of the neo-Nazi rally attendees. It is for good reason that Black liberation movements have taken aim at statues of Confederate generals, slavers, and colonialists across the globe for decades. These monuments not only symbolically but also physically inscribe white supremacy into the nations' infrastructure. As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, 'Nearly 20 percent of the country's 2,300 original Confederate memorials were erected on courthouse lawns, the majority of these between the years 1900 and 1920 — the height of Jim Crow.' Counties with the highest number of Confederate memorials also had the highest instances of lynchings. Read Our Complete Coverage 'The law of white supremacy and the statue were right next to each other, creating an infrastructure,' Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of visual culture at New York University, told me in a 2023 interview. 'It makes sense to respond, as protestors found obvious after the murder of George Floyd, by taking down Confederate and other racist statues, not just to remove racist iconography but to disrupt that infrastructure with a view to replacing it.' As Mirzoeff noted, psychiatrist and decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon called colonial regimes a 'world of statues.' As Fanon put it, 'The statue of the general who carried out the conquest' is part of 'a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world.' The removal of statues is not a symbol of decolonization, but an act of it. The conservative claim that monument removal constitutes an assault on the historical record is so tired and weak that it deserves little of our attention. Suffice it to say that Trump's administration has done more to defund and decimate historical research and education than any in recent memory. What's important here is that the work of towering statues in town squares, presented without context, do not offer insight into history but freeze historical norms in place. This is precisely Trump's revanchist aim. The same week Trump's administration announced the monument restorations in D.C., the president raged on social media about his desire to take federal control of the city, invoking racist dogwhistles about youth crime. The battle with the capital is relevant to the statue issue. Nearly half of D.C. residents are Black and the city's mayor, Muriel Bowser, is Black. Most of the city's statues are, like most of the nation's statues, white men; this is the vision of control Trump and his followers want to entrench. The last time D.C.'s home rule was revoked was by Congress in 1874, in a backlash to a previous congressional decision to grant the local vote to Black men in 1867. Home rule was only restored in 1973. Obliterating Black History Confederate statues themselves were acts of historical erasure, mostly constructed decades after the end of the Civil War, either during post-Reconstruction Jim Crow in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in a second wave of Confederate statue construction in a backlash to civil rights gains in the 1950s and 1960s. Precisely when Black struggle threatened the permanence of white supremacy, supporters of Confederate ideology scrambled to affirm white supremacy to be as solid as marble. Meanwhile, actual historical records of the work of Black leaders in the Reconstruction era were regularly destroyed. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, 'When recently a student tried to write on education in Florida, he found that the official records of the excellent administration of the colored Superintendent of Education, Gibbs, who virtually established the Florida public school, had been destroyed. Alabama has tried to obliterate all printed records of Reconstruction.' Today's Republicans are doing the same: restoring Confederate statues to erase the traces of the vast 2020 rebellions and what they represented, and taking an ax to historical research and education that reflects the truth of America's foundational and continued white supremacist violence, and the struggles against it. Du Bois's description of the post-Reconstruction 'propaganda of history' against Black people since emancipation serves as an apt description of today's work of white backlash: 'one of most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.' The currently empty plinth in D.C. where Pike's statue once stood offers a richer lesson in U.S. history than a renewed, restored monument ever could. It tells a history of white domination and resistance to it — but it is precisely that history of resistance and attempted breaks from white supremacy that Trump's administration seeks to erase. The protesters who felled Pike graffitied and burned the bronze figure; the restored statue will bear no marks of their action.
The Hill
4 hours ago
- The Hill
In a liberal society, equity is a false idol
Over the last two decades, progressive activists have introduced lots of sententious words and euphemisms into the U.S. political lexicon. Examples include microaggression, intersectionality, cisgender, BIPOC, Latinx, 'the unhoused' (that is, the homeless), returning citizens (ex-convicts) and 'pregnant persons' (formerly 'women'). For those not up to speed on the latest academic conceits and ideological fads, including non-college voters streaming out of the Democratic Party, progressives might as well be speaking Esperanto. They have also infused old words with new meanings. Take 'equity.' Specifically, it means ownership in a house or stocks. But in its new meaning, it is used more generally as a synonym for fairness. Now, it has become a pillar of DEI — the hallowed trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion that defines today's 'social justice' ethos. In this context, 'equity' conveys a demand for something stronger than mere equality. The National Association of Colleges and Employers, an enthusiastic advocate of DEI, parses the difference by defining equity as 'fairness and justice' that is 'distinguished from equality.' 'Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances.' After the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, bureaucracies set up to inculcate DEI spread like kudzu throughout government, colleges and public schools, philanthropies and private companies. Job applicants were taxed with describing how they would endeavor to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their daily work. Democrats duly clambered aboard the equity express. On his first day in office in 2021, President Biden ordered federal agencies to develop Equity Action Plans to advance 'racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government.' But DEI's reign was brief. Working class voters, across racial lines, saw it at best as a distraction from their struggles with high living costs and worries about immigration and crime, and at worst as a coercive regime set up by self-righteous elites to correct their thoughts and speech. Their antipathy toward progressive moralizing played a significant role in sinking Kamala Harris and the Democrats last year and returning the failed coup plotter, President Trump, to the White House. The president believes he won a mandate to stamp out all vestiges of DEI in America. His minions are firing anyone in the federal government associated with diversity and affirmative action programs. In yet example of executive overreach, Trump also is threatening private colleges, businesses and civic institutions with political retribution if they don't fall in line. How should Democrats respond to this MAGA version of cancel culture? The same way they should have responded to the left-wing original — by standing up unequivocally for liberty of conscience and free speech. But they should also reflect on the ferocity of the public backlash against a sectarian identity politics that subordinates the general welfare to the pursuit of 'equity' for favored groups. Maybe it wasn't such a bright idea for progressives to abandon Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind society in favor of group preferences, DEI, critical race theory, and related ideas that fragment Americans along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Fixating on the differences between groups makes it impossible to build a broad, center-left alliance, especially when non-college Americans, a majority of the electorate, are either left out of the left's hierarchy of victimized groups or assigned the oppressor role. Democrats, however, should reject race essentialism and equity not because they're unpopular, but because they are illiberal. In America's liberal tradition, individuals have inalienable rights and liberties, not groups. That many originally were excluded from equal citizenship is reason to apply these principles universally, not discard them. Liberals from Jefferson to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama also have drawn a clear line between the aspirational goal of equal opportunity and utopian guarantees of equal outcomes. Show me a country that claims to have achieved the latter, and I'll show you a totalitarian society that oppresses its subjects and relies on a privileged class of apparatchiks to rule them. The late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (a mentor and friend) identified our native strain of liberal anti-statism as the reason European socialism never took deep root here. Americans, he noted, invested heavily in universal public education to give everyone an even start, while Europeans built welfare states to 'correct' markets' failure to distribute wealth evenly. The Mandarin left deems Europe's social democracy as morally superior to America's liberal democracy. But U.S. working families don't rank reducing inequality as a top economic priority. They're more interested in pro-growth economic policies that generate abundant opportunities for upward mobility, keep inflation and debt down, lower the cost of life's essentials, curb illegal immigration and help them acquire the skills necessary to get ahead in a fast-changing economy. To them, equity connotes elite attempts to rectify past injustices at their expense. Social reform movements in this country succeed when they invoke the liberal universalism of the American creed rather than imported political doctrines like democratic socialism. That's why liberals and Democrats should depose the false idol of equity and rededicate themselves to fighting discrimination in all forms, promoting equal opportunity and advancing the common good. The old rallying cry of Jacksonian democracy still illuminates the way forward: 'Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.'
