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Michele McBrien, the co-owner of Patriot Ware Holsters, a gun accessories store in Waterbury, told legislators on Wednesday that a bill they were considering would “literally put her out of business with one lawsuit.”
The proposed legislation allows citizens to sue firearm manufacturers, distributors and sellers who don’t take “reasonable controls” to ensure that their products are not being sold to people intending to harm others or themselves, to firearm traffickers or to people intending to convert legal weapons into illegal ones.
But a line of gun shop owners and other businesses affiliated with firearms stepped up to testify on Wednesday — written testimony submitted in opposition to the bill outnumbered testimony in support by nearly 20 to 1 — and told legislators that the bill would put their businesses at serious risk.
“ As far as the misuse of a firearm … whether it was unintentional or intentional, this could lead to frivolous lawsuits that could legitimately bankrupt my company,” Matthew McBrien, also a co-owner of Patriot Ware Holsters, told the committee.
Business owners and advocates argued that Connecticut’s laws are already stringent when it comes to who can purchase a gun.
“We have plenty of things in place to prevent people from doing things illegally. We have federal and state laws that we follow,” said Krystofer DiBella, the owner of Tobacco Valley Guns in East Windsor. “If I sell something and then it gets resold again, does that still come back to me as an industry person? I mean, we follow every state law to a T.”
Edward Rando, the owner of Ron’s Guns in East Lyme, said that his business, which he inherited from his father, had sold more than a million guns over the last fifty years. He said out of those, he’s had only three “instances of certain issues” — two people who purchased guns and committed suicide, and one who struck his grandfather with a handgun.
“My point there is that criminals do not come to our shop to buy firearms. We have stringent regulations in Connecticut that we have to abide by as FFL [Federal Firearms License] dealers,” he said.
His fear, he said, was that the proposed legislation would make it impossible for him to get insurance for his business. In the last 40 years, he said, the annual cost of insurance for his business has quadrupled — from $5,000 to $20,000. He attributed at least part of this to the regulations Connecticut has passed around guns.
“I truly feel that if this bill passes, insurance will become unaffordable for most gun stores,” he said.
Republican members of the committee largely agreed with the gun store owners, and they grilled supporters of the bill, who said it is meant to ensure that firearms manufacturers and dealers take basic safety measures to prevent guns from ending up in the wrong hands — and that they are penalized when they do not.
“This legislation is about deterrence and prevention, ensuring that bad actors in the firearms industry cannot operate with impunity, and that the cost of negligence in this conduct is borne by those responsible, not by the victims and not by their families,” said Earl Bloodworth, the Executive Director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence.
Bloodworth said that people in the firearms industry were protected by “a unique shield” under federal law that made it difficult to hold bad actors accountable.
But Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, questioned whether other industries were held responsible to the same level for their products. He likened the regulation to holding an auto manufacturer responsible for a drunken driving accident.
Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, said he considered Connecticut’s background check legislation “one of the most robust … in the country” and said laws already existed to prevent straw purchases and illegal transfers and to limit the number of firearms that one person can purchase.
“I would submit to you that this legislation is aimed at running those businesses out of this state and driving up their insurance costs, because everything else is already addressed in statute,” he said.
Connecticut’s gun safety laws expanded in 2013 after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School to limit large-capacity magazines and expand a ban on AR-15 style guns and assault weapons. Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill updating the laws in 2023.
David Pucino, the Legal Director & Deputy Chief Counsel for Giffords Law Center, which specializes in firearms legislation, said the bill will also allow lawyers to prosecute firearms dealers who knowingly sell their merchandise to be trafficked along what is called the “Iron Pipeline,” which sends guns up the I-95 corridor from less-heavily regulated states like Georgia or Pennsylvania to states like Connecticut.
Nine other states have enacted similar legislation expanding the liability of gun manufacturers and sellers. New York’s Attorney General used the state’s law in 2021 to open a lawsuit against ten gun sellers who sold “tens of thousands of illegal, unfinished frames and receivers” to residents, who built illegal “ghost guns” with the parts.
Pucino said seven of the nine states that have enacted these laws have equal or greater restrictions around firearms and ammunition purchases than Connecticut does. He also said that the fears that insurance costs would bankrupt gun retailers did not seem to be coming true in those states.
“We have not seen the kind of catastrophic consequences that some have suggested here today. We’ve not seen a massive number of gun dealers going out of business,” he said.
Sarah Kettle, the state director with the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, argued that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Parents’ lawsuit against Remington Arms for their marketing of the semi-automatic rifle used in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was proof that legal action could shut down a company.
“I think the Remington example shows that it’s entirely possible that these lawsuits just tie industry members up in costly litigation that has the potential to bankrupt them and cause them to move into other states and go out of business,” she said.
Republican Committee members questioned whether the legislation would open the door for “frivolous lawsuits.” Sen. John Kissel, R-Enfield, alluded to a “huge unspoken problem” of suicides in the U.S. and noted that expecting a retailer to judge whether a person who wanted to buy a gun was suicidal was a “really subjective area.”
“If you’re going to start going down a realm where I’m going to have to start being a mind reader if I’m selling a lawful item, to know what you’re going to do with that, I don’t see where the lawsuits end,” he said.
Pucino disagreed. He said there were already strong federal protections that prevented lawsuits against the gun industry. He also said he felt the bill was drafted well and designed to avoid such lawsuits.
Rep. Matt Blumenthal, D-Stamford, said the need to prove to a court that a firearm or accessory played a large part in causing harm to someone would act as a protection.
“It seems to me that for a lot of firearms, parts, and accessories, that would simply be inapplicable. I don’t know how you would prove that a holster or the wrongful sale of a holster — which, I’m not sure if there’s a circumstance where that would be unreasonable to sell a holster, for instance — directly cause someone to be harmed,” he said.
In a statement, Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, referred to the bill as “commonsense legislation that bolsters accountability for firearm manufacturers.”
“We must continue to keep our communities safe and help prevent tragic incidents in the future by holding our nation’s firearm manufacturers responsible when they act in bad faith,” he said.
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