What is "Reasonable" Gun Control?

Starting with legislation signed by New York then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2022, eleven states have enacted “Firearms Industry Responsibility Acts.” The statutes subject firearms retailers and manufacturers to tort lawsuits for any action that is not “reasonable.” The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry, filed a facial challenge, arguing that the statute was void for vagueness. The Second Circuit disagreed, pointing out that “reasonable” is used as a legal standard in many contexts. National Shooting Sports Foundation v. James, 144 F.4th 98 (2d Cir. 2025). But what does “reasonable” mean in the new liability acts?

A grocery store knows that its reasonable duty of care to invitees includes promptly cleaning up spills so that customers do not slip and fall. The grocery store’s reasonable duty does not include monitoring the weight of its customers and barring obese customers from buying high-calorie low-nutrition foods. The plaintiffs’ tort lawyers who have, in a sense, helped shape and define grocery stores’ reasonable duties are not morally opposed to grocery stores.  They are not working towards a society in which there is no private ownership of food. They do not aim for a world in which the only food is what the government chooses to provide and in which the only way to eat is to line up at a government mess hall — such as in Cuba, or in China during the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62.

Contrast grocery store litigation with firearms litigation. On the latter, many advocates do seek the eradication the entire line of businesses. In the words of Mrs. Gabrielle Giffords, leader of the eponymous lobby: “No More Guns. Gone.” Philip Elliott, No More Guns. Gone’: Why Gabby Giffords Isn’t Giving Up, Time, Apr. 26, 2023.

As used by the gun control lobbies that created and pushed for the “industry responsibility” statutes, what does “reasonable” mean?

That is the question addressed in a new Working Paper from the University of Wyoming’s Firearms Research Center. (I am a Senior Fellow at the Center.) Del Schlangen, who is a recent graduate of Denver University’s Sturm College of Law, and was my intern this subject, investigated how gun control groups use thee word “reasonable.” His results were published this week in his monograph Use of ‘Reasonable’ in Gun Control Advocacy (Firearms Rsch. Ctr., Working Paper No. 2026-8).

He finds that “reasonable” as defined by gun control groups is simply their word of approval of all the restrictions and prohibitions they favor. Schlangen’s 58-page monograph begins with a three pages of summary, and then provides a representative catalogue of 170 written uses of “reasonable” by gun control advocates. He concludes:

The very advocates who assure courts that the industry duty is “well understood” (A80) or known (A81), and who assure the public that “reasonable controls” gives the industry “clear guidance” (A113) have, for nearly half a century, used “reasonable” to include banning all handguns, banning most modern rifles, banning the majority of magazines, and banning the carrying of any arm for self-defense. All lesser types of gun control are also declared to be “reasonable.” Because “reasonable” means whatever the gun control lobbies desire at the moment, the word does not provide a fixed and ascertainable standard in the gun control context.

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