After a long string of political defeats that culminated in the Democratic Party's loss of control in Congress in 1994, gun-control activists decided to take a new tack. They would litigate instead of legislate, and gain in the courts what they had been unable to achieve in the political arena: the effective repression of private firearms ownership in America.

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Inspired by the recent success of the plaintiff's bar against the tobacco industry, the leaders of city after city filed lawsuits against the firearms makers. And what they sought was more than billion-dollar judgments, though visions of such surely danced in their heads. They sought what Brady Center attorney Dennis Hennigan called a “doctrinal framework for the eventual liability of the gun industry” - one that, in the words of Temple University law professor David Kairys, would hold that gunmakers “profit from crime and so they should pay the public costs of crime.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the jackpot: Suit after suit was thrown out of court. In rejecting Cincinnati's lawsuit, the Ohio state appellate court noted that to accept the gun-control lawyers' reasoning “would open a Pandora's box” and might well lead to suits against “the manufacturers of matches for arson, or automobile manufacturers for traffic accidents or breweries for drunk driving.”