26 Years. Millions Spent. Gary's Gun Shakedown Dies in Court.

Gary, Indiana filed suit against the country's largest gun manufacturers in 1999. Your flip phone was new. The Twin Towers were still standing. And the city's lawyers were still getting paid last week—until May 21, 2025, when the Indiana Supreme Court refused to hear Gary's appeal and closed the coffin for good.

**Gunmakers: still standing. The lawsuit: dead.**

This wasn't a fluke. It wasn't a technicality. Indiana's legislature passed a state preemption law explicitly barring cities from weaponizing the courts against lawful gun manufacturers—and the Indiana Supreme Court just enforced it, exactly as designed. That's not corruption. That's the system working the way the Second Amendment needs it to work.

The Trace—bankrolled by the same donor ecosystem feeding Everytown and Moms Demand Action—is calling this Republicans "snuffing out" justice. Read that sentence again. A Bloomberg-funded outlet is framing a gunmaker *surviving 26 years of litigation* as a public loss. That's not journalism. That's the agenda with the mask off.

Here's what The Trace won't say plainly: Gary's lawsuit was never designed to win in a courtroom. It was a shakedown—a playbook pioneered in the late 1990s when anti-gun city governments, working hand-in-glove with trial lawyers and gun-control activists, tried to do through litigation what they couldn't do through legislation. Bankrupt the industry. Death by legal fees. New York ran this play. San Francisco ran it. New Jersey ran it. Congress saw it clearly enough to pass the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005, specifically to kill this abuse at the federal level.

Gary kept threading loopholes anyway. Indiana's legislature closed them. The Indiana Supreme Court locked the door.

**Twenty-six years of harassment. Over.**

But don't close the tab yet—because this playbook is still live everywhere state preemption doesn't exist. Chicago. Los Angeles. Any jurisdiction with a sympathetic judge and a well-funded plaintiff's firm can still tie a manufacturer in knots for decades, regardless of merit. The goal was never a verdict. The goal was attrition: mounting legal costs, toxic press coverage, and existential uncertainty until manufacturers either settled or quit the market entirely. Fewer manufacturers. Fewer guns. Less of your right, bled out one legal filing at a time.

Indiana held the line so its gun owners didn't have to watch that slow bleed.

**Here's your homework:** Find out whether your state has a preemption law protecting manufacturers from municipal lawsuits. If it does, guard it—because the same activist lawyers who kept Gary's case on life support for 26 years are looking for their next target right now. If your state doesn't have one, that target might already be painted on the industry supplying your local gun store.

The firewall between your right to buy a legal firearm and a city government litigating it out of existence is a preemption law. Indiana has one. The question is whether yours does—and whether you're paying attention before the lawsuit gets filed.