## Facts

- Camden County, New Jersey sought to recover public expenditures allegedly caused by handgun-related crime within the county.
- The County sued multiple handgun manufacturers and related entities, alleging their marketing and distribution practices created or contributed to widespread criminal access to handguns.
- The complaint alleged defendants oversupplied handguns relative to lawful demand and continued to use distribution channels the County claimed were known to feed criminal markets.
- The County claimed handgun violence interfered with public safety and imposed increased costs on law enforcement, prosecution, incarceration, medical examiner services, courts, and related county operations.
- The County sought compensatory and punitive damages and injunctive relief requiring changes to marketing and distribution practices.
- The district court dismissed all claims; on appeal the County dropped negligence and negligent entrustment and pursued only public nuisance.

## Issues

1. Whether, under New Jersey law, the marketing and distribution of lawful, nondefective handguns can constitute a public nuisance when the alleged harm arises from criminal misuse by third parties.
2. Whether the County sufficiently alleged that manufacturers exercised the degree of control over the source of the nuisance required for public nuisance liability.
3. Whether the asserted connection between manufacturers’ conduct and the County’s governmental costs was too attenuated to support nuisance liability.

## Decision

- The Third Circuit affirmed dismissal for failure to state a claim, reviewing de novo.
- The court held that lawful, nondefective products lawfully placed into commerce do not, by themselves, amount to a public nuisance under New Jersey law.
- The court held the complaint failed to allege the required control by manufacturers over the source of the nuisance, identified as criminals’ and youths’ unlawful use of handguns.
- The court emphasized that linking manufacturers to the County’s crime-related expenditures depended on a chain of intervening actors and events (distribution intermediaries, unlawful transfers, thefts, and independent criminal acts), making the asserted causal connection too remote for nuisance liability.

## Legal Principles

- A public nuisance is an unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public.
- Public nuisance liability generally requires that the defendant exert a sufficient degree of control over the instrumentality or condition that constitutes the nuisance.
- New Jersey law maintains a boundary between products liability and public nuisance; nuisance doctrine is not a substitute for claims based on defects in product design, manufacture, or warnings.
- Criminal misuse by third parties and other intervening decisions can defeat nuisance theories where the defendant lacks control over the direct source of the interference and the causal chain is remote.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit held that Camden County could not use public nuisance to shift generalized governmental costs of handgun crime to manufacturers of lawful, nondefective firearms because the alleged nuisance was third-party criminal conduct beyond manufacturers’ control and the claimed causal connection to municipal expenditures was too attenuated.


Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp., 273 F.3d 536 (3d Cir. 2001)