## Facts

- Victims of handgun violence (including Stephen Fox, rendered paraplegic after being shot by a teenager) sued multiple handgun manufacturers in negligence.
- Plaintiffs alleged defendants negligently marketed and distributed handguns in ways that foreseeably supplied an illegal secondary market serving minors and criminals.
- The claims did not allege defective design or manufacture; they challenged distribution decisions such as oversupplying certain distributors and failing to monitor downstream diversion.
- In some instances, including Fox’s shooting, plaintiffs could not identify the manufacturer of the handgun used.
- Plaintiffs sought to impose liability either based on negligent distribution generally or, when identification was impossible, through market-share liability.
- After a jury verdict for certain plaintiffs in federal district court, the Second Circuit certified to the New York Court of Appeals whether New York law recognized (1) a duty in these circumstances and (2) market-share liability for these claims.

## Issues

1. Whether handgun manufacturers owe a common-law duty of care to members of the public injured by criminals using illegally obtained handguns, based on manufacturers’ alleged negligent marketing and distribution.
2. Whether plaintiffs who cannot identify the manufacturer of the handgun used may recover under market-share liability for negligent distribution.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals answered both certified questions in the negative.
- The court held handgun manufacturers owed no duty to protect the general public from criminal misuse of handguns by third parties, absent a sufficiently direct relationship or other recognized basis for imposing such a duty.
- The court held market-share liability does not apply to negligent marketing/distribution claims involving handguns.
- These answers required dismissal of the claims under New York law.

## Legal Principles

- In New York, duty is a legal question informed by policy; there is generally no duty to control third parties to prevent them from causing harm absent a recognized special relationship or other limited exception.
- Foreseeability of harm does not itself create a duty; it bears on the scope of a duty only after a duty is established.
- Courts limit duty to avoid exposing defendants to liability to an indeterminate class for harms produced by numerous independent actors through attenuated causal chains.
- Proximate cause requires a sufficiently direct connection; where injury follows multiple intervening criminal acts in a complex distribution chain, causation may be too remote for negligence liability.
- Market-share liability is confined to narrow settings involving fungible products and identification problems tied to product indistinguishability; it is not a substitute for proving causation where the identification failure and injury result from downstream criminal transactions rather than product fungibility.

## Conclusion

The New York Court of Appeals declined to impose negligence liability on handgun manufacturers for injuries caused by third-party criminal shootings based on alleged negligent distribution and marketing, and it refused to extend market-share liability to this context, requiring dismissal of the plaintiffs’ claims.


Hamilton v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp., 96 N.Y.2d 222, 750 N.E.2d 1055 (N.Y. 2001)