It’s hard to imagine a lawsuit that faces more challenging political headwinds than Mexico’s case against US gun companies in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

Briefly, the nation of Mexico sued seven US gun manufacturers plus a company that distributes firearms, claiming that these companies knowingly (and illegally) supplied guns to drug cartels in that country which set off an epidemic of violence. According to a federal appeals court that previously heard this case, “defendants produce more than sixty-eight percent of the U.S. guns trafficked into Mexico, which comes out to between 342,000 and 597,000 guns each year.”

Mexico makes a plausible case that these companies have profited handsomely off of these weapons, which allegedly cause thousands of deaths in Mexico every year. Yet there are three reasons to doubt that Mexico has any shot of prevailing in the US Supreme Court.

The first is a 2005 federal law, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (“PLCAA”), which gives gun makers and sellers an unusual amount of immunity from lawsuits of all kinds. This law seeks to prevent suits against gun manufacturers “for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended.” Guns, of course, are designed and intended to be used as deadly weapons.

That said, PLCAA does contain some exceptions to this general rule, including an exception for gun manufacturers who aid and abet a violation of state or federal law. But that brings us to the second reason why Mexico faces an uphill climb: The Court’s most recent precedent governing when someone can be held liable for aiding and abetting is fairly vague, and it contains language that is favorable to both parties’ positions in this case. That means that the justices could potentially read this case to benefit whichever party they want to win.

And that brings us to the third reason why Mexico is unlikely to prevail: The politics of this case are simply awful. The Supreme Court has 6-3 Republican supermajority, and those Republicans have tripped over themselves to rule in favor of pro-gun causes — even writing an entirely new interpretation of the Second Amendment in order to make the law much more favorable to guns.

While there are reasonable legal arguments supporting both sides of this case, Smith & Wesson asks a Republican Supreme Court to choose between ruling in favor of gun makers and ruling in favor of Mexicans. If you’re a gambler, it’s easy to decide which side of that bet you should take.

Of course, it’s........

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