Alumni Q&A
Alla Lefkowitz JD/LLM ’10
In December 2012, 20 children and six adults died from gunshots at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the fourth deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Prior to that day, Alla Lefkowitz JD/LLM ’10 hadn’t given much thought to guns. But as she watched the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, unfold, something changed.
“When I saw what happened at Sandy Hook, it was just so devastating and so shocking that I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something about this,’” she recalls. Shortly after, Lefkowitz left her job at a top corporate law firm to join the Brady Campaign & Center to Prevent Gun Violence (now Brady).
Since then, U.S. gun-related fatalities have risen from more than 33,000 in 2012 to more than 48,000 in 2022, according to CDC data. Tens of thousands more suffer non-fatal injuries each year, while countless others live with the aftereffects or fear of gun violence.
As senior director of affirmative litigation at Everytown Law, Lefkowitz works to hold the gun industry accountable for gun violence through enforcement of laws governing manufacturers and dealers. She spoke with Duke Law Magazine about her impressive record of success and hopes for change.
Duke Law Magazine: How do the cases you litigate fit into the gun violence prevention movement?
Lefkowitz: When most people think about gun violence, they look at a particular shooting and they look at the perpetrator and his motivations. But what we look at is the sources of illegal guns that are coming into neighborhoods: Where and how did that perpetrator get their gun, when they never should have had one in the first place?
Frequently, illegal guns are coming from the same few gun stores. One of my earliest cases at Everytown was in Kansas City, Missouri, where a young man named Alvino Dwight Crawford had been shot by a 14-year-old. We started looking into how he was able to get a firearm, and it turned out there was a trafficking ring illegally funneling guns into Kansas City, and a trafficker was utilizing gun stores who were willing to illegally sell guns through straw purchases. The owner of the store that sold that gun agreed to surrender his license, and federal regulators ultimately issued a notice of license revocation to the gun manufacturer that made and distributed the gun. So the gun industry definitely notices when this stuff is going on.
DLM: Do Second Amendment arguments at the Supreme Court in cases like Heller, Bruen, and Rahimi filter down to your work?
Lefkowitz: We see defendants in our lawsuits bring it up, but courts understand that we’re not talking about preventing law-abiding individuals from having guns. We’re talking about businesses exercising reasonable precautions in the way they sell guns. Even in the Supreme Court rulings there’s widespread agreement that regulation of commercial transactions is constitutional.
As an example, we represented the family of Sabika Sheikh, an exchange student from Pakistan who was killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas by a 17-year-old classmate who was able to get ammunition online without any age verification whatsoever. It’s illegal for someone under the age of 18 to get certain ammunition, so a company has to do something to prevent minors from getting it. We litigated that case at every level of court in Texas and we won at every level, because even though litigating a gun case in Texas is difficult, everyone understood that if it is illegal for someone under 18 to get ammunition, then a company should be taking basic steps to not sell to minors.
People have different views on firearms, but we can all agree that they’re restricted products and they are risky products. They’re products that can kill. Other risky products like alcohol and tobacco come with warnings. There’s nothing like that in firearms marketing. Instead, it seems to be how far they can push the boundaries. Some of the ads out there are just beyond the pale. They’re just horrible and irresponsible.
DLM: Some of the Sandy Hook families sued Remington over such marketing practices under a Connecticut consumer law and reached a $73 million settlement. Will that legal strategy have an impact?
Lefkowitz: Since 2005, a federal immunity law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce and Arms Act (PLCAA) has immunized the industry from the vast majority of lawsuits. It really unshackled the industry, because there was this feeling of impunity, that they can do whatever they want and they won’t get punished for it. Since that was enacted, not a single gun manufacturer has been brought to trial for facilitating one of these shootings.
That’s why the Sandy Hook settlement and the landmark decision from the Connecticut Supreme Court was so important, and that’s why other cases are using a similar approach. There are exceptions to PLCAA, and I do think that these lawsuits will be able to rely on those exceptions, so I am hopeful that the strategy will succeed, both in the court of law and in making gun companies look at their marketing practices and really think about what they’re doing.
DLM: Polls show most Americans support measures like stronger background checks, safety regulations, even bans of certain classes of firearms. It sounds like there’s also common ground in your area of litigation.
Lefkowitz: The analogy that I use is the opioid epidemic. At a certain point, we as a country realized that the people who were distributing opioids at such a large volume and in such an irresponsible way needed to be held accountable. I think it’s the same thing here. People are starting to understand that we need to look at the industry’s contribution to the gun violence epidemic.
I have clients who were kids when they were shot. I represent parents who have lost children as well, and it can get overwhelming when you think about how it has impacted their lives and how unfair and preventable it is. But we have people now applying to work for us who went to law school for the purpose of going into the gun violence prevention movement and bringing this kind of litigation. I don’t think that existed when I was in law school, so that’s really inspiring.
DLM: When did you first feel that the sacrifices you made to pursue this work were worth it?
Lefkowitz: On my first week at the Brady Center, I was assigned an amicus brief to help defend an assault weapon ban passed in Highland Park (Illinois) and that’s how I learned how to litigate the Second Amendment. It was so interesting, and it felt so worthwhile. So I knew right away.One of the things I really love about what I do is that I get to see cases from the beginning to the end and they really make an impact on the people we’re working with. Early on, I represented a woman by the name of Janet Delana, whose daughter was suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia and wanted to purchase a firearm. She was in her thirties. They lived in a small town in Missouri and Janet called the one gun store in town, gave them all her daughter’s information and said, ‘My daughter is sick. I am begging you as a mother, please do not sell a gun to her.’ And the guy said, ‘If she comes in and she passes the background check, I have to sell her the gun.’ Which is not true.
The daughter did exactly what her mom worried she was going to do. She went to the store, they sold her the gun, and within an hour she had killed her father. It was just so devastating and so preventable.
Because of PLCAA, there was only one claim that could be brought, but Missouri did not recognize it at the time because there was case law against it. So I was literally looking for cases from 1800s England, because I knew that a gun store that is put on notice that someone has a severe mental illness should not sell them a gun.
We went to the Missouri Supreme Court and got a unanimous decision that the gun store could be held liable, resulting in a multimillion-dollar settlement for the client. That really mattered a lot to me, because I took that case from the beginning to the end and got a good result for the client and helped change the law in the state. That’s a matter of personal pride for me.
