(UnitedVoice.com) – Smith & Wesson is one of the most prominent gun manufacturers in the world. Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson founded the company in 1852. For more than 170 years, they have been a leading maker of firearms but also a target for anti-gun activists.
In the most recent attack against the company, a group of shareholders is suing. The company’s CEO has now responded to the lawsuit.
Shareholders Sue
On December 5, Catholic nuns filed a lawsuit against Smith & Wesson in the Eighth Judicial Court in Clark County, Nevada. The nuns are from the Sisters of Bon Secours USA in Marriottsville, Maryland; the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, US-Ontario Province in Marylhurst, Oregon; the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia in Aston, Pennsylvania; and Adrian Dominican Sisters in Adrian, Michigan.
The nuns are Smith & Wesson shareholders who are arguing that the company is putting them at risk by exposing itself to liability by violating the laws during the sales and production process of its AR-15-style rifles. The company has been sued several times over the last few years in relation to mass shootings.
The group of nuns, who own more than 1,000 shares of Smith & Wesson, argues the company has enjoyed record-breaking profits from the sales of the rifles, despite the fact that there’s been an “exponential rise in gun deaths and mass shootings carried out with its product in the [US].”
The lawsuit asks the company to change the way it markets the gun. They want to limit the appeal of the weapons to people who might be inspired by the current militaristic advertising campaign. They want the gun maker to “return to the practices of its first 153 years of existence” when the company was a “successful beacon of responsible gun ownership.”
CEO Responds
The New York Times reported that Smith & Wesson CEO Mark Smith issued a statement saying the coalition of nuns wasn’t working on what was best for the company or its shareholders. He accused the sisters of filing a “frivolous lawsuit” aligned with their history of trying to “hijack and abuse the shareholder advocacy process to harm [its] reputation and company.”
Smith was referring to an effort by the same group of nuns earlier this year. They sponsored a resolution that shareholders ultimately rejected to force the company to “conduct an assessment of the human rights impact” its business practices have on the country.
The CEO told another outlet that the nuns have been losing all of their other motions, so he thinks they are “trying a new tactic.”
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