WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether Mexico may sue gun manufacturers in the United States for aiding in the trafficking of weapons used by drug cartels.

Mexico sued seven gun-makers and one distributor in 2021, blaming them for rampant violence caused by illegal gun trafficking from the United States spurred by the demand of Mexican drug cartels for weapons.

Mexico has strict gun control laws that it says make it virtually impossible for criminals to obtain firearms legally. But gun violence is rampant.

The lawsuit, which seeks billions of dollars in damages, said that 70% to 90% of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico came from the United States.

Judge Dennis F. Saylor of U.S. District Court in Boston dismissed Mexico’s lawsuit, saying it was barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a 2005 law that prohibits many kinds of suits against makers and distributors of firearms. The law, Saylor wrote, “bars exactly this type of action from being brought in federal and state courts.”

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the suit, saying it qualified for an exception to the law, which authorizes claims for knowing violations of firearms laws that are a direct cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.

In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the gun-makers said that “Mexico’s suit has no business in an American court.” Mexico’s legal theory, they added, was an “eight-step Rube Goldberg.”

“Absent this court’s intervention,” the gun-makers’ petition continued, “Mexico’s multibillion-dollar suit will hang over the American firearms industry for years.”

In response, Mexico said the defendants were complicit in mass violence.

“The flood of petitioners’ firearms from sources in the United States to cartels in Mexico is no accident,” Mexico’s brief said. “It results from petitioners’ knowing and deliberate choice to supply their products to bad actors.”