Gun Companies Under Attack

Acujeff

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Gun Companies Under Attack
Gun Companies and Stores Don’t Deserve This President’s Lies
by CHARLES C. W. COOKE April 25, 2022

During his recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden (D) called on Congress to “repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued.”

There is, of course, no need for Congress to do anything of the sort, because such a shield does not exist. As usual, Biden is lying about the law.

As The Washington Post observed the day after Biden’s speech, it is simply false to claim that gun manufacturers “can’t be sued.” On the contrary: gun “manufacturers or dealers can be sued if they knowingly sold a product that would be used to commit a crime,” “they can be sued if they were negligent in selling the product to someone they knew was unfit (such as a child or someone who was drunk),” “they can be sued for another technical negligence claim (“negligence per se”) that relates to the violation of a safety statute,” they can be sued if the weapon they sell exhibits a manufacturing defect, and they can be sued if they lie about their product. What they can’t be sued for, by contrast—and what Joe Biden wants them to be sued for—is the bad behavior of the criminals who abuse their products.

This rule puts gun manufacturers firmly within the mainstream. As Bernie Sanders observed back in 2015, “if somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer, and that murderer kills somebody with the gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible? Not anymore than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beat somebody over the head with a hammer. That is not what a lawsuit should be about.” On this, Sanders was correct—which is why, for example, it is possible to sue the Ford Motor Company if it sells you a truck with faulty brakes, but it is not possible to sue the Ford Motor Company if a terrorist steals a truck and uses it to run you over on the sidewalk. As the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson has noted, by protecting gun manufacturers as it has, Congress has not strayed from the fundamentals, but merely “codified the common-law principles that have long applied in tort claims following shootings: if an otherwise lawful firearm has performed as it was designed and intended to do, its maker and seller are not liable for its misuse.”

There is nothing sinister about the U.S. government choosing to codify this rule. Indeed, it does the same thing regularly in other arenas. In an attempt to protect free and open dialogue on the Internet, Congress passed Section 230, which, among other things, makes it impossible for those who wish to censor others to sue the people who facilitate libelous or illegal speech instead of the people who engaged in it. Similar laws have been passed to protect airlines from culpability in such cases as their aircraft are hijacked by terrorists and vaccine providers from culpability when governments mandate their products.

Why does President Biden want to change the rules? The answer is obvious. Indeed, the answer is precisely why the law that Biden lies about—the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA)—was passed with huge bipartisan majorities in 2005.

Biden claims that the gun industry is “the only industry in America that is exempted from being able to be sued by the public.” But what he really means is that, as a direct result of the existence of the PLCAA, gun-control advocates such as himself are unable to achieve their political aims by underhanded means. Joe Biden understands that the Second Amendment presents a profound legal obstacle to his agenda, he understands that the American people present a profound political obstacle to his agenda, and he understands that, as a result, his best bet is to achieve what is best described as “gun control through litigation.” The PLCAA makes that harder for Joe Biden, so Joe Biden dutifully opposes the PLCAA.

This is a game with a long pedigree. In 1999, Joseph Ganim (D), the mayor of Bridgeport, Conn., explained that his plan was to sue gun manufacturers until they did what he wanted. “The idea,” The New York Times reported at the time, “was inspired by state lawsuits against the tobacco industry.” Only this time there was no meaningful claim of dishonesty or wrongdoing. Instead, in the words of Mayor Ganim, the aim was “creating law with litigation.” “That’s the route that we’re going,” Ganim said, “because they’ve always very effectively, with big money, lobbied the legislature and kept laws from being passed.” Commenting on the idea while working in the Clinton administration in 2000, Andrew Cuomo concurred: The strategy, he said, is “death by a thousand cuts.”

Alas, the mere fact that the PLCAA now exists has not, in and of itself, been enough to stem the tide. For it to have its full prophylactic effect, the PLCAA must be applied by the judiciary each and every time a case is filed. And ... well, that is not happening. In February of 2022, the insurance companies that once backed the now-dissolved Remington Arms settled with the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for an astonishing $73 million; they did this after the Connecticut Supreme Court refused to apply the PLCAA to their claim and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in at all.

Specifically, the Connecticut Supreme Court permitted the case to proceed on the grounds that Remington had “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product” by marketing the gun to young men and implying that it was masculine in nature. This is utterly ridiculous. It is not a crime to advertise firearms to young men, and there exists no connection whatsoever between the abomination that took place in Sandy Hook and the promotional material that was used by Remington.

As The Associated Press noted in its write-up of the case, the families did not really object to the advertising, but held the unrelated and intrinsically political view that “the company should have never sold such a dangerous weapon to the public.” And so, having been unable to convince America’s manufacturers to stop producing them, Americans to stop buying them, Congress to prohibit them or the public to amend the U.S. Constitution, they took a backdoor route—precisely the sort of behavior that the PLCAA was designed to prevent.

Alarmingly, this practice of suing the people who didn’t commit the crime in question is gaining steam. Last year, the government of Mexico filed a $10 billion lawsuit in Boston, Mass., against a host of American gun manufacturers including Beretta, Barrett, Colt, Glock and Smith & Wesson. The charge? That those companies—and not the Mexican government, or the cartels, or the individuals who choose to break the law—are morally and legally responsible for the high levels of violence inside Mexico. Not only is this ridiculous on the merits—at most, 10% of the guns used in crimes in Mexico can be traced back to the United States, and, besides, it is perverse to blame the country in which a given firearm originated for crime rather than to blame the criminal who committed it—it represents a full-frontal attack on the sovereignty and Constitution of the United States. As is their prerogative, American voters have decided to pass, sustain and cherish a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and to inoculate themselves against those who would undermine it. This case should be open and shut.

The rest of the column:
 
They should form a perimeter and defend at all costs...

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They should form a perimeter and defend at all costs...
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It's almost like you were in my scout troop.
 
Accepting Brady’s numbers, < 120k people are shot and killed/wounded yearly in the USA. With 393 million guns in the US, that’s a 0.03% effectiveness rate for guns. Lethality even less.

For an instrument whose only purpose is to kill, a 3 in 10,000 rate of shootings by guns is pretty poor performance. Gun owners should be sueing manufacturers rather than gun control proponents.


 
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