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The verdict is in and it’s a catastrophe for
Americans—no, not the Senate acquittal of President Clinton; the verdict in the first
suit by a city against gun manufacturers. (The president’s acquittal was almost a
foregone conclusion—there was no way the Senate could get a two-thirds majority to
convict with more than a third of the senators being Democrats and all of them having
their own guilty consciences.) No, the real disaster happened the day before the president
got away with perjury, when a Brooklyn jury found fifteen firearms manufacturers guilty of
negligence in their sales practices and awarded an initial $4 million in damages to a
shooting victim. Following the lead of states that have successfully sued
tobacco manufacturers for expenses supposed to derive from citizens’ use of tobacco
products, cities including Chicago, New Orleans, Miami (and Dade County), Bridgeport, and
Atlanta have filed law suits against gun manufacturers. San Francisco, Los Angeles, St.
Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston have been considering filing suit. Even though,
according to CNN, the defendants’ lawyers in Brooklyn immediately asked U.S. District
Court Judge Jack Weinstein to set aside the verdict or declare a mistrial, gun control
nuts across the country are sure to use this verdict to trigger an avalanche of suits that
could bury gun manufacturers in red tape for years. Gun control nuts would like to see all potential victims
of violent crime in America stripped of their most effective means of self-defense: their
own weapons. Doing so is clearly unConstitutional and just plain wrong, but we defenders
of such basic human rights as self-defense should be leery of complacency. Being clearly
right is not enough¾ as the massive failure of the tobacco industry to defend itself
successfully demonstrated for once and for all. (Mind you, it may be true that tobacco
companies manipulated their products to enhance their addictive effects, but that
doesn’t diminish in any way the responsibility of the individuals who knowingly and
willfully used products that have been called "coffin nails" for more than 100
years.) But what has true responsibility to do with it? Precious
little, now that the trial lawyers of America have realized that suing entire industries
can be a cash cow. Make no mistake, the opposition on this issue is no
longer just gun control nuts, who can be relied upon to run afoul of the Constitution in
their blind zeal; the money at stake has now attracted the interest of a significant
portion of the legal profession. Consider the attack vector followed by the lawyers in the
New York case. They did not simply trot out the miserable poster children of "gun
violence" and smear the manufacturers as heartless money-grubbing
"pushers." They sought out a legal weakness that stays as far away from
Constitutional questions as possible: distribution practices that, when linked to patterns
of illegal gun use, give the appearance of negligence. Defenders of the right to keep and bear arms
do not help matters by shrilling about the Second Amendment. The lawyers (and gun
grabbers) can shake their heads sadly at the antics of such "extremists," saying
that the litigation has nothing to do with the Second Amendment, but with gun
manufacturers deliberately "flooding" gun friendly markets in order to
"force" the guns over borders into places where guns are illegal or more greatly
restricted—an "obvious" attempt to circumnavigate the law, right? If
extremists think those laws violate the Second Amendment, the argument continues,
they’re free to challenge them, but while the laws are on the books, greedy gun
companies shouldn’t be allowed to break them. (Never mind that the gun manufacturers
are not actually breaking any laws themselves!) Handguns Are "Toxic Waste
Dumped Upstream" The fact that gun manufacturers have no control over the
individuals who do break laws is relevant, of course, but most prospective jurors
won’t see it that way. Guns are even less popular in our culture today than tobacco
is, and the average American carries a lot more disinformation about guns around in
his or her head than he or she does about tobacco. Let’s get real here: where could
anyone find a juror who thinks tobacco is healthy? The same mechanism will work against
gun manufacturers in case after case, as voir dire will almost surely exclude anyone from
jury duty who is truly knowledgeable about firearms. As happened with the specter of doctored tobacco, the gun
manufacturers have been caught with their pants down, as far as the unthinking public is
concerned. The manufacturers will readily admit that they don’t try to make sure the
guns they sell to licensed dealers don’t flow to places where guns are illegal. Now,
an informed person knows that the latter duty really belongs to the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms. But such a person would almost have to lie to make it onto one of
these juries, and the uninformed who do make the jury will take the admission as all they
need to "know" to render a guilty verdict. Defending attorney James Dorr made the argument that has
worked for gun manufacturers before: their products work exactly as advertised, and it is
unfair to "hold the manufacturers of a lawful, legitimately sold product responsible
for acts of outlaws who are totally outside their control.... The case is simply
wrong." This plea fell on deaf ears after the prosecuting
attorneys compared handguns to "toxic waste" and accused gun manufacturers of
"dumping" them "upstream" from locations where harm has been done. How
many average Americans will find much sympathy in their hearts for the manufacturers when
the latter admit that they made no effort to try to find or discipline
"dishonest" distributors? I have to admit that I too fell into the complacency I am
warning against in this piece. The case seemed logically quite different from the tobacco
suits, especially as regards the apparent evidence of genuine wrongdoing on the part of
some tobacco companies. Some appear to have found scientific evidence of the dangers of
their products, but had that evidence suppressed and made false claims otherwise.
It’s not like that with guns, whose makers are being sued in spite of the fact that
their products do what they are supposed to do, and in spite of the fact that the
manufacturers have not hidden any research, lied, or broken any laws. I underestimated the opposition. I just couldn’t
believe that something so stupid and senseless could win in court—and neither,
apparently, did the defense attorneys. Some champions of the right to self-defense have tried to
rally support in state legislatures to pass laws banning such suits. Just such a law has
been passed in Georgia. But it’s not enough. There is no way such laws will pass in
all fifty state legislatures, particularly those in states with a strong anti-gun
sentiment prevailing. Given the number of cities that can bring suit in each state, the
threat to gun manufacturers is very real; gun control nuts no longer need to tangle with
the Second Amendment; they can just bankrupt gun makers and take a giant stride toward
their goal of getting rid of all privately owned guns in the United States. This growing wave of legal action against gun
manufacturers has just become the hottest flash-point in the whole gun debate. This fight
may well be the Battle of Gettysburg of the effort to save self-defense in this United
States¾ the turning point that decides the overall result. Those who support the human
right of self-defense cannot afford to be complacent about the litigation battlefront. The
arguments the other side is using for weapons may seem as ludicrous as the insinuation
that the makers of ice-picks, baseball bats, cars, candle sticks, ropes, monkey wrenches,
and anything else that can be used by murderers are liable for the deaths of murder
victims. But we can’t afford to laugh at them one single day longer. THEY won the first volley! We must agitate, educate, and fight this onslaught with
every weapon in our arsenal of intellectual ammunition, and we must do it NOW, or
the issue will have to be settled with brass-encased ammunition. Don Lobo Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table From The
Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 7, Feb. 15, 1999 |
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