Style, capacity and rate of fire.
Those sound like useful measures but they don’t mean anything. For rate of fire I assume you mean bullets per pull of the trigger but it’s possible you mean bullets per second or some other measure.
Style doesn’t mean anything do you mean all black guns are military weapons? Only if it has a foregrip or a bayonet? As has been mentioned the Remington 700 is one of the most popular hunting rifles in the world it is also a military sniper rifle does that mean it has the style of a military weapons? How about pistols? All 1911 have a similar style and they are used in both the civilian world and military world for over 100 years does that make it a civilian gun or a military gun?
Capacity also does mean anything do you mean the capacity to kill people or are you referring to the magazine capacity? If the former how do you define the capacity to kill a person? How many rounds makes it a military weapons?
Perhaps something:
Style is relevant. The more military the appearance of a weapon, the greater it’s toy appeal - characteristics that are not useful for non military applications.
Maximum rate of fire, by whatever means, is a useful metric. I’m sure sportsmen can agree on the maximum rate of fire required for non-military applications.
Capacity - number of rounds immediately available to the user. Again, sportsmen can determine the number of rounds suitable for non-military applications.
It is quite possible to apply quality weaponry to legitimate civilian activities while minimizing their potential destructiveness. Few true sportsmen need to discharge 20 rounds in a few seconds in order to take down a deer, duck, quail, paper target or bottle.
I appreciate you fleshing out your answer.
I’ll disagree with the bottle above since those types of targets are the ones that are mostly likely to be shot rapid fire since there are no consequences to missing. When I was younger we used to bowl melons down a mountain road with the goal of seeing how many rounds we could put in the melon before it disappeared or stopped moving. Now with my brother in law we use dueling trees on every family vacation. 30 rounds is normal for either of those activities and I would set the rate of fire around 1 round per second but that is more of a function of how long it takes to aim some people are faster than I am. I’ve also never seen a gun ad about rate of fire so I don’t think you’ll ever get a manufacturer for that one. As for magazine size it seems it’s normally aftermarket magazines that advertise that since for the manufacturer it’s more about how many round fit ergonomically.
So your goal with the style of the gun is to prevent children from playing with them. I haven’t seen that “military style” weapons are more likely to be discharged by children from what I can tell the incidences of children and gun accidents didn’t decrease during the adult weapons ban. I don’t think suing manufacturers for making guns attractive to children is going to go very far.
Not at all. I’m referring to adult toy appeal. Like all those pick up trucks in Silicon Valley. Or the guys who drive Gran Prix bikes to work. Same with weaponry. The manufacturer does not have to describe it as military - the picture does it all. A toy is a replica that appeals to the user. The purchaser identifies with the image.
Shooting watermelons is fun. It is the application of a weapon as a toy. Plinking is using a weapon as a toy.
Meanwhile, back to the OP.
Manufacturers absolutely know they are supplying a market that identifies with the military. No different than pharma feeding drugs into the street market. They do it because that’s where the money is.
I can agree with that but you want to be able to sue manufacturers for making toys? Or you’re just opposed to that use case. I’ve shot plenty of melons with a lever action gun they fire very rapidly. Are looking to call levar action military weapons?
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me in the case of the OP. You’'re talking about suing manufacturers for making a gun that is fun to shoot.
Indeed, one mans toy is another mans weapon.
The first thing to do is establish responsibility for each weapon from manufacture to destruction. Require that all weapons must be individually insured for theft and liability. Just like a car. Manufacturers should be required to carry liability insurance for misuse of their products. Ghost weapons, 3D plans and parts should carry the same requirement.
All of this can be carried out through dealerships and insurance companies. No registration is involved. When there is an incident anyone involved who is not compliant is criminally and financially liable.
Taking this line of thought to a reasonable end-point, wouldn’t we just want to have all persons be required to carry some form of federal liability insurance? You are correct in that firearms are a lethal risk, but you’re fundamentally saying anyone who fails to carry insurance (whether or not they use the firearm) is criminally and financially liable. So are uninsured drivers. So were uninsured humans during the first years of the ACA (though not criminally so). At a certain level, it does make sense, but then we are already used to having separate insurance for your dwelling (renter/homeowner), vehicle (car/motorcycle/rv), health, business, and on and so forth. We have a proliferation of insurance, which is great for the insurers, not so great for the people involved in many cases, which can become incredibly burdensome to individuals, sole proprietorships, and many small business.
But I could certainly see the appeal of a nationwide personal liability, and should be expanded to include other sorts of ‘risky’ activities - smoking, drinking, and the like. It would probably end up as some sort of ‘vice’ tax - which I wouldn’t support, and don’t think there would be much political enthusiasm for. And again, going back to the OP - how would this affect the liability for the manufacturer in any way?
The manufacturer has liability for the first step, which is almost always Manufacturer → Dealer. It’s a completed, sold product at that time (arguments could be made for various consignment/single source shops, but that’s sufficiently minor that I wouldn’t bother). Are you saying that once the weapon has been sold, that every step in the chain is required to maintain some form of coverage for the future owners? Because, especially in the case of firearms, they can be a very long chain.
Using myself as an example, I have a Ruger Ranch 14, that I bought used. As I understand it’s history, it was sold by Ruger to a dealership in WI, then to Mr. Owner 1 who bought it for his (at the time 19 year old) son Owner 2 (who properly registered it), and which passed back to Owner 1 (now 3) when said son died in military service. Owner 1/3 didn’t want to keep it due to the history, and listed it on gunbroker.com, which is where I found it and purchased it, making me owner 4. And to be honest, this is a relatively short chain. Plus, at each stage it was transferred via FFL. Which, if we are talking about “establish responsibility for each weapon from manufacture to destruction,” would be a party in each and every sale. So for one sample firearms, we have (arguably) 8 individuals who would have life-long responsibility for the weapon? Again, back to the OP, what possible liability should the manufacturer have at such a point? If any it would be so diluted as to be pointless.
An additional question I think is very pertinent in the like of the recent Police shootings, is how would such liability work towards manufacturers who provide weapons to police? We have had far too many police involved shootings with minimal justification for usage for firearms. I could certainly see a case in which, having been largely thwarted in seeking justice from the individual police officers and departments, that such precedents in cases against Remington could be applied to police shootings as well. After all, we’ve had several threads about the militarization of the police in both training and equipment.
You know this comparing car = gun thing is pretty much always wrong. Again, you do NOT need insurance for your car unless you drive it on the public highway. Nor do cars have to be insured for theft.
And if you car is stolen,whether or not you have theft insurance, you are not held liable if it is used in a crime. Not to mention my homeowners policy covers things like me shooting the wrong person thinking they are a intruder or a accident.
This gun insurance thing is just a way of banning guns.
But this has nothing to do with gun Manufacturer liability.
You’re really going around in circles on this. Originally, you said that you would want manufacturers liable for the advertisement of military weapons to the general population. Once we drilled down on that we determined that weapons who’s sole purpose as you put it was to be a toy were also military weapons. At this point you are now saying that all guns should be eligible to sue the manufacturers. What happened to your three part test?
It’s OK if you admit you just want to ban guns and don’t really care about the mechanism. It’ll make it handy for us to not try and find a middle ground.
I feel like my posts are invisible. You are saying “just like a car.” You understand that when you insure a car against theft, that is so that YOU will be compensated if someone steals your car, right?
You further understand that when a car is insured “for…liability” that means when YOU do something negligent with your car, or alternatively a third party to whom YOU have given permission to drive your car? Do you understand that you are not liable if someone steals your car and drives it into a crowd?
So, insurance “against theft” on a gun would mean that an insurance company would pay me the value of my gun if someone stole it, and “against…liability” would pay out if I negligently shot someone with my gun.
We keep going over and over and over this because people keep failing to understand that you don’t buy insurance against third parties criminally misusing your belongings because there is NOTHING TO INSURE AGAINST.
Wasn’t there some trouble a few years back when states couldn’t get the drugs they needed to perform lethal injection executions because the drugs in question weren’t rated “safe and effective”?
No need to get personal,
I identified a market comprised of adults who utilize weapons as toys: ie displaying, plinking, pseudo military activities, acting out fantasies by shooting targets sometimes people.
The insurance policy I propose for manufacturers is for civil suits resulting from the improper use of their products. If they were not a protected class they would be held liable for shared responsibility in making mass shootings possible.
If I market rat poison by pointing out that a small amount is enough to kill a horse and it is invisible dissolved in water and has no taste or odor and is undetectable by autopsy. If, as a result, I had voluminous sales concurrent with widespread use of the product to eliminate wealthy relatives, I would be the subject of law suits.
Ok, so your proposal is to make guns different then every other type of manufacturered good and somehow do this without running afoul of the constitution. You don’t want to sue manufacturers for
Not at all. Toy manufacturers have been sued and products withdrawn. Remember lawn darts?
Given how much better lawn darts are at killing people than guns are at killing people, or so I’ve read above, lawns darts should be protected by the Second Amendment.
I may be misunderstanding your intent, so please clarify for me. My understanding of your earlier posts - specifically regarding style, maximum rate of fire and capacity, implied that hunting was the predominant (only?) legitimate use of a firearm, with a possible pass for target shooting as well.
You also state -
My interpretation, and I may well be wrong, is that you do not (in general at least) see self or home defense as a proper use of a firearm? At least I have not seen a single statement along those lines. Especially as 2 of the three points I summarized from your earlier post would have direct effect of utility on that specific use of a firearm.
Now again, it’s an interesting POV regarding manufacturers liability, in that by implication, the manufacturer is being made legally responsible for a users judgement call regarding threat to life and limb. So that even if the legitimate purchaser makes a legal, purchase, even including your hypothetical liability coverage, and above and beyond the coverage afforded by many homeowner/renter liability coverage, that the manufacturer should still be liable for consequences of self-defense?
This is why trying to discuss the topic usually goes to hell. No matter what is brought up when it comes to controlling guns in any way shape or fashion the objection is that “it is just a way of banning guns.” The world is just one big slippery slope to you, isn’t it?
The responses to this thread pretty much illustrate the reason why. For a lot of folks the very concept of legally possessing a tool designed to kill people strikes them as something that a civilized society shouldn’t allow in the first place. Or at most, with the heaviest restrictions possible. For too many reasons to reiterate here yet again, gun owners disagree with that. Which leads to an impasse in fundamental outlook as unbridgeable as the gap between pro-life and pro-choice.
The fact is that “reasonable” gun control, as defined by people who don’t really like guns in the first place, inevitably amounts to “make guns as rare, difficult to obtain and as tightly controlled as possible”. Which gun owners regard as obnoxious as the various laws pro-lifers try to pass to hinder, hobble, and obstruct legal abortion at every possible turn.