Ok, so now we’re back to gun manufacturers should be sued because they are manufacturing guns. Their right to exist as a legal business is wrong and they should be punished for it. This is nothing but a back door ban on guns and would get thrown put by the Supreme Court.
No, in whole. Every piece of the design of a handgun, outside of non-functional styling, is intended to make it better at killing humans within the overall design parameter. They are advertised as ways to protect yourself by killing humans.
Ping Drivers are not. They are advertised and designed utterly and completely for playing golf. There isn’t a single design parameter where the engineer said “this would make it more likely that a ball will kill a 3rd grader, so let’s do that”
Can you say the same about a Glock?
This is a much more interesting position. I’m curious what makes something a military weapon unsuitable for the general population is it something like the 1911 that is carried today by the military or is it something like a bolt action .308 that was used by the military of WWI but it primarily a hunting weapon today? Would it be something like the M&P 15-22 that would never be used by any military ever but looks scary?
This doesn’t make any sense. There aren’t two categories of firearms based on this. One of the most popular deer rifle designs is the Mauser design, which was designed for war by the German Empire, and is way more powerful than any “military style” rifle. One of the most popular bird shotguns was used in the Vietnam War. And how do you know they’re not used more in deaths? The vast majority is handguns, the FBI data doesn’t even split up rifles into some nebulous categories.
For that matter, the Remington 700 is a standard hunting rifle which is also one of the most common sniper rifles in military use.
You said it: “protect yourself by killing humans” not murder.
My issue with your argument is that you are not holding the same variables the same. A gun can have many purposes of which murder is one. A golf driver can have many purposes of which murder is one. Neither manufacturer markets their products for murder.
A product which is designed to kill human beings in lawful self-defense will very much share the same features which are good for murdering a human being, but as we as a society permit such products, (indeed they are specifically protected by the Constitution) you cannot hold a manufacturer liable because it shares those features.
To be accurate, the M24 and M40 military sniper rifles used by the US Army and Marines are both based on the Model 700 design.
Which, strangely enough, has not led to a sudden holocaust of gun violence and death in the states which have eliminated requiring permits for carry. Go figure…
True enough. For example the Constitution protects freedom of assembly; no one has ever claimed that that means that police can’t disperse a disorderly crowd or that cities can’t require parade permits.
But there seems to be quite a lot of disagreement on just what “reasonable” means in this context. What gun owners object to are laws that are the equivalent of a crowd control ordinance which pre-defined any unauthorized public gathering as a riot. When a “reasonable” law eviscerates the evident meaning of a Constitutional guarantee of a right, people and the courts have mostly strenuously objected. Yet the Second Amendment seems to be the red-headed stepchild of the Bill of Rights.
The New York Times Book Review of April 4/21 has a brief review of a book called Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo. Not read it. He “follows the guns” of arms which start off legal and get diverted, interviewing straw purchasers with fake names.
A Quote From The Review:
“And yet there is no firearm-trafficking statute to tackle guns flowing [to gangs]. Nor is there a national gun registry which makes tracking down the owners of guns used in crimes a Sisyphean task.”
Using explosives carries strict liability to the user since they are considered dangerous when weighed by the six criteria. But this does not always, or usually, extend to the manufacturer if they make the dangers clear.
What is stopping action on the two points highlighted in italics? Fearful politicians? Lobby funds?
Except as I explained, almost all guns go from manufacturer to distributor to dealer. Not manufacturer directly to dealer.
If a dealer is keeping bad records they are eventually going to get boinked by the feds. BATFE can make a general inspection of my records and inventory without any warrant once within a 12 month period. Other scenarios cause further warrantless inspections.
If my records are screwy as in the acquisition and disposition doesn’t match my inventory there is going to be a problem, including getting my license suspended, getting completely shut down, or even charged with a federal crime. This is the responsibility of the feds, not manufacturers or distributors. And they are good at what they do.
Which does constitute an interesting take on how such liability may be looked at – did the maker (and the marketers) present this product to the public in a way that its sale was founded on emphasizing its lethality (“knowingly marketed and promoted the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle for use in assaults against human beings”) and should a reasonable person have expected this to have bad consequences.
(Anyone looking at enthusiast publications and sites will have noticed that for the last couple of decades there has been an increased emphasis on how “tactical” the firearms and their accessories are. A question arises, given that we do not live in an environment where you or I would be expected to encounter a “tactical” situation (or at least not until lately), why emphasize that?)
Myself I am not sure how it will turn out, but at least SCOTUS said “judge it on the merits” – not suing them just because they made the gun used by a third party, nor saying they can’t be sued at all. Gonna be a bit tough to prove Remington intended the rifle to be used for massacres, unless thay can convey that "well, what other thing was there to use it for? "
BTW, it strikes me in this regard that one likely effect of an opening up of this liability standing, would be to cement the position of a few large, well-established firearms makers/importers, as smaller operations may not be able to sustain the exposure.
To be even more accurate, the M24 is just a standard Remington 700 with a military number designation. I’m not sure why you thought adding the military number added any ‘accuracy’. My statement was completely correct. Some models are chambered for different rounds, but then so is the 700, because they are the same gun.
The M40 is a standard 700 that the Marines modify with bolt-on aftermarket accessories, plus perhaps some other mods the Marines don’t like to talk about to improve the accuracy slightly. It’s still a Remington 700, just as it would be if I bought one privately and put a new stock or barrel on it.
The civilian Remington 700 is available in all the different chamberings the military uses, from .223 to .338 Lapua, which is a very common sniper round. You can also get match barrels, lightweight stocks, etc. Still a Remington 700.
Since we seem to be drifting again, I have an on-topic hypothetical - what if the liability was made contingent upon a small (as to not be burdensome to the manufacturer or buyer) tax that was used for research into firearm safety measures.
Just using a round figure, say a 1% tax on new firearm purchases and FFL transfers, which could be applied to grants for additional safety such as as the currently largely moribund smartgun tech (huge reliability and interference concerns).
As a gun owner, I wouldn’t find that amount burdensome, although it’s also about the maximum I would recommend. And I suspect that if kept low, such a tax would be a much lower cost of combatting the legal challenges if the liability exception was removed.
Just a thought on how we can try to look at options other than all or nothing. Lets try to be better.
Modnote: Again, stay on-topic. This is almost on topic so no warning. But no more deep dives into specific gun design or mechanics.
Well we have the deer rifle, the bird shotgun, the hunting rifle (based on a sniper rifle) then we have
How interesting. We have all these different bolt action rifles and shotguns with so many different non-human killing purposes, and then we have handguns that are the weapons used in the vast majority of killings. This is me not being at all shocked. Yes, like I said, the weapons that were designed with a legitimate non human killing purposes in mind, are NOT used that often to kill humans. It’s the guns designed specifically with a human target in mind that are used far more than any other to kill us.
Let’s try this one other way. I sell a machine that opens bank vaults. 30,000 bank vaults get ransacked every year using my machine. The fact that you’re not “supposed” to open bank vaults illegally doesn’t mean my machine is being misused. I sell the machine and train anyone who pays how to use it to open any bank vault they want, knowing full well all the vaults ransacked in the past and all the ones that I’m helping happen in the future. The only way I’m not a criminal is by ridiculous tortured logic trying to justify my business.
The AR-15 and similar semi-automatic rifles aren’t really military weapons. They’re not assault rifles by definition, which is why the political classification of “assault weapon” was created in 1994. My limited knowledge of selective fire weapons like the M-16 is that two or three-round burst is what’s preferred in most combat situations, since full auto will be inaccurate and run through the rounds very quickly. But as others have said, what makes a military weapon? The Remington 700? The Colt 1911? Dad’s or Grandpa’s M1 Garand (or a similar copy), which was the semi-automatic rifle of WWII and Korea?
A very interesting point, and one which ironically could be counterproductive towards improved firearm safety - after all, it’s the start-ups and purpose built guys that are prototyping things like fingerprint and RFID tech for firearms. Unintended consequences and all that.
This is not true. In fact there are whole bunches of handguns carefully designed to do nothing but punch holes in paper and very very accurately. They would actually be rather bad at killing humans, as they are chambered often in .22 short.
But you see, both for home defense and for a police usage, both classes of people hope very very much they will never have to kill anyone- and in general the odds are so small that they will.
Again guns are not designed to kill humans, if they are they are terrible at it. 99.99% never do so. But if they are, then certainly you cant sue a gun manufacturer for a defective product then, can you?
If you had a bank vault opener that only opened one vault in thirty thousand, few would buy it.
But I think we are going down a rabbit hole away from the OP.
The exception that proves the rule. Yes, there is a very specific subset of handguns that are actually designed for something other than taking down a person. I’m fine with categorizing their use to harm people as a misuse. That’s the bolt action rifles, shotguns, .22 short target pistols out of the way, which as noted before are NOT the source of our gun violence problem.
The vast majority of handguns are designed to kill a human with the twitch of a finger, so good at the job a 4 year old could kill The Mountain without even intending to hurt him. There is literally no household object in the world that a 4 year old could hold in their hands and operate that would make them more dangerous to the people around them.