Court Rules N.Y. Shooting Victim Can Sue Gun Maker, Distributor

[primavera]

94. It's called "proximate cause" versus "cause in fact"...

... and it's a very tricky area of law. Cause in fact is defined as the but for cause, i.e., were it not for this event taking place, nothing else along the successive chain of events could have occurred. It is therefore a cause of the subsequent event, but may be so distantly removed as to be meaningless. The classic example in law school is the physician who refuses to provide an abortion to a woman who wants one, she goes on to have the child, who grows up and, twenty years later, commits a crime. Had the physician provided the abortion, the child would never have been born and the crime would never have taken place, so the physician's decision is a cause in fact. But it's so distant that no court would ever hold him guilty. On the flip side, though, one doesn't need to actually pull the trigger one's self to be the proximate cause of the harm. The contrasting classic example is the kid who throws a lighted firecracker into a crowd. The first person who catches it throws it away and a second person catches it, who in turn throws it on to a third person, and so on. Eventually, it explodes and injures somebody. The last person to catch and throw it is the most proximate cause of the injury, yet is still not the responsible party because, had the kid not thrown the lighted firecracker into the crowd in the first place, the injury would never have taken place. Where along this scale of causation is one of the hardest things to determine in law. Which is why the court held that gun manufacturers may, indeed, bear some portion of responsibility for crimes committed with the weapons they sell. But it's a very subtle determination that hinges upon the specific facts of the situation. I'm no authority on torts, but my suspicion is that it would be very difficult to prove that the gun manufacturer was a cause in fact that was sufficiently proximate to the event to be actionable, but it's by no means inconceivable that they could be liable under the law.