2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hoping for the best with Bernie and guns- finding his explanations polarizing as some on the right [View all]DanTex
(20,709 posts)Like all analogies, it's imperfect, but the basic idea is that, if you are facilitating criminal activity, and either you know about it or it's so obvious that you should reasonably know about it, and you are making profit from it, then you can be held accountable.
I actually don't know the details of all the lawsuits of this sort that were filed against gun manufacturers, but you can probably find more info about them online. But it definitely wasn't just "some criminal used a gun, I'm gonna sue the gun manufacturer." And this is obvious: totally frivolous lawsuits go nowhere, and the gun industry doesn't need any special laws to defend against them.
The question was whether the business practices of the gun industry contributed to crime rates. I think this is a legitimate question for courts. And it is true that Smith and Wesson settled a lawsuit and made some policy changes. Of course, what happened after that is the NRA organized a boycott of Smith and Wesson to punish them for caving in, which almost killed the company. Then Bush got elected, and the PLCAA got passed and the whole push to try and get gun manufacturers to act responsibly through the courts ended. But without PLCAA there was a real chance that the gun industry at large would be behaving differently today.
As for the lawsuit example I mentioned, I should point out that it's not clear that the manufacturer was actually negligent in this case. But the issue I have is that that lawsuit should have gone forward, and the court should have decided whether it was negligent, based on the product design, and whether the kid was charged with manslaughter should have nothing to do with it at all.