Right before Congress adjourned for Easter, Rep Chip Pickering (R-3rd District) was getting busy, doing his part to spread the “tort reform” revolution. His staff happily released a statement saying that, right between helping implement an “amber alert” system for kidnapped children and preventing postal-rate increases, the Mississippi Republican helped spread a little joy to yet another industry that just hates to be sued.
Pickering co-sponsored HR 1036, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which passed the House 285-140 with Rep. Bennie Thompson the solo Mississippi hold-out against it. The measure, pushed by the National Rifle Association, would give the gun industry near-blanket immunity against lawsuits, keeping Americans from even trying to sue gun sellers for, say, over-saturating markets with guns that then end up in the hands of criminals. Pickering’s statement said his bill would protect “legal gun and ammunition manufacturers and sellers from being sued for the criminal or unlawful misuse of a firearm by someone else.”
On April 17, days after the House overwhelmingly passed the bill, The New York Times reported that many people were “stunned” by the legislation, especially people trying to bring lawsuits against the gun industry. Like: Thirty U.S. cities and counties, including Chicago, Detroit, Newark, New York, Cleveland and Cincinnati, accusing the industry of irresponsibly flooding the market and, thus, endangering their citizens. Like an NAACP lawsuit against gunmakers and dealers for “negligently helping supply criminals with guns in a way that disproportionately harms poor African-Americans,” as the Times put it. Like two New Jersey police officers who are suing a pawnshop for selling a semiautomatic pistol used to wound them badly while they were on the job.
The shop had sold the gun to a drug trafficker, who was a felon. Oops.
If it is up to Pickering and 284 other congressmen, gun makers and dealers will no longer be held accountable unless they were in there pulling the trigger, too. Victims won’t even get their day in court to argue that the industry’s negligence harmed them. “If someone uses a gun illegally, they should be punished for it,” Pickering said.
“But to punish the maker or seller of the gun for someone else’s criminal behavior is unjust. This measure is Second Amendment tort reform.”
Well, it isn’t really “tort” reform—it’s more like blanket protection for gun hawkers—but who are we to quibble with legal semantics? The measure now goes before the Senate.
Previous Comments
Aren’t retail establishments held responsible for selling cigarettes to minors? How is it different? There has to be checks and balances otherwise every crazy can walk into Wal-Mart and pickup a gun.
#63910 | Author: Knol Aust | Date: May 6 2003
I do believe that working in a bar selling alcohol holds me more accountable than I would be selling guns. We that work in this industry are held liable for any thing that happens on an entire evening a patron is out. Talk about responsibility. Eeech.
#63911 | Author: Bingo | Date: May 7 2003
It does strike me as odd that anyone could talk about victims’ “rights” out of one side of their mouth and then try to blanketly protect the gun industry from its own negligence out of the other. There is a long distance between supporting the right to go hunting (yuck, but I know a lot of y’all like it) and giving blanket protection to an entire industry like this. Isn’t there a responsible gun-owner organization out there that can outshout the NRA (and have a talk with Mr. Chip while they’re at it?).
#63912 | Author: ladd | Date: May 7 2003
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The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.
