Lesson From Flint: Hillary Vs. Bernie Or Hillary Vs. The NRA?

March 7, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , 2 Comments

There has been a lot of back and forth between the Clinton and Sanders camps about the gun issue, with Clinton claiming that Sanders has been less than honest about his take on guns, and Sanders responding by touting his D- rating from the NRA as proof that he’s as much of a gun-grabber as Hillary wants to be. I have to say from the gitgo that there would be no talk about gun violence in this campaign if we had waited for Bernie to bubble the issue up. This was Hillary’s impressive response to the shameful pro-gun pandering of the Republican candidates and her response alone; I’m not saying that it makes her a better candidate overall than Sanders but I am saying that she deserves all the credit on this one, bar none.

hillary Be that as it may, I watched the Bernie-Hillary debate from Flint because I assumed that the gun issue would loom large, and loom it did about midway through the program when the father of one of the Kalamazoo victims had the following to say: “The man who shot everyone, including my daughter, in Kalamazoo, had no mental health issues recorded, and had a clear background. What do you plan to do to address this serious epidemic? I don’t want to hear anything about tougher laws for mental health or criminal backgrounds, because that doesn’t work.”

And Clinton, to her credit, went right to work first pushing for more comprehensive background checks, and then moving into a discussion of the immunity that gun makers have thanks to the 2005 law, known as PLCAA, which basically protects the industry from class-action suits. I don’t know if it was coincidence or what, but the day before this debate, the New York Times ran an editorial on wrongful-death suit that the Sandy Hook parents have brought against Remington/Bushmaster, and while the text was a bit garbled, the bottom line is that the PLCAA law does not immunize the gun industry if they knowingly produce a product that is dangerous to the consumers who purchase the item, whether the product is acquired legally or not.

Everyone knows that Bernie voted against the 2005 law, claiming that it wouldn’t stop anyone from committing violence with a gun. He also voted against the original Brady bill, basically for the same reason. But this past January he signed on as a co-sponsor of the Schiff bill that would repeal the PLCAA, which is why the Brady Campaign just issued a press release wanting to know exactly where Sanders stands. Which brings us back to the comments he made in his debate appearance in Flint.

And basically what he said isn’t going to leave the GVP community feeling all warm and fuzzy when it comes to the Sanders approach to guns. Because on the issue of immunity for the gun industry, the Senator from Vermont basically believes that as long as a gun is acquired legally, that whatever the owner then does with that gun should not result in any liability for the manufacturer at all. Otherwise, according to Sanders, holding the industry liable for how its products are used would “end gun manufacturing in America.” He then went on to say that if the manufacturer of a gun was held liable if that gun fell into the wrong hands and someone got shot, then “essentially you are saying that there should not be any guns in America, period.” To which, incidentally, the NRA this morning tweeted that Bernie was “spot on.”

Let me break the news to you gently, Bernie. There happen to be a lot of people in America who actually do believe that we’d all be better off without guns. And I thought that the whole point of your ‘revolution’ was to say and do things differently from the way they are usually said and done. Mind telling me what’s so new and different about pushing a view on guns that the NRA has been promoting for the past twenty years?

 

Question From Milwaukee: Can Private Gun Sellers Be Sued For Negligence Too?

October 14, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve had some time to think about the Milwaukee case, and as the owner of a gun shop, I’m not sure that the importance of that case is fully understood. It’s also unclear whether the defendant will appeal the verdict to a higher court; a few of the more rabid pro-gun bloggers were already at work this morning saying that a pro-gun SCOTUS would reverse the ruling, which only shows what those ‘experts’ know about law.

badger Everyone keeps talking about how this case, for the first time, undercuts the 2005 federal law that immunized the gun industry against torts. Actually, that’s not really true. The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act followed from a long battle between the Clinton Administration and the gun industry over whether gun makers and dealers could be held liable for gun violence if a gun was used criminally even though it first entered the market through a legal sale. The PLCAA however, did not shield gun dealers from civil suits in cases of negligence or cases in which the seller violated federal laws by the manner in which he transferred the gun.

Earlier this year a gun dealer in Alaska faced a similar suit brought by the family of a shooting victim who was murdered by a man who walked out of the gun shop with a rifle without first doing any paperwork at all. In this case, however, the owner of the gun shop convinced the jury that he played no role in the transfer of the rifle and, in fact, contacted the police as soon as he discovered the unauthorized disappearance of the gun. So the negligence question obviously comes down to the issue of intent, not just whether something bad is done with a gun.

Now here’s where things get a little tricky. The PLCAA shields manufacturers and dealers, the latter referred to as ‘sellers’ in the law. And a ‘seller’ is defined as someone who is ‘engaged in the business’ of selling ammunition or arms. Which means that this law immunizes FFL license-holders because the only way you can ‘engage’ in firearms commerce is if you possess a dealer’s license issued by the ATF.

Later this week I am meeting a friend of mine who is going to sell me his Winchester 9422 rifle for five hundred bucks. It’s an original 9422, never been shot, still in the box, and when he asked his grown sons whether they wanted the rifle they both said to him, “We don’t want that old crap.” So he’s selling it to me and since we both live in the same state we don’t have to do a transfer in a gun shop at all. My friend goes to a state website, fills out a private transfer form with his name and mine, and that’s the end of that. Fine.

Now what happens if I take this gun, walk across the street to the neighbor whose dog keeps crapping all over my lawn, shoot his dog and, for good measure, drill one through him? Can’t my neighbor’s family sue my friend for selling me the gun? Your damn right they can, and btw, these kinds of transfers go on all the time. Because the fact is that most states don’t require any kind of paperwork to be done when a gun changes hands

Let’s go back to the case in Milwaukee for a moment. Sure, the two dopes engaged in a straw sale but the dealer was negligent because he didn’t follow the law. The moment the gun left his shop and moved from Dope A to Dope B, the latter dope was only violating a law that said he was too young to own a gun. The two cops were shot at a much later date.

Is extending background checks to cover private transactions the only way to keep guns from moving from legal to illegal hands? The Milwaukee verdict, it seems to me, creates the possibility that lawsuits for negligent private sales might work just as well.

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