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

October 14, 2024

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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.

The NRA May Think It Owns The Gun Debate But The Other Side Is Waking Up.

October 12, 2024

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One of the things I’ve trained myself to do is a weekly check of the NRA-ILA website, because as don Corleone advised his son Michael, you always have to keep your enemies closer than your friends. And while I don’t consider myself and the NRA to be enemies necessarily, I do consider their continued attempts to push a very radical, pro-gun agenda to be shortsighted and ill-advised. When I joined the NRA in 1955, it was an organization devoted to training, gun history and outdoor life. It still devotes time, energy and resources to those activities, but the organization’s major thrust today is to promote the notion of armed citizens which I believe does nothing except increase risk.

open The real reason I’m against the NRA’s push for concealed-carry is that, believe it or not, I think CCW laws for the most part actually threaten rather than strengthen the 2nd-Amendment right to own a gun. I say that for the following reasons. First, the 2008 Heller decision specifically and explicitly limited private ownership to guns kept in the home, and I don’t care if all these so-called 2nd Amendment ‘absolutists’ want to yap about their God-given right to walk around with a gun, the law says otherwise, period, end of debate. Second, Heller also vested in government the right to regulate, and there has not been a single challenge to Heller that has denied the public authority from having the last word when it comes to how, why and when people can carry or use guns.

Finally and most important, a majority, in fact a large majority of Americans don’t own guns. That’s not true in Western states like Montana, the Dakotas or Idaho, which together have a total population 4.4 million, which is less than the body count for Brooklyn and Queens. The moment you move into populous states however, particularly on the two coasts where more than 100 million live, per capita gun ownership begins to drop down to one out of four or one out of five. And despite the whining of Mother Loesch about all those millions of Moms who own guns, that’s about as near to reality as how effectively she teaches her kids by keeping them at home.

Most Americans are in favor of gun ownership, as long as guns are kept out of the wrong hands. And the only way that will happen is to let the public authority create and enforce laws that restrict gun ownership to folks who play by the rules; and I’m not talking about the rules that govern everyday conduct, I’m talking about the rules that regulate the ownership of guns. Which is why it’s absurd that the NRA would be campaigning against background checks while, at the same time saying that every law-abiding citizen should own and carry a gun. It’s a contradictory message and, unless you’re a diehard gun owner, it makes no sense.

This is why I found it interesting that the NRA-ILA website carried a story this week criticizing a recent report which once again found that upwards of 40% of all gun transfers occur without a background check – a loophole that has been mentioned by just about everyone who wants to see an end to violence caused by guns. The evidence for this claim is an old survey conducted in 1994 which, according to the NRA, cannot be used to measure “anything about the American people with only 251 respondents in a survey.” This is the same NRA that has been telling us that armed citizens prevent “millions” of crimes from being committed every year. Where does this evidence comes from? Another 1994 survey whose respondents numbered 221!

The NRA will never have a problem convincing gun owners that what it says about guns is sacred and true. But the recent shootings in Virginia and Oregon may have turned the tide and 200 million non-gun owners may be asking themselves what they can do.

Want To End Gun Violence? Just Keep Showing The Numbers.

October 10, 2024

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I participated in my first anti-war demonstration in 1964. Johnson had just announced the first, major troop commitment to Southeast Asia, I thought he was going to drag us into an unwinnable war, so about twenty of us walked around Times Square one day after school handing out leaflets, shouting some slogans and having a good time. Everyone who walked past us was polite, a few actually took a leaflet, most said they had never heard of Viet Nam. What happened over the following nine years was that public opinion shifted from not knowing, to not caring, to being concerned and finally, to being against the War.

Know when public opinion really began to shift? When the television networks ended their nightly news broadcasts with a graphic that showed how many U.S. soldiers had been killed in Nam. The networks did the same thing again in 1980 when each night’s news broadcast ended with a graphic showing how many days the hostages had been in captivity in Iran. Remember who won the 1980 election? It wasn’t the guy who couldn’t get the hostages out of jail.

The same thing now seems to be happening when it comes to mobilizing people against the violence caused by guns. And while the major media outlets haven’t yet caught on, the ‘daily count’ has spread throughout the internet, and sooner or later it will be picked up by the networks as well. Or it won’t matter whether the numbers make CNN or MSNBC because increasingly we depend on ‘alternate’ internet media for our information anyhow.

The granddaddy of in-your-face gun violence calculators is the Gun Violence Archive, which was first mounted in 2013. Mother Jones has presented data and graphics over the years, ditto the Center for American Progress. Joe Nocera and Jennifer Mascia kept up a running count for The New York Times. But the Gun Violence Archive was the first attempt to go beyond media anecdotes and try to assemble a comprehensive, real-time analysis of all violence committed with guns. And this is an important point, because the data from government agencies like the CDC and the FBI is either several years behind, or skewed in ways that don’t give a true picture of the damage caused by guns, or both. What you get from the GVA is a comprehensive picture of the toll of gun violence; no ifs, ands or buts.

The GVA has been joined by a crowd sourced website, the Mass Shooting Tracker, which counts all shootings in which four people are hit by bullets, whether any of them are killed or not. This is an important element in the gun violence debate, because the FBI only counts mass shootings if four or more people are killed at the same time. Not only does the FBI definition seriously underestimate the carnage and costs of gun violence, but it also doesn’t count shootings in which one of the victims is the shooter himself. But this is an absurd and arbitrary way to analyze gun violence, and the MST sets it straight. You can read a good story about GVA and MST by Jennifer Mascia in the current issue of Trace.

Leave it to the pro-gun gang, of course, to try and come up with reasons why the gun-violence calculators are nothing more than “pure propaganda,” as one red-meat story claimed. It turns out that the MST mistakenly listed 2 shootings out of 498 in 2013 involving pellet guns. If this is the best example of the MST “padding” its numbers, the pro-gun crowd better look somewhere else.

The biggest problem facing the GVP community is enlisting and mobilizing the ‘average’ person in the debate about guns. These websites will help turn the tide because numbers really do tell a story that goes beyond words. When I handed out anti-war leaflets in 1964 I didn’t imagine that CBS would ever run a daily tally on how many U.S. troops had died. But they did. And the war came to an end.

 

 

 

Dre Buys A Gun And We Learn A Lesson About Gun Violence.

October 1, 2024

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Now that Anthony Anderson has replaced Bill Cosby as the African-American whose family life proves that most families face the same, universal problems regardless of race, the show’s writers have to come up with situations reflecting issues that come up when everyone’s sitting around the dinner table, or running off to school in the morning, or getting ready for bed. That being the case, what better issue to inject onto the screen in Black-ish’s second episode this season than the issue of guns?

Anthony Anderson

And before I go any further, I just want to remind my readers that the gun industry has been trying like all get out to convince African-Americans to own guns because the typical gun owner, an older White man like me, owns more guns than he knows what to do with them anyway, so demographics like minorities, women and new immigrants hopefully represent new consumer targets who need to be convinced to buy guns. It hasn’t worked in the African-American community, by the way, no matter how many times Colion Noir prances around on the NRA video screen. Nor have women been flocking into gun shops because a pathetic, Sarah Palin wannabe named Dana Loesch stands there in a tough leather outfit delivering a vapid monologue on how her gun protects her family from thugs.

The “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Gun” episode of Black-ish on the other hand, is both funny and profound, the former because the script simply doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to spoofing just about every sacred cow we have; the latter because interspersed with terrifically comic lines are serious statements about guns and gun violence that honestly capture both sides of the gun debate. The argument about guns, after all, gets down to whether the benefit derived from using a gun for self-defense outweighs the risk of keeping an altogether lethal consumer product around the home. And if you listen closely to the dialogue, you’ll realize that the folks who created this script for Black-ish have taken the trouble to read and understand both the obvious and the subtle issues that inform the gun debate.

Example: Dre wants a gun in the house, his wife Bow does not. In fact, men are much more likely to be gun owners than women by a margin of eight or nine to one. Example: Miles, the six-year old, gets very excited over the prospect of a gun, his older brother Andre, who spends all his time on the computer, couldn’t care less. In fact, young children are the most vulnerable to gun accidents because they are naturally curious, have no sense of risk and everything to them is a toy.

Finally Bow gives in and Dre goes out to buy a gun. There’s a remarkably funny moment inside a gun shop involving an older Asian-American woman who has just bought a shotgun, but I’ll leave its description unsaid. So now the gun is in the house and one night it sounds like the veritable bad guy has broken in so everyone crowds into Dre’s bedroom because he’ll protect them with the gun. Except that the door opens and in stumbles Dre’s father played perfectly by Laurence Fishburne who doesn’t get shot only because Dre can’t figure out how to actually use the gun.

Of course the show has already come in for the usual stupid and snarky comments from the pro-gun gang, but there’s no question that Black-ish captures the truth about the risks embodied in owning a personal-defense gun. And the final moments invoke a very profound insight when Dre confesses to his father that the reason he wants to own a gun is because he felt scared as a young boy and wished he had a real gun back then. The GVP community often finds pro-gun fervor to be inexplicable and difficult, if not impossible, to understand in logical terms. Is there a chance that Dre’s admission of childhood fears provides an important clue?

Time To End Gun Violence Whatever It Takes.

September 9, 2024

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Last week the NRA unleashed its attack dog John Lott to explain to the American people why more gun laws don’t do anything to curb gun violence. And what was his proof? The fact that Dylann Roof killed all those folks in a Charleston, SC church with a legally-purchased Glock. And since background checks can’t predict whether someone who passes a check will then go on a rampage, and since everyone knows that criminals don’t obey laws, what’s the point of burdening all those law-abiding gun owners with more laws and regulations that keep them from enjoying their guns?

I’ll tell you the point. Laws work. And the reason they work is that every, single gun that gets into civilian hands first got there because of a legal, regulated sale. And if every transfer of a gun thereafter had to go through some kind of regulated exchange, don’t ask me how, don’t ask me why, but fewer guns would get into the ‘wrong hands.’ And if you don’t believe me, just take a look at the cogent and well-articulated piece in The Trace by Evan DeFilipis and Devin Hughes which explains, how gun laws reduce gun crimes.

 

Andy & Allison Parker

Andy & Allison Parker

Asking our lawmakers for proper and effective responses to gun violence will be the centerpiece of a national, community-based effort led by Everytown on July 10. They have created a series of public events in communities around the country with the most appropriate theme – Whatever It Takes. Some of the events will be fashioned around the general issue of gun violence; others will be remembrances of specific events; others will focus on convincing public officials that work remains to be done.

In Asheville, NC, there will be a meeting to remember the horrendous Virginia Tech massacre that killed 32 people in 2007, including a student named Julia Pryde, whose father will speak at the event. Raleigh, NC will be the site of a gathering to honor Kim Yaman, a survivor of the 1991 University of Iowa shooting , and at Hilton Head, SC, a group will remember 17-year old Dominique Xavier Milton-Williams, who was killed at Coligny Beach on July 19. A contingent will be in DC, of course, to present the case on Capitol Hill, and a group will visit the Nashua, NH office of Senator Kelly Ayotte who voted against expanding background checks after Sandy Hook but then pretended she voted for background checks when, in fact, she voted for a Republican-backed substitute bill that didn’t expand NICS checks at all.

September 11 will mark the 14th anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks, a day which, between the Trade Center, Pentagon and Shanksville, America lost 2,996 souls. A moment none will ever forget. Know how many Americans have been killed by gunfire in the last fourteen years? Try 470,000 and I’m undercounting by more than a bit. Know how many combat deaths we suffered in both World Wars, Korea and Viet Nam? About 50,000 less.

So there’s every good reason to mark these gun deaths tomorrow or any other day. In fact, perhaps Everytown should get some like-minded Senator or Congressman to introduce a bill that would officially mark Gun Violence Day every single year. And if the NRA, the gun industry and simple fools like John Lott want to tell you that none of these killings would have occurred if everyone was walking around with a gun, they can all lay brick. It’s time for honest people who put human life above childish self-defense fantasies, come together and do whatever it takes to get the job done.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say Everytown didn’t coin the phrase ‘whatever it takes.’ It was actually first said by the father of slain TV journalist Allison Parker, who now knows first-hand the pain which comes from losing a loved one to this terrible state of affairs. Let’s help him and everyone else who somehow go on living even though their lives have been shattered by a gun. Time to get it done.

Thank God Our 2nd Amendment Rights Are Being Protected By Kasich, Walker And Bridge.

September 7, 2024

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Okay, it’s time to play gun nut quiz. And here’s the gun nut question today: What do the following states - California, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey - have in common? And the answer is – actually they have two things in common. Each state contains at least one city with a murder rate at least four times the national average – Oakland, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark; and each state is home to a Republican Presidential candidate: Fiorina, Carson, Kasich, Walker, Christie.

chris2 Right now the national murder rate per 100K is somewhere slightly above 4. The murder rate in Oakland is 22, in Detroit it’s 45, Cleveland’s rate is 14 (oops, that’s only 3.5 times the national average), Milwaukee rolls in at 17 and peaceful Newark sits at 40. Now you would think that Fiorina, Carson, Kasich, Walker and Christie would know something about gun violence, given the fact that they come from states with cities that have murders happening as if it were Mog. And if you don’t know where Mog is, take a look at a map of Somalia – it’s what our Airborne guys call Mogadishu, the place we lost a couple of Black Hawks back in those heady days before the Twin Towers came crashing down.

kasich Before I get into this issue too deeply, I’m going to give Carly and Ben each a pass, because they come from California and Michigan respectively, but they don’t live there any more. On the other hand, Kasich, Walker and Bridgegate are the friggin’ governors of their states. They live there, they work there, and they are ultimately responsible for public safety there. And since most murders occur with the use of guns, and these guys need to show they are doing something about murder rates that are beyond belief, let’s see what, if anything, they have to say about guns.

I’ll start with Kasich. “I believe in the 2nd Amendment.” That’s from a 2010 webcast during his successful gubernatorial campaign. What was Kasich supposed to say? I love how all these red-meat politicians ‘believe’ in the 2nd Amendment. Duhhh, it’s part of the Constitution. What are they supposed to day? That they don’t believe in it? In 2011 Kasich signed a bill that allows Ohioans to bring concealed weapons into establishments that served liquor, including nightclubs, restaurants, stadiums, malls and, of course, restaurants. He really believes in the 2nd Amendment.

walker Scott Walker also believes in the 2nd Amendment. He believes in it so much that he says it’s his duty as Governor to “protect and preserve our Constitutional freedoms.” To prove how important the 2nd Amendment is to our freedom, he recently signed a bill that ended a long-established 48-hour waiting period to purchase a handgun in Wisconsin. The fact that the bill’s supporters used a fabricated tale about a woman who ended up being killed by her husband because she couldn’t get her hands on a gun is further proof of Walker’s commitment to Constitutional rights, in this case the right to tell a lie protected by the 1st Amendment’s defense of free speech.

As for Bridgegate, he began huffing and puffing after the Roanoke shooting with the standard bromides about the ‘terrible tragedy,’ his condolences to the families, the usual crap. But then he cut to the chase and reminded the interviewer that we didn’t need any new gun laws, we just needed to enforce the laws we already have. And in case anyone was wondering who would do the enforcing, I’ll let Bridgegate tell you himself: “New Jersey has a Governor who enforces the law.” Christie enforces laws so well that the only person who didn’t get fired after millions of commuters were unable to get to work was the guy who should have been fired – Christie himself.

When it comes to your 2A rights, you’ll have nothing to fear from Kasich, Walker or Chris. As for the cities withgun violence rates through the roof, let’s not worry about a few bodies here and there when the Constitution will be defended by all those armed citizens and their guns.

Don’t Get Rid Of The Guns, Get Rid Of The Nuts. Thank You Donald, Chris, Bobby, Et. Al.

September 4, 2024

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So it’s official. The Republican Party, or at least its putative Presidential candidates, has decided that the key to eliminating gun violence is to get rid of the nuts, not the guns. The idea that gun violence has nothing to do with the gun and everything to do with the crazy people who on occasion use guns, has been floating around for a long time. But after last week’s Virginia ambush, first The Donald and then every other red-meat Republican (a redundancy if I ever wrote one) fell into lockstep proclaiming that the real culprit was a mental health system that still needed to be “fixed.” Here’s Bridgegate Christie explaining it to dopes like you and me who actually believe that stricter gun regulations should be in effect: “We need to have more information about people’s mental health background, but we don’t need new laws to do that.”

trump Just for a moment I’m going to pretend that these jerks know what they’re talking about and go along with their stupid and pandering idea that ‘fixing’ mental health will ‘fix’ the problem of gun violence. So let’s take three instances of horrific gun violence and see if the ‘fix mental health’ bullshit has even the slightest connection to reality or not. The three instances I’m going to mention involved three shooters named James Holmes, Adam Lanza and Elliot Roger. Together, these three ‘nuts’ shot 126 people, of whom 41 died either at the scene or in a hospital following the attacks.

What did these three young men have in common besides their ability to use a gun? They not only had documented histories of some degree of mental distress, but had all been seen by mental health professionals in a short period of time before the actual shootings took place. The official report on the Sandy Hook episode indicates that Adam Lanza’s mother dragged him hither and yon for mental health consultations; Elliott Roger’s diary contains numerous references to treatment by shrinks. In the case of Holmes, who committed the worst massacre of all, his psychiatrist actually reported threats he was making to the University of Colorado Neuroscience Department because he had flunked out of school, reports that were forwarded to the campus police who took no action at all.

chris2 When we look at instances of individual shootings, we find a similar pattern wherein the shooter made contact with professional caregivers prior to the event, expressed concern about what was going to happen, disclosed the possibility of violence, but then was allowed to go about his business as if the discussion had never taken place. I cited a case earlier this year in which a severely-agitated young man visited no less than seven different medical facilities in and around Fargo, ND, complaining that his room-mate was trying to poison him but was told in every visit to go home and take previously-prescribed psychiatric meds. The cops then encountered him wandering in front of his apartment at 1 AM, but after he told them that his room-mate had a gun they decided that no crime was about to be committed and told him to go back home. Three hours later, this young man shot his room-mate to death.

jindal Every single state has a system whereby certain designated individuals must report suspected child abuse. And once reported, the agency designated to deal with the problem must take action to see if the report is true. The Federal Child Abuse and Prevention Act defines abuse as: “An act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.” And notice the word ‘must.’ Not maybe, not perhaps, must.

We don’t need to cop out on the issue of gun violence by pretending that the NICS system should get better reports on which nuts are walking around who shouldn’t be able to buy a gun. We need to acknowledge that anyone who expresses anger or possible violence becomes an imminent threat if he has access to guns. And the guns must be taken away. Not maybe, not perhaps, must.

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