The title of the
piece in CTNewsJunkie was “Blumenthal,
Murphy Seek Repeal of Law Shielding Gun Industry From Consumer Negligence
Lawsuits.”
If the law “shielding the gun industry from lawsuits,” the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, were to be removed, the manufacturer of an illegally acquired firearm used by Frankie “The Razor” Resto sometime ago to murder the co-owner of an EZMart in Meriden, Connecticut -- after Resto’s victim already had handed over to him the demanded cash -- would be at the mercy of rapacious prosecutors such as US Senator Dick Blumenthal.
Before becoming senator, Blumenthal was, he never tires of reminding us, a prosecutor, and for more than two decades the attorney general of Connecticut. As attorney general, Blumenthal sued, or threatened to sue, many of his victims, bouncing them around through the judicial system, and encumbering their operational assets, until they could no longer afford to defend themselves in multiple legal jurisdictions, at which point they surrendered to a deal favorable to Blumenthal. When George Jepsen succeeded Blumenthal as attorney general, he dismissed over two hundred cases in which Blumenthal had left his victims hanging on legal hooks in the attorney general’s office.
Subject to this kind
of court brutalization, any manufacturer of Resto’s illegally procured firearm
would soon be out of business, because there are in Connecticut many black-market
firearms, not a few murderous criminals who regularly use them, and enough
rapacious lawyers in the land to fill every inch of space on the Washington DC
Mall.
CTNewsJunkie reports,
“The threat of negligence and product liability lawsuits will provide ‘a
powerful incentive’ for safer products, said Blumenthal, who noted that such
lawsuits have moved the tobacco, automobile, and pharmaceutical industries to
focus on safety.”
But there was
nothing “unsafe” about the pistol Resto used to murder his victim in Median. The
firearm worked just fine; there was no manufacturing defect in the murder
weapon. The product was “safe” for use. It was simply misused by a violent
career criminal and gangbanger who had taken advantage of a program initiated
by prison czar Mike Lawlor that awarded get out of jail early credits to nearly
every inmate found guilty in a court of law, some of them after myriad, expensive
legal proceedings.
The ubiquitous
Blumenthal – who has joked that he has been known to attend garage door openings –
was not present at the victim’s funeral, and relatives of the victim were
unable to sue Lawlor for a his defective program, because the state in such
circumstances takes refuge behind claims of sovereign immunity. Blumenthal
himself, while attorney general, has often retreated behind the shield of
sovereign immunity.
Should the shield of
sovereign immunity be removed from state political actors, the threat of
negligence suits certainly would make administrative officials such as Lawlor
considerably more cautious, but this is a very poor reason to remove a shield
that protects such officials from costly lawsuits.
The legal measures that
protect gun manufacturers from costly lawsuits should be retained because
such provisions allow a legal product to be fashioned without the fear of
irrational suits that punish product makers for criminal acts committed by
others that bear no relationship to product defects. Hitting the nail directly
on the head, commentator
Chris Powell writes, "’All we are doing is giving victims of gun
violence their day in court,’ Blumenthal says disingenuously. No, all the
senators are doing is turning an original constitutional right into product
liability.”
Blumenthal knows all
this because, as he never tires of reminding us, he has spent most of his
political life working in prosecutorial vineyards – and prosecutors know 1)
that the manufacturer of weapons should never be prosecuted for their misuse by
a criminal, and 2) prosecutors must operate within the same constitutional
framework that imprisons the rest of us. Both the US and the Connecticut
Constitution protect the right of citizens to bear arms. This is not to say
that the law should not punish manufacturers that produce a faulty product that
endangers the general public because of operational defects.
A maker of defective
car airbags should be liable to suits. But an automaker that has manufactured a
stolen car involved in an accident should not be held responsible at law for
criminal acts committed by the thief. The same reasonable rule of law should
apply to gun manufacturers. The premise underlying Blumenthal’s attempt to
strip from gun manufacturers a protection that reinforces a constitutional
right to bear arms is that product manufacturers, not those who misuse guns,
should be held legally responsible for their misuse by, among others, Frankie “The
Razor” Resto.”
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