Why just the gun manufacturer?

I’ve been thinking about the lawsuit against Bushmaster because of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. And the more I think about it the more clear it becomes that our political opponents are not rational.

If the gun manufacturer is responsible then isn’t the magazine manufacturer just as, if not more, responsible? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the custom springs in the gun? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the ammunition? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the propellant in the ammunition? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the bullets? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the shell casing? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the cups, anvils, and explosive compounds in the primers? Why just the gun manufacturer?

And of course we could, and have, asked similar questions about the car the shooter drove to the school, and that leads to the gasoline, tires, oil, and roads he used to get there. And once we go there why not the shoes and clothes of the shooter? Or maybe he wore glasses and would have had trouble hitting his targets if it hadn’t been for the manufacturer of the corrective lenses and the optometrist who prescribed them.

We could carry this on to bizarrely extreme levels but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. So how does the anti-gun mind work such that they think the gun manufacture is responsible but none of the other manufactures of the components involved in the crime are? The point is that there is no clear threshold where it is easy to say the manufacturer of one component is responsible and the next is not.

The only thing I can think of is that they have some mind distorting hatred of GUNS!!! such that they cannot think rationally. They recognize the absurdity of blaming the car and corrective lens manufacturers but it just doesn’t register that since the ownership of a gun is constitutionally protected right that makes the liability of gun manufacturer even more absurd.

The inability to recognize the obvious in defiance of clear and presence evidence is evidence of a mental disorder. We see it with Peterson Syndrome and we see it here.

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21 thoughts on “Why just the gun manufacturer?

  1. On the topic of the vehicle: What do you think the likelihood is that a vehicle has a higher probability of being used in or during the commission of a crime than a gun? I think it’s possible, I mean, how many crimes DON’T involve a vehicle as some sort of tool to enable the crime to take place (or, to a much lesser extant, is the actual weapon used)? I think it’s very reasonable, a quick google search leads me to believe that there were 254 million registered vehicles in the US, and possibly over 300 million guns. If so, we could reword the lawsuit to this statistic and say the vehicle manufacturer should have known that their vehicles would be used in a crime, “As a result of selling vehicles to the civilian market, individuals unfit to operate these vehicles gain access to them… Despite that knowledge, defendants continue to sell vehicles to the civilian market.”

    Thinking about this a little more, I have a feeling that a car is many times more likely to be used in a crime than a gun… But the results could be skewed because I think a gun has a longer useable lifespan in years than a car. Thoughts for another day, I suppose.

    • Not to mention, they don’t do background checks on retail car sales – new or used.

      And although they do have full registration of vehicles, rarely (if ever) is that information useful – in and of itself – in solving serious crimes.

      Just sayin’.

  2. How come they are not suing the mental health professionals who’d been involved in treating Lanza?

    Surely they have failed, not only to protect their client/patient but society in general.

    Where’s the outrage (and lawsuit)?

  3. Better go after the mine where the metals came from and the oil company that supplied fuel to mine those metals, better sue Eugene’s family too for designing the AR platform….

  4. “What about the manufacturer of the propellant in the bullets? Why just the gun manufacturer?”

    That sounds complicated. Did you mean “… the manufacturer of the bullets”?

  5. I would think that the school district should be liable for the deaths. Education is compulsory; the school took custody of the children. Reasonable precaution against apprehended danger would have been to have at least two well-armed, well-trained adults in the school at all times when there are children present at school.

    The school district choose to put those kids at risk; that’s gross negligence.

    • If you make this argument, suddenly previous school shootings are not longer predictive in any way of future school shootings. When they want to ban guns, they see all the data pointing in one direction. When they are asked to be responsible, suddenly the data is muddled and all the correlations disappear.

  6. Pingback: SayUncle » Why stop at the manufacturer?

  7. Isn’t it interesting with such logical and well stated posts Ubu is absent!

    I’m sure she feels this lawsuit is 100% reasonable and filed in good faith!

  8. They aren’t suing the car manufacturer for the car he drove there in because the car can be used for other purposes, and was designed for other purposes.

    Same thing for the sneakers.

    Even the brass cases. They could have had other purposes. Pest abatement, for one.

    The Bushmaster in this case had one purpose. Homicide. In their lights. And I might even concede this is wholly true, or certainly primarily true. That Bushmaster is for killing people. And homicide is bad, right? It’s murder! Right?

    Of course they’d never get their heads around the idea that homicide might have been not just been justified, but nigh obligatory. If the principal had the same model rifle in her office and used it to drop Lanza, for example, after he started killing people in the front office and before he went classroom to classroom.

    • I don’t think their lights are very bright. Exceedingly dim in fact.

      How many homicides occur for each bullet fired through a Bushmaster gun? One per million? One per 100 million?

      Either those guns do an extremely poor job of their “sole purpose” or they are useful for many other purposes.

      • Is that argument a variant of Ted Nugent’s line (paraphrased): If all guns are ‘made to kill’, then all mine must be defective.

          • Nah. I didn’t think so, and I didn’t intend to sound that way.

            It’s just interesting that we can look at things from different perspectives and come to basically the same conclusion.

            The “designed/intended to kill” argument is both amusing and frustrating to me. On the surface, it’s a straw-man argument. Moreover, common sense says that what an object is designed to do and what it can do are very different concepts, so equating them also creates a false dichotomy argument.

            And in any case, as Robb Allen pointed out a while back, intent is non-transferable anyway.

    • There’s a world of difference between killing and murdering. Dovid Bendory makes this very clear (http://jpfo.org/rabbi/6th-commandment.htm). While it isn’t all that hard to make the argument that firearms are designed to kill, it would be quite difficult to argue that they are designed for murder.

  9. We can take an Obama quote, change one word, and have it explain everything;
    “You didn’t do that! Somebody elssssse…made that happen!”

    And so the shooter didn’t kill anyone. He’s merely the projection of whomever the left doesn’t like at the moment– He’s as much a victim as anyone.

    We of course could far more credibly blame the Progressive mindset as the guilty party, that is if we’re going to blame anyone but the person who pulled the trigger.

    And as far as the anti-rights movement’s tactics here; a gun maker, especially one with money, is a far more attractive target than a miner or a car dealer, et al, at least for the moment. Car makers, car dealers, miners, energy companies, and pretty much all industry that does important things that we all need, are also targets. They just have to isolate one at a time. They know what they’re doing.

  10. Two comments:
    1) in 2005 IIRC Bush signed a federal law against this type garbage. Why we not suing those behind the case and disbarring the lawyers involved?
    2) What about the federal and state agencies who are responsible to enforce existing laws? They are clearly more responsible than the business that merely put the inanimate objects in the capitalist supply system!

    • It’s been pointed out elsewhere, the PLCAA does NOT mean gun manufacturers can’t be sued; it just means the plaintiffs can’t win. That’s probably not the tactic – the plaintiffs in this case are likely just trying to drain Bushmaster’s/Freedom Group’s/Cerberus’ funds fighting frivolous lawsuits; even with the PLCAA, the manufacturers still have to pay lawyers, file briefs, and make arguments in court to get it thrown out. Fighting it WILL get it thrown out, but not fighting it is like pleading “No Contest” – just as bad as admitting guilt.

      Correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC, state and federal agencies carry effectively zero liability for not enforcing the law, just like they have no duty to protect you or ensure your personal safety.

  11. I think these plaintiff organizations are being very rational in their means — given their irrational and twisted goal: eradicate the right to keep and bear arms. They know they cannot right now prevail with outright confiscation, so why try? Instead, they impede the practical exercise of the right in any way they can: taxes, restrictions on ownership, restrictions on using the U.S. Post, expensive licenses, micro-restrictions on carry, gun ban zones, public relations campaigns against “stand your ground” laws, and any other opportunity that comes along that chips away at the RTKBA. To the extent they impede firearms related business, they succeed in curtailing your RTKBA. Their chief problem with this one is the Congress’s legislation designed to stop exactly this kind of frivolous lawsuit. Until the courts hit these plaintiffs and their lawyers with penalties, we will keep seeing them.

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