Lucky Gunners

August 2, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again – the false equivalency of guns and cars. It’s sort of like a riddle: Why is a Honda Civic like 6,000 rounds of ammunition? Answer: because both can be used to kill people. It must then follow, so goes the logic, that they are alike in many other ways.

Today’s logician is Jay Caruso, managing editor of Red State, writing in the National Review (here) about a lawsuit filed by the parents of one of the victims in the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre. With the encouragement of The Brady Campaign, a gun-control group, the parents sued Lucky Gunner, the online company that sold the Aurora shooter his stockpile of ammunition.

Lucky Gunner was no more responsible for the actions of James Holmes than Honda was for the actions of Abdul Razak Ali Artan when he attempted to use his Civic to kill pedestrians at Ohio State University, and it no more deserves punishment.

I don’t know about you, but to me it seems kind of obvious what the difference is between a Honda and 170 pounds of bullets.

It’s the same as the difference between a swimming pool and an AR-15.* Simply put, the purpose of guns and bullets is to kill. If they didn’t kill, nobody would buy them. Car manufacturers and swimming pool manufacturers, by contrast, try to make their products increasingly safer – less able to kill people.

So you have one dealer that sells people things whose purpose is transportation and another dealer who sells people things whose purpose is killing. Caruso makes this same point in his next sentence.

There are already consumer protections that make gun manufacturers liable in rare cases when their products malfunction. Naturally, they do not apply to misuse.

Misuse it may have been. But the bullets did not malfunction. They did what they were designed to do – kill.

The main point of Caruso’s article is to criticize the Brady Campaign – first, for urging the parents to file a lawsuit they were sure to lose; and second, for not paying the $200,000 in Lucky Gunner’s legal fees that the court assessed the parents.

The reason the lawsuit was a sure loser also reinforces the idea that, as even a child knows, deadly weapons are different from cars. Because the purpose of guns and bullets is to kill, people might think that companies and individuals who sell them to killers have some responsibility for the ensuing deaths. So gunlovers, mostly via the NRA, have successfully gotten legislatures to pass laws absolving these sellers of any responsibility. As Caruso explains,

Phillips’s lawsuit was dismissed under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was meant to protect the firearms industry from politically motivated lawsuits in which the plaintiffs claim that gun manufacturers and dealers were responsible for the criminal acts of third parties beyond their control.

Lucky Gunner is indeed lucky to have that kind of near-total immunity.  The  Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act might well go under another name – The Tom Lehrer “Wehrner von Braun” Act.

Once bullets get sold,
Who cares who they slay,
That’s not our department
Thanks to you, NRA.

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* Gun lovers often claim that swimming pools are more dangerous for kids than are guns. Really, they do. See this earlier post.