Sue the Gun Makers, and the Sellers, Too
A Glock pistol similiar to the one used by Adam Lanza. The gun manufacturer faced a lawsuit in 2003 until Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
The horror of Newtown has finally snapped us out of our delusional reverie about guns. Swiftly, a barrage of promising proposals have been thrown on the table: Close the gun-show loophole, which allows guns to be sold to anyone without the simple safeguard of a background check. Ban assault weapons. Ban or control the sale of large ammunition clips. Increase funding for mental health awareness, services, and surveillance.
Like any major public health problem, stemming gun violence will require multiple, overlapping strategies. Let me offer another one, overlooked until now, but potentially a dynamo: Repeal the little-known, but pernicious, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. In other words, reopen the door to lawsuits against gun sellers for wrongful conduct in the design and marketing of their weapons. ?
In 2005, at a high point of the NRA?s control of the national agenda on guns, Congress passed this breathtakingly broad and virtually unprecedented law. Overriding states? power to regulate harmful conduct within their borders, the PLCAA eliminated most tort claims anyone might bring against the manufacturers and other sellers of guns, and did so for past and well as future misconduct.
Until that point, with my colleague Jean Eggen at Widener University School of Law, I?d been developing an argument that, under certain limited conditions, people injured by gun violence, and cities bearing the financial cost of that violence, should be able to sue sellers. David Kairys at Temple Law School was making similar arguments. And courts had started to see things our way.
In one prominent California case in 2003, Ileto v. Glock Inc., an appellate court allowed a negligence claim against several gun manufacturers, distributors, and dealers. The claim was that they?d been part of the chain of gun distribution that led to the deaths of a postal worker and injuries to three young kids in a 1999 shooting spree. The killer was carrying at least seven firearms, all bought illegally. The suit argued that Glock and the other defendants intentionally placed into the market more firearms than could reasonably be sold legally, and that these strategies created a substantial risk that the guns would fall into the hands of criminals. But then the PLCAA came into effect, and the judge had no choice but to throw the case out.
Around the same time in the late 1990s, a bunch of cities?including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Gary, Ind.?hit hard by the human and financial cost of gun violence, brought suits against prominent gun manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson, Baretta U.S.A., and Glock. The suits generally alleged that the defendants? illegal marketing and misleading advertising of their guns had caused the city to spend substantial money on crime fighting, depleting resources. The Chicago case was filed after a sting operation revealed that many retailers were engaging in all manner of illegal sales, multiplying the risk of deadly outcomes.
When a state or city can convince a court that an activity threatens the safety of its citizens, it can require the nuisance-causer, like a toxic waste dumper, to stop, and to pay for the cost of clean-up. The cities argued that the gun sellers were creating a nuisance. And some of these lawsuits?notably, those brought by Gary and Cincinnati?successfully advanced through the courts. But the PLCAA stopped them cold, too.
To be fair, these cases faced difficulties before the PLCAA. Suits like Ileto, based on bad marketing and advertising practices, are controversial, in part because it?s hard to prove that the marketing led to a particular injury. And while the cities? claims show the power of public nuisance theory, they also suggested that cities could effectively regulate guns right out of the market.
But the law evolves by testing theories, discarding some and ultimately embracing others. And until the NRA got Congress to choke off these suits, no industry got a free pass on the whole litigation process. Even with vaccines?where untrameled access clearly benefits the public?drug manufacturers got only a partial shield: If you can show you?re injured by a vaccine, you win compensation from a federal fund (paid for by a small excise tax on each dose of vaccine). People who are injured or killed by guns, or cities saddled with the financial costs that gun violence causes, by contrast, are without recourse.
We should care about preserving the right to sue not only for those who are injured or killed, but because litigation is a useful supplement to regulation. Especially for guns, given that regulation is anemic in the first place. Often, defendants will change their behavior?self-regulate, in other words?rather than risk liability. ?Faced with the public nuisance suits, Smith & Wesson agreed to limit retail customers to no more than one gun within a two-week period and threatened dealers with cancellation of their contracts if "a disproportionate number" of crimes were committed with guns they sold. S&W also began installing safely locks on its weapons. That last bit is particularly important because the Consumer Product Safety Commission is forbidden from regulating firearms.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=90e9bf28adc8654f8030c1d5e85503fd


By Erin Griffith
As noted by The Economist earlier this month, the ?big four? of tech ? Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple ? are increasingly playing in each others? sandboxes. Google and Facebook compete on the social network battlefront. Meanwhile Facebook is more than likely building a search ad business to compete with Google?s and will probably buy its own ad platform too. And then Google is making its paid and organic search results more social to compete with Facebook. Amazon, the commerce company, sells media to compete with Apple?s iTunes and now makes its own devices to compete with the iPhone and iPad. Bringing it full circle, Apple?s iAd mobile advertising business is nothing to sneeze at.
Like Scrooge after discovering the True Spirit Of Christmas, AOL is offering a shiny half-crown (worth $1,056) to the little boy (its employees) as thanks for bringing the prize Turkey from the Poulterer’s this holiday. The $1,000 cash bonus is a celebration of the company’s $1.056 billion patent sale it made earlier this year. I rarely, if ever, comment on internal AOL stuff but this is a nice gesture at the right time. The company is doing well in the markets and traffic is up for its properties. Patch, the hyperlocal news organization of the future, has shown its true value in the wake of recent news in Connecticut and, in the end, AOL is still trucking even after many wrote it off. I wish, in my heart of hearts, that “Tiny” Tim Armstrong would appear before the gathered employees and do a quick, Mary-Lou-Retton-style tumbling routine like in Scrooged, but perhaps I’m dreaming too big. AOL closed at 30.94 today with a high of 31.
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