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The Moral Work of Gun Control
A Canadian leftist writer for the New Yorker describes the lawsuit against gun makers, likening it to Martin Luther's 95 Theses, nailed to a church door.The news that the parents of the children massacred two years ago in Sandy Hook, near Newtown, Connecticut, by a young man with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, were undertaking a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer was at once encouraging and terribly discouraging. The encouraging part is that those parents, suffering from a grief that those of us who are only witnesses to it can barely begin to comprehend, haven’t, despite the failure to reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre, given way to despair. Like Richard Martinez, after his son was murdered by a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter, they’re allowing themselves to be angry, and then turning their anger into action: they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible. I don't see a tort, but then this is modern American jurisprudence, which uses conjured up theories such as "Emerging Awareness" to justify all manner of insanity. Frankly, using the legal system to redress the grievance of murder is insanity by definition. The filed complaint—the numbered paragraphs give it an oddly religious feeling, like theses nailed to a church door—is worth reading in full, however painful that might be, not only because of the unbelievable suffering and cruelty it details on that terrible morning but also because it offers, in neatly logical fashion, an indisputable argument: the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time. Despite the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having previously declared that such weapons “serve a function in crime and combat, but serve no sporting purpose,” Bushmaster sold it anyway—and precisely on the grounds that it could kill many people, quickly. “Forces of opposition bow down. You are single handedly outnumbered,” the advertising copy read. The rifle used in the Newtown massacre was sold to a woman who was murdered by the shooter. Unlikely Bushmaster sold it for that purpose, and it would be hard to prove even negligence on the part of the Bushmaster. Posted by: badanov 2015-01-02 |
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