By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Police, prosecutors, and policymakers: All of them
respond to incentives, just like anybody else. Gun control provides a textbook
example of that.
It is remarkable how little our elite law-enforcement
agencies and prosecutors are willing to do when it comes to policing the
criminal use of firearms. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of
Illinois, whose office has responsibility for Chicago, has for years maintained
a policy of refusing to prosecute most straw-buyer cases unless they are part
of a larger organized-crime investigation, partly because those cases are a lot
of work and partly because they tend to net a lot of sympathetic defendants,
the girlfriends and grandmothers and nephews with clean records who buy
firearms illegally for convicted felons. Local officials in Chicago and
Illinois practically never pursue gun-trafficking cases: As ProPublica
reports, between 2014 and 2017 Cook County authorities charged only twelve
gunrunning cases and zero gun-trafficking cases. Chicago police made only 142
arrests for illegal gun sales over the course of a decade — and no arrests at
all for gun trafficking. Of the many arrests for illegal possession of
firearms, few led to prosecutions and fewer still to convictions. Similar
stories play out less dramatically in jurisdictions around the country and in
the federal system: Thousands of gun purchases are wrongly approved in federal
background checks every year, but the ATF makes no effort at all to recover
those guns.
There are reasons for that. The people who are driving
Chicago’s sustained murder problem are young and mobile. Chasing them is hard
work, catching them is harder still, and convicting them brings very little in
the way of headlines or glory.
The companies that legally manufacture and sell firearms
are a much easier target. They have fixed addresses and keep regular business
hours. They also keep copious records, and they and their customers are — as
even Daniel Webster, the Michael Bloomberg Professor of American Health and the
director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University,
confesses — considerably more law-abiding than the average American. Our police
agencies police these law-abiding people and their businesses because they are
easy to police.
Gun-control advocates target them for another reason. The
first is cultural: From the op-ed cartoons to the rhetoric of Democratic
presidential candidates, the face of gun violence in the United States is not
that of the criminals who frolic on the streets of St. Louis or Chicago but the
face of the NRA and sport shooters: white, male, middle-aged, middle-class,
conservative, churchgoing, Republican-voting, and, preferably, for the purpose
of caricature, a little paunchy. These are not criminals, but cultural and
political enemies for the American Left, whose spiritual home is in Brooklyn
and Silicon Valley, and in imitations of those from Austin to Portland. But
there is another reason to target ordinary, law-abiding businesses in the
firearms trade rather than, say, criminals: They have a lot of money. Nobody is
going to get rich suing a car-trunk gun trafficker in Gary, Ind.
The Left is eager to drain gun manufacturers, and it has
in mind the tobacco settlements of a generation past — lawsuits that would produce
a multi-billion-dollar slush fund for left-wing activism, fund scores of
activist groups, and create desirable full-time jobs for Democratic
constituents administering the largesse. The effort kicked off in earnest in
1998, when Chicago mayor Richard Daley and Bridgeport, Conn., mayor Joseph
Ganim launched lawsuits against a number of gunmakers, with Mayor Ganim making
explicit what usually is implicit: The point of the effort was “creating law
with litigation,” trying to achieve through judicial activism what Democrats
had failed to achieve at the ballot box and in the legislature. President Bill
Clinton leaned on Smith & Wesson, which was dealing with lawsuits from
several states and at the federal level, to accept an agreement that would have
in effect forced all firearms dealers to accept new restrictions if they wanted
to stock Smith & Wesson products. Andrew Cuomo, HUD secretary at the time
and now governor of New York, promised ruination of any noncompliant business.
Eliot Spitzer, who has not been heard from in a little while, promised that any
holdouts would be bankrupted. Smith & Wesson signed under duress, but
gun-rights groups reacted quickly, drafting what would become the Protection of
Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).
The PLCAA is an often misunderstood — and misrepresented
— piece of legislation. It does not grant the firearms industry any
extraordinary protection from ordinary product-liability claims and similar
actions. It simply codifies in statute the ancient legal-liability principle
that one party is not ordinarily legally liable for the intentional criminal
acts of another party. The PLCAA was necessary not because of the ordinary
practice of tort law but because of activist judges’ willful departures from
it. A firearms manufacturer remains entirely liable in the case of, e.g.,
selling a defective product, just as a firearms dealer faces liability for
negligently selling a weapon to someone who is not legally eligible to purchase
it. The PLCAA simply holds that if a manufacturer makes and sells a firearm
legally, then that manufacturer is not responsible if a third party
subsequently uses that firearm in a crime.
But the American firearm business is a $14 billion–a–year
concern (down slightly under President Trump; the industry had no better friend
than Barack Obama, under whose haughty gaze gun sales soared), and lawyers are
an inventively devious bunch. The current strategy of gun controllers is to
focus on marketing rather than manufacturing and sales, knowing that a friendly
judge or two — they already found some in Connecticut — will try to clear the
way. In March, the Connecticut supreme court ruled that families of those slain
in the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school can sue Remington for
its advertising. The marketing materials for the Bushmaster rifle used in that
crime contained images of combat (the AR-style rifle is a cousin to
standard-issue U.S. military rifles, aesthetically similar but functionally
distinct) and such macho slogans as “Consider your man card reissued.” To be
clear: The lawsuit is moving forward as a matter of unfair trade practices.
That is, of course, preposterous on the face of it. There
is no evidence that the shooter in the Newtown massacre ever saw a Bushmaster
advertisement, and neither the maker nor the retailer ever engaged in any trade
at all with the shooter, much less unfair trade: The rifle used in the crime
belonged to the murderer’s mother. Nonetheless, the court insisted that “it
falls to a jury to decide whether the promotional schemes alleged in the
present case rise to the level of illegal trade practices and whether fault for
the tragedy can be laid at their feet.” Remington has asked the U.S. Supreme
Court to throw out the case under the PLCAA.
But the PLCAA itself is under attack. Connecticut
Democratic senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy have tried and failed to
repeal the law for years, and in June they submitted another bill to do the
same. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar
have co-sponsored the bill, and every Democratic-primary candidate who has
taken a position on the PLCAA opposes it. (Representative Tim Ryan, D., Ohio, a
no-hoper, voted for the PLCAA but has since evolved, as they say, on most
gun-control questions. Andrew Yang proposes a system for fines on manufacturers
when weapons are used in mass shootings.) If the PLCAA is repealed or
diminished, it is a near certainty that every manufacturer of handguns and
semiautomatic rifles sold in the United States — and, possibly, every maker of
firearms sold in the United States, period — will be subjected to ruinous
litigation. The Democrats will accomplish through legal chicanery what they
cannot accomplish legislatively, activists and lawyers will grow rich, and the Bill
of Rights will be gutted without so much as a vote in Congress.
Defending the PLCAA is necessary but not sufficient. What
is most needed is to reestablish the ordinary legal standard that persons
involved in lawful conduct are not responsible for the willful criminal acts of
others. Which is to say: What is needed here is the rule of law.
And while we’re at it, the rule of law would not suffer
one little bit if the federal authorities and the Democrats who run the big
cities started enforcing the actual law on actual criminals, who do so much
harm to so many communities.
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