Biden’s BS about Gun-Manufacturer Immunity from Suit

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Friday, February 04, 2022

 

One of the President Biden’s most unappealing attributes — a lot to work with here — is his penchant for incanting, with painfully off-key conviction, the dullest of left-wing whoppers as if they hadn’t been blown up eons ago.

 

This was on maddening display yesterday during his speech in New York City. Biden’s rambling remarks attended his meeting with new mayor Eric Adams and a visit to NYPD headquarters just days after officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora were laid to rest following their brutal murders by a career criminal while answering a call in Harlem.

 

The show of presidential support for police in a time of rising crime would have been more effective had Biden attended one of the officers’ funerals at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But the ambivalence, at best, of left-lurched Democrats and their radical allies when it comes to backing the blue has also been on maddening display. Black Lives Matters just complained — in connection with yet another recent attack on police, this time in Washington, D.C. — about the public’s propensity to hail as “heroes” cops shot in the line of duty; meantime, a Manhattan actress complained that the thousands of cops and other mourners who poured into the streets for the 22-year-old Officer Rivera’s funeral made it harder for her to get around. (The actress, Jacqueline Guzman, was let go by her company, Face to Face Films, after ranting on Tik Tok that the city shouldn’t shut down over “one f***ing cop” who was “probably doing his job incorrectly. They kill people who are under 22 every single day for no good reason and we don’t shut down the city for them.”)

 

Some will complain that it is unfair to tar Biden with these outbursts (as Ilya Shapiro could tell you, the left is unfailingly fair and measured about such things). But these are the bedfellows Biden and his administration have chosen. And if two young cops (even cops of Hispanic descent, such as officers Rivera and Mora) had killed a violent black suspect but not been killed by him, it is hard to imagine the president refraining from a show of ardent support for the anti-cop protests that would inevitably ensue.

 

In any event, I wrote a column for Fox News yesterday to preview the president’s visit to the city, observing that, in many ways, his ballyhooed meeting with Adams was with the wrong guy. In New York’s system, the mayor has no control over the separately elected district attorneys; and crime is surging in cities across the country because the progressive prosecutors beloved of Democrats will not enforce the laws, which themselves have been gutted by Albany Democrats, cheered on by Big Apple Democrats, in order to make it far more difficult to detain criminals and keep them incarcerated. I was also involved in the coverage of Biden’s speech, with Fox News’s Sandra Smith and John Roberts.

 

I will have more to say about Biden’s speech in the weekend column tomorrow. For now, like David’s thrashing of the president’s claptrap about how cannons somehow prove his point that the Second Amendment is no real bar to firearms restrictions, I want to address just one of the inanities Biden monotonously repeats to promote the Democratic storyline that surging crime is caused by guns rather than by criminals.

 

Biden once again feigned mock astonishment that the law gives gun manufacturers absolute legal immunity for harms caused by firearms use. His analogy, of course, is the cigarette companies. The comparison and the underlying point are specious.

 

Self-defense is a natural right, which the Second Amendment explicitly recognizes by barring government from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms. The Constitution does not recognize a right to smoke. Smoking does not facilitate the right to self-defense. Smoking is an unhealthy habit, the dangers of which smokers are explicitly warned about — as if they didn’t know — because of warnings government requires to be stamped on the manufacturers’ packaging.

 

If crusading Democrats were serious about the intolerable lethality of cigarettes, they could use government power to ban smoking entirely, as has been done to a number of narcotic drugs, and as Democrats would like to do to firearms. Of course, making cigarettes illegal would simply have fueled a black market, but that is not why Democrats stay their hand. Instead, they like the revenue from taxing cigarettes. Even more, they like the resulting redistribution racket: Progressives con the public into expanding government’s reach into activities it should have no part in, such as health-care programs, by promising that it will be underwritten by cigarette taxes; then, when the intentionally inflated revenue projections don’t pan out (in part because the taxes are prohibitive and the anti-cigarette crusade depresses use), progressives pivot and say the program must be funded out of general tax revenues and more debt-spending — or are you one of those creeps who want children to die!

 

As a matter of constitutional law, guns are not at all like cigarettes. And as a matter of products liability law, guns are like other legal commodities. Contrary to Biden’s BS, gun manufacturers do not have absolute immunity from suit. If guns malfunction because of negligent design or production and harm results, the companies responsible for manufacturing them are most certainly subject to lawsuits for money damages. But if guns function as they are lawfully designed to function, the manufacturer is not responsible if a bad actor uses them for an illegal purpose — just as manufacturers of cars, knives, hammers, bowling balls, and baseball bats are not liable if those lawful but inherently dangerous items are employed by violent criminals to hurt people.

 

The argument Biden made yesterday in New York City is ridiculous, so I imagine that henceforth we’ll only hear it . . . incessantly.