According To The NRA, Sandy Hook Was Just A Frivolous Event.
It
took our NRA friends at Fairfax less
than 24 hours to
respond to the opinion published by the Connecticut Supreme Court after the
Court deliberated Soto v. Bushmaster
for more than 15 months. And what the boys from Fairfax said is what is always
said by the alt-right when a legal decision goes the other way, namely, that it
was the product of an ‘activist’ court; ‘activist’ being a code-word for any
judicial opinion they don’t like.
The
reason Gun-nut Nation doesn’t like the decision is because it may start a trend
around the country where busybody tree-huggers and other liberal types who hate
guns will dig up some consumer-protection statute in their state which can be used
to take away from the gun industry its beloved federal protection from torts,
a.k.a. the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a.k.a. PLCAA.
This law exempts the gun industry from the kind of lawsuits that have
been plaguing the tobacco industry for years, namely, taking responsibility for
damages from their product even when the product is sold in a lawful way.
When
PLCAA was passed in 2005, the law
contained certain exemptions for state laws that gave consumers a basis for
legal redress if the product’s use created an injury or a financial loss. Connecticut
has such a law, known as the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practice Act (CUTPA), and it was this law which was
used by the Sandy Hook plaintiffs to ague their case. It was also this law that
the CT Supreme Court majority held to
be applicable while a minority of the justices said it was not. I’ll deal with
each in turn but first I have to mention a detail of the case that may prove
difficult for some to read.
On
the morning of December 12, 2012 a 20-year old named Adam Lanza woke up, took a
bolt-action, single shot rifle and shot his sleeping mother in the head. He
then took an AR-15 rifle with multiple, hi-capacity magazines, drove to the
Sandy Hook Elementary School and within five minutes killed 26 adults and
children, then pulled out a pistol and took his own life.
Adam
Lanza didn’t own the AR-15. His mother had purchased the gun a year earlier,
and at no time did she state that she had purchased the gun for him. This is
the reason that the case could not go forward under the doctrine of negligent
entrustment, because the plaintiffs would have been required to prove that the
actual purchaser of the product had used it in an unsafe manner, which was
obviously not the case.
At the same time, the CT Supreme Court majority held that the
case could proceed under CUTPA,
because that law “authorizes any person who has suffered an ascertainable
financial loss caused by an unfair trade practice to bring an action,” no
matter who committed the unfair act. The majority further found that the PLCAA law exempted CUTPA because even though
PLCAA exempted only laws which specifically referred to firearm commerce,
the CUTPA statute prohibited unfair
or deceptive advertising in any kind of commerce, which would supersede the specific
limitation found in PLCAA.
What
was the minority opinion which the NRA grasped like a veritable last straw? It
was the idea that since PLCCA only
covered state laws which contained specific reference to guns, that the CUTPA law couldn’t be used by the plaintiffs in this case. And if there
is any doubt about where the NRA stands
on this issue, they applauded the minority dissent because it would protect the
gun industry from – ready? – frivolous litigation, obviously a category which includes
the Sandy Hook case.
How
many people have to get killed by someone wielding an AR-15 before such an act would’nt
be considered frivolous? Only 17 people
were killed at Parkland, so I guess that one was even more frivolous an event
than what happened at Sandy Hook. Maybe we should set the bar at 50 dead bodies,
maybe 100, maybe more.
