Posted on 09/25/2002 7:15:55 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
California Gov. Gray Davis signed a package of new gun control bills Wednesday, including the first state law in the nation to strip gunmakers of a key legal shield against liability lawsuits brought by victims of gun violence.
"No industry should be allowed to hide from its own harmful conduct, and except for gun manufacturers, no industry is," Davis said in a statement. "Current laws shield a gun manufacturer from its own negligence. These new laws strip away that shield."
Davis, a Democrat who faces reelection in November, had previously vowed to go slow on new gun control legislation after signing a raft of gun control measures during his first year in office.
But he said Wednesday that the new laws were an important step toward making California's gun safety laws -- already the toughest in the nation -- even stronger.
"A LEGAL EARTHQUAKE"
Gun control advocates hailed the new laws as a "legal earthquake" for the gun industry, which has come under legal attack in recent years by plaintiffs seeking to blame it for America's epidemic of gun violence.
"Gun makers are going to face judgement day," said Luis Tolley, California spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
"They will no longer be able to hide from the courts and escape legal accountability when they engage in dangerous and irresponsible conduct that hurts and kills people."
The centerpiece of Wednesday's legislation was a bill repealing a 1983 state law which has protected gun makers against certain liability claims for damage caused by criminals wielding their weapons.
Spurred by a lawsuit brought by survivors of a 1993 San Francisco office massacre, in which a gunman murdered eight people with a TEC-9 assault pistol, Davis' repeal overrides a 2001 decision by California's state Supreme Court which upheld the legality of the 1983 immunity law.
Gun control advocates had accused the maker of the TEC-9, Miami-based Navegar, Inc., with criminal negligence, saying it had manufactured and marketed the weapon specifically to appeal to potential killers by touting its "fingerprint resistance" and massive firepower.
A HIGHER STANDARD?
Gun manufacturers, who lobbied hard against the California bill, say they are already subject to existing product liability laws covering everything from defective products to negligent sales practices.
Now, they say, they will be held to a higher standard than other manufacturing industries -- liable for criminal misuse of legal products that are not in themselves defective.
"Some products, knives and firearms for example, must by their very nature be dangerous in order to function. The mere fact of injury does not entitle the injured person to recover from the manufacturer," Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, said in a recent letter to Davis urging him not to override the 1983 shield law.
"Repealing (the law) will result in California courts being flooded with exactly the kinds of cases the statute was intended to prevent -- lawsuits seeking to (hold) manufacturers of legal, non-defective firearms responsible for criminal shootings."
Other elements of the gun control package signed Wednesday included a law which adds city attorneys to the list of officials who have access to handgun registration information compiled by the Department of Justice.
We can try all we want to put a good face on it, but the fact is this is a huge, huge victory for the gun grabbers and trial lawyers. Even if every manufacturer stopped shipping guns to CA today, the millions of guns already in existence there would still put them in the position of having to defend the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lawsuit cases which greedy trial lawyers will handle for their clients on a contingency fee basis. Even if the gun makers and importers win every case, which they won't in ultra-liberal CA, the legal fees alone will bankrupt every one of them within a short time. Gun makers are not big rich corporations like the tobacco companies. Most of them are relatively small operations compared to other industries, and many are in financial trouble now. Just one big multi-million dollar award to one plaintiff would destroy even the largest manufacturer.
IMHO, this is the death knell for the firearms industry that the gun-grabbers have been hoping for ever since the courts in most state courts began throwing out their baseless suits a couple of years ago. All they needed was one large state to enact a law to allow them to litigate their frivolous lawsuits, and now they have the biggest state of all doing just that.
No firearms manufacturer has the financial resources to fight this. Unless congress acts soon to pre-empt state laws like this one, no currently active American firearms manufacturer or importer will be in business 5 years from now. There has been a lawsuit pre-emption bill lying around congress for at least 2 sessions which would over-ride this CA law. But it has never made it to the floor for a vote. Maybe when every American gun maker and every importer is out of business and there are no new guns left to buy, some of the 75 million gun owners who have so far refused to get involved in the fight will finally join a pro-gun lobbying group and begin calling and writing congress about this issue.
On 2nd thought I want to retract that statement from my last post. The vast majority of gun owners don't even care enough about their 2nd A rights to bother voting for a pro-gun candidate if the other candidate promises them more free goodies than the pro-gun guy. I don't expect them to do anything except bitch and moan when they lose the last vestige of liberty they now have. This nation is headed straight for an all-out dictatorship because of the apathy, greed, and class envy of it's people.
Let Davis and his Berkley Buttheads swim in the seditious sh*t and shineola he subjects Kalifornia to.....
Demand his bodyguards weapons be turned back to the manufacturer based on Davis's own toadies claims..............Davis is the biggest POS I have ever seen.
Good luck to the sane folks still struggeling to overcome this criminal in the governors mansion.
Stay Safe !
Some times I think the best way to respond to these things is to give them exactly what they want.
Manufacturers should announce today they will no longer sell guns in California, period. Don't ship a single firearm to California, not to stores, not to gun dealers, not to police.
Let all of the gun dealers go to Sacremento to ask Davis what he's going to do for them. Let the police do without. Let Davis's bodyguards do without.
Have the manufacturers announce recalls of all the weapons they have already sold to escape liability.
Let the ammo manufacturers do the same thing, they know they're next anyway. Quit selling ammo there and recall what's sold.
Current owners will face a few hardships getting ammo from Nv or AZ. Police will go nuts.
Dealers of course have the most at risk. If they stand firm and camp on Davis's doorstep, I'm betting they can get this repealed.
I have always said that if big tobacco had done this in Florida, Massachusets and Minnesota, there would never had been a tobacco settlement.
I wouldn't buy a gun that didn't have 'fingerprint resistance', every decent gun made has some kind of 'fingerprint' resistance, whether it's called blueing, tennifer, parkerizing or hard chrome, they are all metal finishes to prevent corosion. I'm certain a decent forensics guy could lift a print off of any of them.
And excuse me, 9mm is not 'massive' firepower. 230 gr, .45 ACP is massive. .454 is massive. .45 Colt is massive. .44 Magnum is massive.
A better defendent in the San Fran case would be the twisted gay lifestyle, not the gun.
9mm is adequate, being able to spray a few dozen around is fun, but it's not accurate.
Bingo. It won't happen, but we can dream....it would be a totally appropriate response.
Its worth repeating -make everybody, especially law enforcement, buy their guns out of state.
It's clear that's the unspoken goal, so let's see what happens when it comes home to roost.
1. Is Bill Simon still alive?
2. Why aren't Bush and the Senate Republicans doing or saying anything about California's non-stop harassment of gunowners?
3. Why isn't the NRA running commercials in pro-gun states like S. Dakota, Texas, and N. Carolina to attack Democratic senate candidates for not supporting a bill to shield gun-makers from these frivolous lawsuits?
Those makers wouldn't mind at all seeing the American firearms industry bankrupted, that would just open up a large new market for them. Ammo wouldn't be any problem either, I'm sure companies such as Geco, Hirtenberger, Norma, and many others would happily sell CA all the LE type ammo it could use. CA cops wouldn't be carrying Glocks and Berettas loaded with HydroShoks or Corbons, but they would be sufficiently well armed.
There isn't any quick or simple answer to this situation. The only way we can fight it is by joining and supporting an effective pro-gun lobbying association, keeping the heat on our reps and senators, and by the power of voting as a bloc. I'm not at all happy about the direction the NRA has taken the last decade or so, but it is still the only lobby with enough membership and money to influence congress to a significant degree. If all NRA members would also join GOA we would have a much more powerful voice in Washington. Of course, if even 10 or 15% of all gun owners been active in politically opposing the gun-grabbers and their hirelings in D.C. we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
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