Maybe gun owners, makers, and sellers would be less opposed to these proposals for mandatory training, mandatory insurance, mandatory technology if they were not so blatantly intended to make gun ownership difficult and expensive. As things stands, the right sees these proposals the same way the left sees voter ID laws – as having the intent to deter the exercise of a constitutional right, with the claimed goal of reducing crime being a mere smokescreen.
Show me a legal theory under which lobbyists are legally responsible for the impact of the laws they lobby for or against?
Gun manufacturers are under strict Federal rules and accounting for the handling of firearms, for the transfer of firearms to a federally licensed dealer, and for transfers from a dealer to the purchaser. Failure to follow these laws brings civil and criminal liability on gun makers and dealers.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), includes explicit exceptions allowing damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible or should have known the purchaser intended to use the weapon in a crime. There’s nothing in the PLCAA to prevent legitimate lawsuits based on knowing violations of federal or state law related to gun sales, or on traditional grounds including negligent entrustment or breach of contract, or product liability cases involving injuries caused by a defective firearm.
Most people would say that the FBI’s saying “This guy is OK” is sufficient to clear the dealer and manufacturer of liability. To go beyond this and extend liability beyond the first sale is an extreme stretch of secondary liability, unlikely to stand up in court. The PLCAA exists because lobbyists working to ban guns were using lawsuits to drive manufacturers out of business through the use of unusual theories of vicarious liability.
