Discussion: Gun Shop Ordered To Pay Millions To Police Officers Wounded By Gun It Sold

[sniffit]

@AllieBean

To the courts example of what happened if the handlers had purposely thrown the package down?

Because the court found there was no way they could know the package was dangerous. If they had no reasonable way to know, they can’t be held liable for what they didn’t know could happen.

Also too, you start getting into the issue of negligence requiring a causal relationship between the breach of duty and the foreseeable consequence and damage suffered. Intervening and superseding acts and omissions cause all sorts of problems for that analysis.

[breccia]

“Criminals are always going to get guns”. That’s what the NRA says every time want to make legal gun owners get a permit, or wait 72 hours, or implement some other common sense gun regulation. It’s worth asking who is selling the criminals these guns that we need to buy guns to protect ourselves from.

[alliebean]

@DaveyJones64

But obviously the scales were mounted in such a manner that an explosion, a reasonable expectation in a train yard, could cause them to fall. Obviously, because they did in fact become dismounted and fall when an explosion occurred.

For what it’s worth, this causes law students fits. I spent 45 minutes on the hot seat in torts class about this very topic. It’s one of the harder legal concepts for all the reasons @Sniffit stated and because @DaveyJones64 what you say makes sense.

My prof ran me in circles. First year hell. But he became my favorite before I left, so the trauma was manageable.

[darrtown]

@breccia

“Criminals are always going to get guns”. That’s what the NRA says every time

Then the NRA supports the carnage and wants it to continue and get worse so that more people will get paranoid and buy more guns. A very sick line of thinking on their part. There must be some way to damage the NRA and their blood thirsty followers.
I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me there must be some way of seeing the NRA culpable in this ongoing carnage they support. Get rid of the NRA as a political entity!

[srfromgr]

Something tells me the Conservatards on the Supreme Court will find a way to reverse this by taking up the case eventually…because if its a political matter, which the wingnuts will insist this is, they’ll go to the mat to protect the NRA, gun manufacturers, and the rest of these fuckers.

[srfromgr]

@MattinPA

I know it’s been suggested that a limit on purchasing guns, say one a month, would help curb the straw purchases,

They do that in Australia and they’ve turned all of the gun violence around since enacting stronger gun legislation. This do-nothing Republican Congress would never allow that to come up for a vote however. So until we get out and vote and get rid of as many of these crazy bastards in Congress as possible, we’re stuck with gun shop loopholes and straw purchases as gun shows. Australia also closed their gun show loopholes too.

[daveyjones64]

Okay, correct me where I am wrong.

The New York Supreme ruled against her, arguing the concept of forseeability,the desent was based on proximate cause arguments.

The problem I have with the courts forseeability argument, is its an argument that the guards couldn’t have known that the scale was shabbily mounted. And that may be true for the individual.

HOWEVER, the guard is an agent of the defendant here, which, as a company(i.e. the deep pockets if you will), most definitely knew, or should have known, that the scale’s mounting was questionable. That occurrences such as say, a large cart carrying baggage could knock into it, or any of dozens of other occurances that would lead to it toppling over (Indeed, there was some speculation that the scale was actually knocked down by another by stander bumping into it), are indeed quite forseeable, and should even be expected. The Railroad company did have a duty to all people that would in the area of the scale, to take reasonable steps to ensure it was properly mounted and wouldn’t fall over.

Now as to the proximate cause argument; my understanding is that when that is in play, its not up to the judge to make the determination, rather, its a question for the jury. And as such, it would be unconstitutional under the 7th Amendment for the NY Supreme to overrule their finding. (And the NY Constituion upholds the 7th; its basically Article I, Section 2 if I am reading it correctly). The proximate cause argument, in my opinion, was the one used at trial and should have been applied here, therefore upheld for the plaintiff.

[origamitrain]

This type of response is why I go to TPM for information.

[charliee]

The phrase is “used as intended”, not “works as intended.” It’s why we don’t see lawn darts for sale anymore. They were sharp and you were supposed to throw them at their target. When people were doing that, people sometimes got hurt, because the “intended use” of the product was to throw sharp objects across your yard.

“Used as intended” should have put the tobacco companies out of business decades ago, but for some reason, juries have decided that if you smoke and the cigarettes hurt you, it’s your own damned fault and not an issue of product liability.

We don’t have many products whose intended use is death, so there’s no cut and dried answer as to whether the “used as intended” phrase in liability law would actually result in a successful claim against a firearms manufacturer. Republicans were concerned that a plethora of such lawsuits might put firearms companies out of business due to the crushing weight of legal costs.

We can’t have that, because we must always have more guns.