For many decades, the American government and its people have argued ceaselessly about the issues revolving around guns and gun control.  One of the deeper arguments on this topic is the question of whether a person or business that sells a gun to a customer that later goes on to commit a violent crime against another person should be held liable for selling a gun to said person. Whatever beliefs you may have about gun control do not let that affect you as all the different opinions should hear the argument at hand because everyone will understand the point of this question by the end of the reading. As it is with other controversial topics this question has many controversial answers on if they should be held liable and if so then what the punishment needs to be. The objective of this paper is to prove that the only logical and appropriate reaction to these situations is to not hold the gun distributors accountable at all. This argument will be verified first by using many detailed, real life situations that were occurring. In the 90’s when gun stores were not protected by the government and began to get sued incessantly off liability grounds which caused a ricochet effect to happen on the economy(Anderson). Another solid reasoning to back up the argument is to compare the liability of gun sellers to other products that can cause harm to others. An example of these kinds of products are knives which have also been used in a malicious intent in the past to commit some horrific crimes(Leahy). However, the manufacturers or sellers of knives have never been held liable for what their customers have done so why should guns be any different. Then some of the strongest arguments for the opposing side of the topic will be presented and analyzed such as the idea that guns were made to only cause harm to others. Those opinions will be given a counter argument to show that those views are either inaccurate toward the topic or do not hold water when faced with all the circumstances. Hopefully, by the conclusion of this paper most readers will have a better understanding of the overall point of reviewing this topic and will have an empathetic viewpoint as to why it is wrong to hold gun stores liable.

On the first of July during the year 1993 a man walked into a law firm and committed a horrible tragedy killing nine people, including himself, and wounding another six-people using two semiautomatic pistols(Pearson). This case would eventually become the first ever case to move forward to an actual court case to be heard by a judge in an open court. While the case was eventually resolved in the favor of the gun manufacturers this would pave the way for many more lawsuits to come. The worst of times for the gun stores came in early 2000 when a group of local governments all filed lawsuits against numerous gun manufacturers under the conditions that since their customers had committed some kind of violent crime that they were somehow financially responsible for the deaths of the crimes(Anderson). To make matters even worse none of these cases ever got past the initial court hearing however, the cost of fighting off these ridiculous lawsuits caused a lot of these businesses, especially the family owned ones, to go out of business(Kenny). These innocent businesses that were only trying to make a living for themselves were being punished even though they legally were doing nothing wrong. All of these events led to the government passing a bill in 2005 that would help protect gun distributors from being sued on the grounds of liability for the actions of their customers(Jusko). This relieved much financial pressure on the gun distributors and finally allowed them to freely run their business as long as they properly ran background checks and did not sell to obvious strawman which are two things the bill did not protect them from. Now fast forward to the present where many senators, specifically Bernie Sanders and his like-minded democrats, have been considering getting rid of the bill that was shielding gun businesses from liability lawsuits and this leads to the controversial topic being brought up in the public eye which is why the topic of this paper is still a relevant topic to this day (Devaney). 

In America, everyone is given quite a numerous amount of freedoms and rights as soon as they are born. Some of the most notable rights are the right to freedom of speech, the right to vote, and the freedom of religion. These lists of rights that all natural born Americans is called the Bill of Rights and most U.S. citizens are familiarly the amendment that correlates to the issue at hand which is the Second Amendment. For those unaware, the Second Amendment states that the people have a right to bear arms and defend themselves that cannot be infringed upon. Whether or not someone believes that American citizens should have guns is irrelevant at the moment because this is currently the law of the land so it must be followed. The point of referencing to this amendment is to compare the idea that a gun store owner is no different than an individual who owns a single gun because both parties are simply just making use of their rights to bear arms. Now once you are looking at this situation as a implementation of the gun owners right to bear arms and sell guns to others it becomes easier to see why suing gun distributors for not doing anything directly wrong is not just erroneous but it is also infringing on the basic rights of the gun owners to bear arms which is a genuine crime.

The most popular argument that advocates of gun manufacturers tend to use is that guns are the most dangerous products in the U.S. so why are they the only products in America that are given special liability immunity rights for the sellers of guns. The counter argument for this claim is simple to understand and that is guns are given a unique set of liability rights because guns are a very unique product compared to all other products. Guns are the only product legally sold that is made for the sole purpose of either wounding or killing other living beings. This may sound like an immoral quality at first but it needs to be said that guns were originally created so that people could defend themselves from attacking criminals or animals in the wild. Unfortunately, there will always be a small minority of humans that take advantage of something and guns are no exception to this abuse as everyone has heard at least a few violent and unnecessary gun crimes through the news. However, guns are not the only weapons that are used on a daily basis to commit murders. Another lethal weapon example would be any kind of sharp cutting knife and these knives have been used to commit just as many crimes as guns have (Kenny). Even with the dangerous possibilities that sharp blades have on people almost every single house in America has at least one knife in their kitchen. This blatant hypocrisy is because everyone in this society has accepted that even though knives have the potential to be deadly the risks of having them so available does outweigh the pros of them. So, if this is the case for knives and other household items then this should not be the case for guns either that are used mainly for protection. This obviously becomes unfair for guns themselves and the innocent people that are trying to feed their families and make a living trying to sell a legal product that has the same deadly possibilities as many other products. 

To go into more specific detail on an example used let’s take a step back in time before the bill was passed that protected gun sellers when gun store owners were getting bombarded with lawsuits left and right on the grounds that they were accountable for the crimes of their customers. The most notable of these lawsuits was at the start of the early 2000’s a group of thirty-one city and county government came together and simultaneously sued multiple gun stores using the argument that the gun stores were financially responsible for the deaths that were caused by their customers (Anderson). The term “financially responsible” is another way of saying that the gun owners are supposed to pay for both the funeral arrangements of the deceased party and pay for the sanitation workers that would clean the crime scene after the scene was investigated. The most disheartening aspect of this situation is that all of the small governments that were suing these gun distributors had no real care about the deceased victims and their families. All that they were trying to do was save money by placing the blame on another party so they would no longer have to compensate the deceased family themselves which is just forthright greediness. Not only was this greedy act off-putting for the victims it was also seriously impacting the lives of many innocent gun store owners. Even though none of the courts that the lawsuits were taken to ever made it past the hearing process it was still costing the gun owners a fortune to fight against all of the lawsuits. All of the gun distributors that were being targeted were small, local businesses so they did not have the large amount of income that other larger companies had. These gun stores were just trying to run a business to support their families and they were losing their stores because of the greed of the local governments (Pearson). These companies going out of business means that there are less people working so the unemployment rate will go up higher and that is obviously never a positive sign for the economy. So, the greed of these local governments not only showed disrespect for the victims of gun crimes in their districts but also hurt innocent business owners and the their very own economy. All of these negative impacts from the lawsuits eventually forced the national government to create a bill that would prevent this from happening to gun stores again. The fact that the national government had to step in just to help protect these small businesses from the greedy lawsuits shows how corrupt and wrong it is to hold these business owners liable for someone they have no control over.