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. As it is with all controversial topics this question has many different answers on if these distributors should be held liable and if so, what punishment needs to happen to them. The only logical and appropriate reaction to these situations is to not hold the gun distributors accountable. This argument will be verified, first, by using detailed, real life situations that were occurring. 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 viewpoint as to why it is wrong to hold gun stores liable.

For starters, it would be best to give a brief explanation of what a “distributor” exactly is. These gun distributors can be called a few other things such as a manufacturer, producer, and most commonly known as a store. Also, the distributors in this paper are not just supergiant companies that control 90% of the gun market and are household names in America. The majority of these distributors are common mom and dad family owned stores that exist in the local communities scattered all around the United States. It can be hard to try and empathize with any big corporate business that is bringing in millions or billions of dollars. However, almost anyone can imagine the life of a small gun store that is working on building up a successful store so that he or she can provide for his or her family so keep this point in mind when reading the rest of the paper.

On July 1, 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 court case to move forward 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. All of these unchecked and unpractical lawsuits eventually led to the national government passing a bill in 2005 known as the PLCAA. This bill protected the gun stores by making it illegal to sue these businesses unless direct negligence was found. 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). One unusual thing about all of this pressure from these congressman is that the main man, Bernie Sanders, originally backed the idea of supporting this bill when it first came out. Bernie was one of the biggest supporters of the bill in 2005 and even helped right a generous portion of the bill. So, for him turn his back on these people that possibly voted for him because they expected his views to stay the same and try to protect the gun stores this is just another bad situation to add to their list. 

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. 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. An even better example of a product that is just as dangerous as a gun is a car. Recently, many individuals have been carrying out a lot of terror attacks using large vehicles to kill large amount of people. A specific example involves an attack that happened in December of 2016 which was only a couple of months ago. An unnamed individual drove a large eighteen-wheeler into a crowd that was gathered outside of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church(Pederson). Twelve people were killed and approximately fifty others were injured from this brutal attack. Everyone was ready to accordingly punish the driver of the truck but unsurprisingly no one was considering the possibility of suing the car company that sold the car. No one ever mentioned this idea because it is irrational to say that the car manufacturer did anything to directly cause the attack. If, for some unknown reason, the car dealership did not sell that car to the terrorist then he or she would have just gone to another store and bought another car. The point of this to show that none of these businesses would ever want to be directly responsible for a massive killing event because all businesses want to do is make money. Clearly if a company was ever found responsible for blatantly selling to these people with their purpose being known then the sales of the company would drop drastically. Yet gun manufacturers are still targeted incessantly by anyone looking to punish them for a gun crime when no other industry faces this sort of criticism. This is ultimately 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.

In 2012, a well-known attack occurred at an elementary school named Sandy Hook occurred and killed twenty young children. This event was traumatic for everyone across the nation and nothing can make it up to those parents that lost their children on that day. However, just because a terrible tragedy occurred to these parents does not mean that they are allowed to accuse an innocent company of being guilty of the shooting. The lawsuit that was file by the parents accuses not only the gun store that the gun was purchased from but it also accuses both the manufacturer and distributor. So, they are trying to claim the gun distributor that the gun store bought the gun from and the manufacturer that the distributor brought it from are both guilty of the shooting. The concept that any of those companies that sold to a company that sold to the shooter is absurd to say the least. To go even deeper on the fallacy of this lawsuit the person that actually bought the gun was the shooters mother and not himself. This shows that there was no way for the gun store to be able to know that the gun would be used for a crime since the shooter was not the one to go and physically buy the weapon. Nonetheless, the lawsuits is still moving forward and is presently waiting for approval by a Connecticut Judge to see if the suit should be moved to open court. “If allowed to proceed, lawsuits such as the one in Connecticut could lead to all sorts of other outlandish claims being asserted against producers merely for selling their legal products, even though they rarely have any control over who buys their products or how they use them” (Kloster). Writer Andrew Kloster sums up perfectly in this quote why lawsuits such as the Sandy Hook one is a problem. We as a country cannot allow ourselves to be fooled by our emotions of vengeance when we see something like children being killed and expecting for everybody to take the fall for it. 

In conclusion, we as a collective group of Americans need to come together and face the situation of gun violence together. While the solution to this problem is not fully agreed upon yet the one solution that is not helping is placing the blame on innocent people. These people are just exercising their constitutional rights to sell a legal product and the majority of them are average every day citizens that can be related too. Whether all of these lawsuits both in the past and present were motivated by greed or trying to find justice this is clearly not the way. In the end, it is best to accept that the PLCAA bill was created for a purpose in 2005 and that changing it now will just cause the same issues from the past to arise again. Remember that before the bill was passed there were still just as many gun crimes as there are in present day society. The only difference the bill made was allowing for people to abuse the fact that the gun industry was not protected which is both morally and ethically wrong towards these businesses.
