A little while ago we had a good, calm debate about how the courts deal
with product safety issues in regards to the House and Senate bills we
all know and "love". This crappy legislation we are all discussing makes
it clear that the founding principle for action is "public safety". The
language is quite specific (although vague in detail, of course) that the
Secretary of Defense is to be empowered with ability to destroy SME if he
feels there is a concern for public safety. Some speculated that this
could be applied, willy nilly, to all sorts of things without any
documented proof. I and a few others said it doesn't work that way, in
that the Feds/States/Cities must prove that something is in fact a threat
to public safety if challenged in court. This gives us yet another
chance to challenge confiscation and destruction should this legislation
go through *AND* the DoD decides to act upon it in ways that directly
affect us.
A few people didn't think this was the case and came up with two counter
examples -> recent lawsuits against gun manufacturers and tobacco product
companies for producing unsafe products. I pointed out that the gun
lawsuits consistently fail in the courts while tobacco cases are often
upheld. The difference is one product is a WEAPON functioning as
intended and the other is supposed to be a recreational activity which,
due to its very nature and deliberate tampering by its makers, causes
serious harm and often death when used according to the manufacturers
specifications. BIG difference.
Well, I heard on the news this morning that the Supreme Court decided to
NOT hear the test case for product liability based lawsuits against gun
makers. Therefore, they refused to overturn the previous rulling that
was against the city law in question. This effectively means that ANY
law or lawsuit which attempts to hold gun makers responsible for creating
"defective products", which in fact have no inherent defects (i.e. round
explodes in chamber, killing user), are not legal/valid unless it goes
through to the Supreme Court *and* they rule in favor. This is so
unlikely to happen that nobody sane would try this tactic again.
Just thought you'd all like to know that the Good Guys won a very
significant battle ;-) Hopefully it will give a few of you out there a
little bit more faith in our system of government. It isn't perfect, and
sometimes is painfully slow to set things right, but it works more often
than it doesn't.
Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 07 2001 - 00:36:24 PST