Quick edit: If this is considered in violation of rule 5, then please delete. I do not wish to bait political arguments and drama.
Edit 2: I would just like to say that I would consider this question answered, or at least as answered as a hypothetical can be. My personal takeaway is that holding weapons manufacturers responsible for gun violence is unrealistic. Regardless of blame and accountability, the guns already exist and will continue to do so. We must carefully consider any and all legislation before we enact it, and especially where firearms are concerned. I hope our politicians and scholars continue working to find compromises that benefit all people. Thank you all for contributing and helping me to better understand the situation of gun violence in America. I truly hope for a better future for the United States and all of humanity. If nothing else, please always treat your fellow man, and your firearm, with the utmost respect. Your fellow man deserves it, and your firearm demands it for the safety of everyone.
First, I’d like to highlight that I understand that, legally speaking, arms manufacturers are not typically accountable for the way their products are used. My question is not “why aren’t they accountable?” but “why SHOULDN’T they be accountable?”
Also important to note that I am asking from an American perspective. Local and national gun violence is something I am constantly exposed to as an American citizen, and the lack of legislation on this violence is something I’ve always been confused by. That is, I’ve always been confused why all effort, energy, and resources seem to go into pursuing those who have used firearms to end human lives that are under the protection of the government, rather than the prevention of the use of firearms to end human lives.
All this leads to my question. If a company designs, manufactures, and distributes implements that primarily exist to end human life, why shouldn’t they be at least partially blamed for the human lives that are ended with those implements?
I can see a basic argument right away: If I purchase a vehicle, an implement designed and advertised to be used for transportation, and use it as a weapon to end human lives, it’d be absurd for the manufacturer to be held legally accountable for my improper use of their implement. However, I can’t quite extend that logic to firearms. Guns were made, by design, to be effective and efficient at the ending of human lives. Using the firearms in the way they were designed to be used is the primary difference for me. If we determine that the extra-judicial ending of human life is a crime of great magnitude, shouldn’t those who facilitate these crimes be held accountable?
TL;DR: To reiterate and rephrase my question, why should those who intentionally make and sell guns for the implied purpose of killing people not be held accountable when those guns are then used to do exactly what they were designed to do?
I’m not sure “this was used in a crime” is the sort of thing that can be legislated or sued over, if that makes sense. I think the more reasonable standard for successfully adjudicating criminality is people’s or their constructs (corporations) acting negligently in the production, marketing, sales, and distribution of “things that can be dangerous” or “things that can be used to commit crimes.”
The huge issue most of the responses in this thread have is that they say “you can’t sue someone for making something just because the end user did a bad thing with it” oversimplification of how basically the entire world works.
The only reason manufacturers of anything have plausible deniability on being partially responsible for crimes committed with their wares is the strong likelihood that they could not have known the end user would do that.
If I hand craft a knife on and sell it on the Internet to someone who sends me a message asking “hey is this knife good for stabbing my bitch ex?” there’s a decent chance a good lawyer could get me for negligence at a minimum and possibly accessory to a crime. Because a reasonable person might conclude that knife would be used for a crime.
There’s a reason a Remington settled the lawsuit from the Sandy Hook families for $75 million: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/us/sandy-hook-shooting-settlement-with-remington/index.html
They were never going to be liable for making the gun (particularly since gun manufacturers have a special law protecting them). But they clearly determined there was a decent chance they’d lose in court regarding how they marked, sold, and distributed guns, so they decided shelling out $75,000,000 was a better business decision.
If there’s a company making screwdrivers out there and they’re aware there’s a screwdriver murder problem in a city and they manufacture and distribute their screwdrivers to that city and put up billboards and take out magazine ads glorifying how good their screwdrivers are in a fight… they ought to be liable. Not because a screwdriver can be used to hurt people, but because they should reasonably be aware that in that city their screwdrivers had a good chance to be used to hurt somebody.