Do Gun Makers Deserve to be Protected by the Bill of Rights?
Once Remington Arms agreed to fork over $73 million to compensate the families of the Sandy Hook victims, I knew the gun industry would come up with some kind of narrative to turn Remington’s defeat into the gun industry’s victory.
And this narrative appeared last week in a statement issued by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which has produced a response to the Remington settlement that not only reminds Americans that guns have their own Constitutional protection in the form of the 2nd Amendment, but now should receive special sanction from the 1st Amendment as well.
Incidentally, in case you don’t remember, the NSSF is located in the same town which used to be the location of the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The school building no longer exists because it reminded the townsfolk of the terrible 2012 massacre, — that’s the slaughter of 26 adults and young children which Alex Jones says never took place. Anyway….
What the anti-gun zealots are now going to do, according to the NSSF, is attack the gun industry by claiming that the advertising done by gun makers to promote their altogether legal products violates various state laws which prohibit false advertising (like the Connecticut law that was used to go after Remington) thus preventing gun makers from maintaining their rightful and Constitutionally-protected place in the consumer market space.
But this Constitutional guarantee is not just a function of the 2nd Amendment. It’s also found in the 1st Amendment which protects freedom of speech, thus letting the gun industry say anything it wants to say about its products, whether the anti-gun gang likes it or not. And since the lawsuit against Remington could not cite a specific instance in which Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was motivated to murder 26 adults and children at the elementary school (along with murdering his mother), Remington shouldn’t be held for what happened because that would be a violation of the company’s ‘right’ to exercise free speech.
So now, we not only have an industry whose products are used to kill and injure more than 125,000 men, woman, and children every year claiming that they are protected from liability not just by one Amendment in the Bill of Rights, but by two! And this argument wasn’t just dreamed up in the offices of the NSSF, it has been made for the gun industry by experienced and noted Constitutional scholars, who no doubt might have testified on Remington’s behalf if the Sandy Hook case had gone to court.
Over the years, our friends in Gun-control Nation have gone out of their way to posture themselves as being concerned about not infringing on 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ an argument first made in a 1989 Yale Law Journal article by a liberal Constitutional scholar, Sandy Levinson, who said that if liberals wanted everyone to support the 1st Amendment, then they needed to show the same reverence for the 2nd Amendment as well. So, chickens have really come home to roost, haven’t they?
There’s only one little problem with this attempt to shield the gun industry from taking responsibility for producing a product that was used to slaughter adults and children at Sandy Hook and other mass-shooting events as well (e.g., Aurora.) And the problem is that when someone walks into a crowded, public space and shoots off more than 90 rounds of military-grade ammunition in four minutes or less, this behavior has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights at all.
The AR-15 assault rifle which Adam Lanza used in his Sandy Hook rampage was not only functioning perfectly as he walked from one classroom to another killing and wounding as many as he could, but he used an AR-15 because this gun was designed to be used exactly the way it was used, which is what would have been argued by the plaintiffs if the case had been tried in open court.
Now you can say that Adam Lanza should have realized that he wasn’t walking down a street in Fallujah or wading through a rice paddy in Vietnam. But as long as Americans are allowed to purchase and own guns that were designed only for the purpose of ending human life, from time to time a nut-job like Adam Lanza will pop up.
Want to prevent kids like Adam Lanza from killing 26 adults and children in an elementary school? It’s very simple — stop making the types of guns which are used in such horrendous events again, again and again.
Sandy Hook: A Man Sold A Gun: Weisser, Michael R: 9780692945025: Amazon.com: Books
