Should We Sue the Lawyers?
Every product has illegitimate uses and undesirable consequences. In 1996, for instance, car accidents killed 43,000 people and injured another 3.4 million. Some 950 children younger than 15 drowned in pools and while boating, 500 died in bicycle accidents, and more than 1,000 died from residential fires.
No one is proposing that state or city governments recoup medical costs or police salaries associated with such accidents by suing automobile or bicycle companies, pool builders or makers of home heaters. So why have city governments filed a host of lawsuits against gun makers based on the same theory?
A weapon for good
Twenty-three cities have sued the gun industry for costs they allegedly incurred from gun-related violence. And gun-control groups, which are helping coordinate these suits, claim that as many as 50 cities and some states eventually will file similar suits.
The city lawsuits are using the courts to bypass not only the legislative process but also the legal system. With so many simultaneous suits, the goal is not to win these weak cases but to bankrupt legitimate small companies through massive legal costs. To these plaintiffs, the solution to crime is simple and obvious: eliminate guns.
Bad things happen with guns. But simply claiming that gun makers should "know and foresee" that murders will be committed with guns will not be enough for the cities to win these cases.
What the suits ignore is that guns also make it easier for people to defend themselves and prevent bad things from happening. Less than one-tenth of 1% of guns are used to commit crimes in any given year, while many other products have much higher probabilities of causing harm.
The precedent for the cities' suits against gun makers is the state attorneys general's cases against Big Tobacco. Those cases said tobacco companies should pay the health-related costs of treating people who had smoked for years in part because of the companies' decades-long deceptions about the health effects of smoking. But unlike the tobacco companies, gun makers have powerful arguments about the benefits of their products.
It is true that more than 430,000 crimes, including more than 9,000 murders, were committed with guns in 1997. But Americans also use guns defensively about 2 million times a year, and merely brandishing the weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 98% of the time. When criminals confront people, resistance with a gun is by far the safest course of action.
Questionable logic
Guns particularly help offset the strength differential between male criminals and their female victims. The chances of serious injury from an attack are 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for those resisting with a gun.
My own research has found that increased gun ownership is associated with lower crime rates. Poor people in the highest-crime areas benefit the most from owning guns. Lawsuits against gun makers would raise the price of firearms, and such a price hike would most severely reduce gun ownership among the law-abiding, much-victimized poor.
The cities' claims against gun makers, furthermore, conflict with the wisdom of the people whose job it is to keep the streets safe. A 1996 survey of 15,000 chiefs of police and sheriffs conducted by the National Association of Chiefs of Police found that 93% of them thought law-abiding citizens should be able to purchase guns for self-defense.
With police carrying guns, it is hard for cities to deny that there are any benefits to being armed. If mayors really believe guns produce no benefits, they should demonstrate their belief by disarming their bodyguards. It is hypocritical for them to demand that poor people live in high-crime areas without being able to own a gun while they would never enter these areas without armed guards.
Some of the lawsuits claim that gun makers try to make their products attractive to gang members. The offending characteristics include: low price, easy concealment (small size and low weight), corrosion resistance, accurate firing and high firepower.
That argument, too, is off base. Lightweight, concealable guns may help criminals, but they also have helped protect law-abiding citizens and lower crime rates in the 43 states that allow concealed handguns. Women in particular benefit much from guns that are easier to use, small and lightweight.
Other lawsuits seek to hold gun makers liable because accidental gun-related deaths are "foreseeable" and not enough has been done to prevent them. That suit, which prominently discusses three cases in New Orleans since 1992, emphasizes accidental deaths involving children. Nationally, 17 children younger than 5 and 44 younger than 10 died from accidental gun deaths in 1996. Yet with some 80 million people owning about 240 million guns, accidental deaths from guns are far less "foreseeable" than deaths from many other products.
A most troubling cynicism
The cities' lawsuits against gun makers also have raised real civil-liberties nightmares.
Take the Chicago case, where the city employed undercover police to gather evidence for the civil case. The gun dealers faced a no-win situation. Had they not sold firearms to undercover minority police posing as gang members, they could have faced discrimination lawsuits. And while the city found it possible to use television cameras to record the purchases so they could be shown on programs like CBS's "60 minutes", it somehow ignored decades of police policy on stings and failed to make any audio recordings.
Allowing the court system to ignore a product's benefits to society is bad enough, and with offenses like the one in Chicago above, it is hard to see where this process will stop. Yet the most troubling aspect of these lawsuits is the cynicism involved, for it lets public officials file bogus lawsuits and use taxpayer dollars to impose massive legal costs that make it infeasible for defendants to even defend themselves.
This article was written by John R. Lott Jr. He is the John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, is the author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1998). He is also the author of Are Predatory Commitments Credible?: Who Should the Courts Believe? recently published by the University of Chicago Press. This article was published on the website Intellectualcapital on August 5, 1999.
Bob's note: Just a month before Mr. Lott wrote this article an Atlanta father took a hammer and bludgeoned his three children to death. He currently awaits trial. Ban hammers next?