DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

More drivel from the New York Times.

 GUN manufacturers have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of gun violence — the deaths and injuries of innocent victims, families torn apart, public resources spent on gun-related crime and medical expenses incurred.

Similarly, socialists have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of their totalitarian beliefs — the deaths and injuries of innocent victims, families torn apart, public resources wasted on socialism-related crime and poverty incurred. Oh, wait — the authors are law professors. Well, that’s even worse than being socialist.

But there is a simple and direct way to make them accountable for the harm their products cause. For every gun sold, those who manufacture or import it should pay a tax. The money should then be used to create a compensation fund for innocent victims of gun violence.

Funny, I don’t see the criminals who actually use guns to commit crimes being brought under this rubric of ‘accountable for the harm these products cause’. I guess they were just holding the thing when it decided to go off by itself. Pesky things, those guns; you never know when they’re going to take it into their heads to shoot somebody.

This proposal is based on a fundamentally conservative principle — that those who cause injury should be made to “internalize” the cost of their activity by paying for it.

So you’re a fan of more prisons, stop-and-frisk programs, and mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related crimes? And the death penalty for people who use a gun to kill somebody else? (Somehow I don’t think so….)

Now, gun manufacturers and sellers are mostly protected from lawsuits by federal law.

Primarily to keep them from being subject to lawfare by people like, well, you two.

 As it happens, a model for this approach already exists. Under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, those injured by vaccines are eligible for compensation from a fund financed by an excise tax on the sale of every dose of vaccine. In creating this no-fault system in the 1980s, Congress sought to provide care for those injured by vaccines while protecting manufacturers from undue litigation.

No, Congress thought to stick it to the people with deep pockets when bad things happen to people who claim to have been injured by vaccines, without resort to those pesky formalities otherwise required by the law like having to prove that a certain manufacturer actually provided the vaccine that supposedly caused the injury, and indeed without resort to having to prove that the vaccine in question actually caused the injury in the first place. My torts professor used to deal with these cases on what he called Fuddlehead Friday, since he knew we were all just waiting for the weekend; perhaps understandably, most of these cases came from the California Supreme Court.

Guns, of course, are not essential for public health. But Congress has made painfully clear that it values the largely unfettered ownership of guns and their manufacture — despite the social costs of the violence that results when guns work as designed.

No, they’ve made it clear that they’ve actually read the Constitution — which, oddly enough, these ‘law professors’ appear to have dodged.

 Some of the victims of recent mass shootings — including the massacres at Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and Virginia Tech, as well as those who survived the 9/11 attack — have recently banded together to ask Congress to enact a National Compassion Fund, to make sure that charitable donations get to their victims rather than being swallowed up in administrative costs.

Oh, sure, passing the money through the Federal government is a sure cure for funds being eaten up in administrative costs. I really wonder what planet these people are from.

 Gun makers know that their products are lethal, and sometimes used illegally. They know that some of their dealers’ sales practices contribute to guns’ falling into criminal hands. They know that each year a significant number of innocent people will be killed or maimed by the use of guns. But quite often, the shooters themselves cannot be held fully or even partially accountable, financially, because they are unknown, destitute or dead.

So we’ll look under the lamp post because the light is better there. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

But why stop there?

Next up will be a tax on automobile manufacturers because of all the deaths and injuries caused by drunk drivers and illegal immigrants who can’t be bothered to carry insurance.

And how about all those uninsured people getting injured and killed? Hey, a tax on the insurance companies sounds like a lovely idea!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 at 16:42 and is filed under Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.