There’s a great line in the movie “Usual Suspects”: “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing mankind that he didn’t exist”. As the devil would surely know, if he existed, the very best place to hide is right in plain sight. It’s the last place anybody will look for ya. Cars were designed to transport people and things from point A to point B more quickly. That any car kills anyone is outside its design specs. If anything was a case of “cars don’t kill people, people kill people”, cars is it. No one designing the car every thought of their creation as a murder weapon. That there are deaths to which they contributed must surely haunt them. A gun just used to murder someone – or take down an animal in a hunt – shouldn’t haunt the gun’s maker. The gun they designed lived up to its billing! It met or exceeded its design specs, shame about that dead body. Statistics evidence what should be obvious: the presence of a gun in the home environment increases the chances that gun violence will occur there exponentially. Homes without guns NEVER experience gun violence unless someone from the outside brings a gun in.
It is rudimentary logic that the presence of gun a anywhere makes wherever that is more dangerous. The ready availability of a gun makes suicide exponentially more likely. What guns trigger tends to stay triggered.
And yet… while one has to insure one’s ride because misuse could be deadly and expensive, one doesn’t have to insure one’s death machine where proper use would absolutely end up in costly chaos and death. How could something so manifestly illogical and stupid have happened? We all know the answer. But stupidity in the past doesn’t have to be stupidity of the future and for all time!
Quick note: “nothing can be done” is horse shit. Very few problems are truly intractable. Something can always be done. The rule of law, like democracy and religion, is a human invention. We made it all up. We forget that sometimes. What we make up, we can change. All it takes is the willpower to overcome the resistance we’ll face. For the record, struggles can be generational. Giving up at every downturn isn’t how struggles work. They’re long haul.
Want to know why no one can sue a gun manufacturer for making the machine that killed their loved one? Because that’s how the law was written – by legislators in league with gun manufacturers who didn’t want to get sued out of business by people with every right to sue them. Are our gun laws written in concrete? Absolutely not. But gun manufacturers and Second Amendment “advocates” want us all to believe it is. Their goal isn’t free or balanced anything, don’t forget. It’s power (and the gobs of money that come with it).
Earlier this year, the Sandy Hook parents won their lawsuit against Remington Arms to the tune of $73 million. They didn’t sue Remington for making the guns that slaughtered their babies, they sued them for how Remington MARKETING their guns. That’s the secret sauce – right there. It’s exactly the angle that every stakeholder in the Uvalde tragedy should take toward Daniel Defense, the company that made AND MARKETED the guns used in the Uvalde Massacre.
Daniel Defense marketed their wares – including their AR15 – this way without an ounce of irony apparently.
For me? For Christmas? It better have come with ammo!
I bet the insurance industry feels about guns the exact same way the banks feel about cannabis. The second cannabis comes off schedule one and the banks can get involved? Look out below! The boom will be supersonic. Consider guns from the insurance industry’s perspective. We’re giving them open access to a massive pool of people who all want to own death machines. Being as they’re motivated by fear, these people are instantly terrible insurance risks because they’ll always react with their hearts and never their heads. That’s a staggering amount of risk to calculate. Considering the amount of gun violence going on (we’ll have to include non lethal property damage in the calculus), the insurance companies will have no choice but to charge their customers huge premiums for coverage. A Uvalde Massacre could wipe out an insurance company in a heartbeat.
If insurance companies calculated gun risk the way they calculated car risk, they’d see risk everywhere guns were or could be. They’d see the myriad ways they might be forced to reach into their pockets and pick up the costs for the chaos their customer caused. Insurance companies want to make profits for their shareholders, not spend money on the victims of their careless clientele.
I admit – gun manufacturers are in a tricky place. They make a product designed to kill and destroy things. If they make good products, they’ll get sued relentlessly because their products work so well. That, in fact, is why they’re protected. So that they don’t get sued. But not getting sued has allowed gun manufacturers to NOT innovate a solution to the problem. Solutions COULD come from the gun manufacturer side. They could put palm and fingerprint readers on their guns and render then unusable if someone other than the owner has them in hand. That’s just for starters. Except the gun manufacturers don’t want to. And that’s where they want it to end.
Those bastards deserve to be sued! Or worse. I say “hoist every gun manufacturer on their own corrupt petard!” And, I say tax those who’ve profited the most from selling their stuff in and to America especially gun manufacturers. While we’re at it, let’s tax every penny of profit gun makers make.
At the very least, we owe it to ourselves to put all that money into a fund that will help pay for all the death and destruction guns always bring.