Defective firearms go unchecked

Tens of millions of guns in America share design flaws that put their owners and those around them in unnecessary jeopardy, a four-month Detroit News investigation found.

Firearm manufacturers, long aware of the dangers, have made no concerted, industrywide effort to improve safety.

The News found that many firearm manufacturers ignore technology ? including their own ? that would make guns safer and less apt to accidentally discharge. Internal memos, gun patents and employee depositions show that many of these safety features are cheap, easily installed and have been available for nearly a hundred years.

As you might guess, this isn't an "investigation" so much as it is an editorial... and it isn't an editorial so much as it is a polemic. So far, four separate stories on this theme have been published; more may be on the way. I will be debunking them here. For links to the additional stories, check the sidebar.

The basic premise is that gun manufacturers are somehow at fault for the stupidity of some gun owners who cause accidents with their firearms. The fact is, you would be very hard pressed to find a firearm on the market today that does not have at least one safety device incorporated into its design. Many have several.

But the authors of this piece aren't about to let you start to wonder about the wisdom of their pronouncements. The very first thing you'll see when you open up the link is a picture of a disabled child. The Web doesn't carry the screeching "Save the CHILLLDREN!" sounds in the background, but any decent imagination will suffice to include them, because surely they are there.

Another thing that many people do not realize: firearms accidents are rare in this country. Firearms accidents involving children are extremely rare. Depending on his age, your child is more likely to die from drowning in a swimming pool or from injuries sustained playing football than he is from a firearms accident.

So why do we keep hearing about it? Because it's the only way the news media can keep up the pressure on guns.

In addition, many manufacturers routinely disregard customer complaints and fail to recall guns even after losing or settling lawsuits over faulty, dangerous firearms. Some gun makers go further, using confidentiality agreements as part of legal settlements to conceal problems with their firearms.

Gun manufacturers have strong allies in the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Congress.

Lawmakers have ensured that no federal agency has the power to set safety standards for firearms manufactured in the United States, and that no agency can demand a recall of defective guns. And the NRA, a gun owners lobby group, has used its considerable political clout to help fend off all attempts to impose safety standards for guns.

Actually, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms already regulates the manufacture of firearms. They are under some political restraint, true, because in the past they have been used as tools of anti-gun administrations trying to do a lot more than "regulate". But the fact is, additional "safety standards" for firearms are nothing more than political tools to make firearms more expensive.

How can I know this? Simple: many of the proposed standards include such wise decisions as requiring the use of a metal with a melting point higher than some arbitrary number. Since there aren't any firearms on the market that are actually in danger of melting from extended use, what relationship does this have to safety? Well, you see, it bans guns made from "cheap" material, thus effectively outlawing the infamous "Saturday Night Special" that gun controllers love to talk about.

What they don't realize is that banning cheap firearms will deny the poor the ability to defend themselves effectively -- but that's another issue. My point is that the proposed "safety" standards often have nothing to do with safety.

Want another example? Try the case against Beretta being argued in California (after the original jury returned "not guilty"). The plaintiffs are arguing for a "chamber loaded indicator" as mandatory safety equipment on all firearms -- and in fact that's one of the proposals in this editorial. So what's the problem? The gun used in the California incident that spawned the lawsuit had a chamber loaded indicator already. The plaintiffs claim it was "too small".

The real problem in that case is that the person holding the gun broke the rules of gun safety:

1. Always point the gun in a safe direction.
2. Always assume all firearms are loaded.

Safety features, like those missing from the Bryco pistol that shot Brandon Maxfield, are especially effective in preventing accidents among people with limited knowledge of firearms.

"A large number of children and teen-agers who are killed by other children in unintentional shootings are shot in the face, sometimes between the eyes," said former Guns and Ammo magazine senior editor Whit Collins, a national firearms expert and historian who has testified in dozens of gun defect cases across the country. "That?s because the child with the gun pulls out the magazine and thinks the gun is empty.

"Then they try to scare the other child by pointing the gun right in his or her face and pulling the trigger. They expect to hear a click, but the gun goes off."

Twenty years ago, Philadelphia native Tamika Haines suffered massive brain injuries that left her partially paralyzed on her right side when she was shot in the head by a teen-age friend. Haines was 14 at the time.

The friend, Walter Butler, then 16, removed the clip from the .25-caliber Raven handgun and believed it was empty. But a bullet remained in the chamber.

Butler told police he was kidding around and trying to scare Haines when he pointed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. He never expected the gun to go off.

Can you hear the violins? But aside from the musical accompaniment, we have here a typical "firearm accident". The editorial would like to blame this accident on the manufacturer. I would like to blame this accident on Walter Butler, who deliberately pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger. Guns are not toys; they are intended for purchase and use by responsible adults.

"The reaction of the gun industry is to blame all unintentional shootings on human error and negligence," Collins said. "But part of manufacturing is to assume that human error will occur and find ways to minimize it. We have applied this approach to appliances in the home and cars, why not to a product like firearms that carry such a capacity for catastrophic injury?"

The fact is, there are a huge number of different models of firearms available. All the safety features described in this article are available, on the market, today. If a responsible adult chooses to purchase a firearm without those features and bear the associated risks, it is their choice. Manufacturers should bear liability for their products in the same way as other products -- that is, for actual safety flaws. But just as you cannot sue Chrevrolet for making a car capable of tripling the speed limit, you cannot sue the person who made a firearm because one of their customers was stupid or criminal.