Did The Gun Industry Sell Out Its Best Customers?By Andy Barniskis
I am convinced that S.397, the federal legislation recently passed to protect the firearms industry from frivolous civil liability claims, was nothing but industry protectionism, with little or no consideration provided for the protection of the rights of gun owners. From the way it was passed, I suspect a segment of the sporting arms industry received undue benefits at the expense of our individual rights.
In general I do not support government protection of industries, but not all such protection is bad. Protection of an industry from competition is almost always bad. Protection of an industry from abuses of its genuine rights (which are extensions of the rights of the individuals who own it or benefit from it) is always good. The recently passed protection for the firearms industry would seem to fall in the latter category, but the non-germane, anti-gun amendments contained in it call to question the purity of the motives of its more strident supporters. There was no need for anti-gun amendments to be included, yet the loudest industry lobbyists insisted that only the bill containing those features be passed.
There is reason to expect the enacted law to be challenged on constitutional grounds. Those grounds could be built around the law's too-narrow focus on protecting only one industry. Such a challenge, if successful, will leave us without protection for our firearms industry, but with the law's anti-gun provisions still firmly in place.
As suggested by Angel Shamaya, founder and former owner of KeepAndBearArms.com, protection of the rights of the firearms industry should have been approached from a much broader, constitutional rights foundation, acknowledging the Second Amendment and other recognized civil rights. To make an analogy, the federal civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not address industries in a piecemeal way. A law wasn't written to integrate only lunch counters, or only buses, where civil rights workers were challenging segregation with their sit-ins. The 1960s civil rights legislation banned segregation for all public accommodations.
Today, a properly crafted law should have provided protection for all industries. A true, constitutional, industry-protecting law would have protected not only the firearms industry from frivolous, predatory, and politically motivated civil suits, but also the baseball bat industry, the knife industry, and the blunt-or-pointy-instrument-in-general industry. Now that a rights-violating tactic, the abuse of tort law, has been utilized to attempt a political end (the elimination of private firearms ownership), it will surely be used again, to target other industries.
The most suspicious thing suggesting chicanery on the part of the sporting arms industry centers on that there was no need for the enacted law to contain any anti-gun provisions at all. It passed by a margin of almost two-to-one (283 - 144). Our high-powered gun rights lobbyists, who tell us they have a solid handle on the pulse of congress, had to know that no compromises were necessary to achieve their goal of industry protection. In the past, congress had shown no enthusiasm for mandatory trigger lock legislation. And, parallel legislation that existed in the form of HR 800, a "clean" bill that contained no gun control provisions, had nearly as many cosponsors as the number of congressmen who voted for the tainted bill. One could be led to believe that both the industry and its paid lobbyists wanted a bill that contained a mandatory trigger lock provision, that would provide congressmen cover from the wrath of gun owners when they voted for it.
And that is exactly what I am suggesting.
I happen to love the products of our sporting arms industry, but I am under no illusions that many of the people in that industry aren't as avaricious and willing to trade our rights for profits as the profiteers in any other industry. We've already had the experience of one gun manufacturer coming out fore-square for banning foreign semi-automatic weapons - of the kind that competed with the semi-automatic weapons his company made and then having his image rehabilitated by the NRA, following a large cash donation. We also have seen the spectacle of Smith & Wesson undertaking to impose privatized gun control on its network of dealers, requiring them to place restrictions on sales of not only S&W firearms, but all firearms.
For several years I've observed some of our more successful self-promoters in the gun rights industry occasionally speaking kindly of the potential virtues of safe storage laws, giving reasons no better than "They won't hurt very much, and they might provide you with liability protection," and "Supporting such laws would give gun owners a more responsible image in public." Most of the time I was willing to write off such silly opinions as abject stupidity, or just insanity. After the passage of S.397, I now suspect the unthinkable - that someone in the sporting industry has been paying off some of our highest profile gun rights lobbyists to sell us out. I can think of no other rational reason for industry lobbyists' adamant support of the recently passed travesty, at the expense of a viable, parallel bill that contained no gun controls.
It would seem the time has come to watch our supposed friends just as closely as we've been watching our enemies.
http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=10206
