REVIEW & OUTLOOK
California Deamin'
The state Supreme Court shoots down a bogus gun lawsuit.
You know you're in trouble when the folks out in California start making sense. Especially on an issue that mixes assault weapons and trial lawyers. But sanity prevailed this week, and that's news in itself.
We refer to Monday's decision by the California Supreme Court that a Miami-based gun manufacturer could not be sued because a murderer used two of its semiautomatic pistols. Brought by the families of the victims of a deranged businessman who in 1993 went on a shooting spree in a San Francisco skyscraper, the suit was originally thrown out by a superior court judge. Two years later, however, a state appellate court reinstated the suit, becoming the first in the nation to rule that gunmakers could be held civilly responsible for the criminal use of their weapons. Once again, California appeared on the cutting edge of jurisprudence fashion.
That's why the Court's actual ruling is so devastating for those playing the tort racket. Politically speaking, it was the ideal script. In 1993 Gian Luigi Ferri walked into law offices at 101 California Street in San Francisco and opened fire with two weapons made by Florida-based Navegar; before he took his own life, Ferri--who blamed the law firm for financial misfortunes--managed to kill eight people and injure six others in what proved one of the worst mass shootings in California history. As a personal injury lawyer told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, "It's hard to imagine a more attractive set of facts in a case against a gun manufacturer."
Though the suit was backed by a number of anti-gun lobbies, what was really at stake here was not imposing more restrictions on guns but opening a new vein of litigation for the trial lawyers. The claim was, as the lawyer for the families put it, that Navegar was guilty of "selling to the general public a weapon designed precisely for the use it was put to at 101 California Street." In other words, far from asserting Navegar had promoted a defective product, the implicit contention was that the "defect" was selling a legal product to the general public.
That's all the more reason to celebrate the court's refusal to twist tort law to settle highly politicized scores that ought to be dealt with either in the legislature or the criminal courts. In the same year that Ferri went on his rampage in San Francisco, a fertilizer bomb planted by terrorists went off in the World Trade Center; and two years later, Timothy McVeigh would also use fertilizer to set off an even more powerful bomb in the Oklahoma City federal building. Result: two separate lawsuits against fertilizer manufacturers. This logic, which is waved into courts constantly, is destructive of respect for the core purposes of a legal system.
The good news is that the plaintiffs' bar has been delivered a major rebuff, at least for the moment. In addition to Monday's ruling from California, New York's highest court in April shot down a similar attempt against gun manufacturers. Alas, mischief is a great deal easier for tort lawyers to initiate than it is for judges, juries and legislatures to sort out. But given the emphasis California's high court's insistence on upholding state law rather than rewriting it, this is one West Coast trend we'd like to see catch on.
