The Gun Industry, By the Judges's Number's

The Gun Industry, By the Judges's Number's

We told you yesterday about Judge Jack Weinstein’s decision in a New York City court to allow a lawsuit by the city against gun manufacturers. Today, the New York Daily News prints a rundown of the reasoning that Judge Weinstein used to make his decision. Lots of interesting stuff in here.

The United States leads the world in the number of people and in the number of children who die and are injured each year by guns. The yearly toll of several thousand persons killed compares to no more than a few hundred per year in every other industrialized country. A teenager in the United States is more likely to die from a gunshot wound than from all natural causes combined.

Firearms are by far the preferred method of murder in New York City, and are used in approximately 60% of the murders committed each year. In 1996, 652 people were murdered with a firearm in New York City; in 1997, 465 were murdered with guns; in 1998, 375; and in 1999, 391.

Approximately double the number of persons are injured by the criminal use of firearms with over 2,000 criminal shooting victims reported each year in New York City.

Clearly there’s a problem. And he even holds the gun industry responsible for those problems, in direct contrast to the recently passed gun immunity lawsuit bill.

According to a recent ATF study, just 1.2% of dealers accounted for over 57% of the crime guns traced to current dealers in 1998. … A congressional study of ATF data found that an extraordinary proportion of crime guns were purchased from the same”high crime” gun dealers. The same 137 dealers were the source of more than 34,000 crime guns between 1996 and 1998.

***

Defendants produce, market and distribute substantially more handguns than they reasonably expect to sell to law-abiding purchasers. They oversupply states with weak handgun controls and restrictions, such as certain southern states along the I-95 corridor, with substantially more handguns than they know or should know will be purchased by legitimate purchasers in those states.

***

Over 84% of the crime guns recovered in New York City come from out of state. Of these crime guns, the top source states were Virginia (414), Florida (329), Georgia (282), North Carolina (268), South Carolina (224), Pennsylvania (159), Ohio (136), Alabama (106) and Texas (99).

Handguns manufactured, imported or distributed by defendants are acquired in states and cities where gun regulations are lax, diverted to the illegal market in New York, and used to cause injury, death or the threat thereof to residents of the City of New York.

There it is, by the numbers. The gun industry, in major part, is responsible for a large number of the gun crimes that are being committed around the country. By flooding the country with handguns and making it easy for them to find their way into criminal hands, the gun industry is all but aiding and abetting the gun violence that wracks our country every day. Weinstein’s decision is important, because it’s the first step in making sure the gun industry’s actions are brought to justice.
---------------snip----------------------
<http://www.gunguys.com/?p=422>

A salute to this brave judge and and Mayor Bloomberg for taking on the gun lobby thugs.

ought to be the focus of attention.

Defendants produce, market and distribute substantially more handguns than they reasonably expect to sell to law-abiding purchasers.

It amounts to saying that the defendants are not acting in a reasonable manner and by implication are not reasonable people.

Who can honestly say how many handguns an industry could reasonably expect to sell to law-abiding purchasers? That line of thought presumes that one can say how many potential law-abiding purchasers are out there and how many on average each could "reasonably" be expected to own. Here are a couple of things we DO know: 1) A MAJORITY of US households own no firearms at all, 2) There is no legal limit to the number of handguns a person may own. Therefore one could legitimately advance an argument that there is a large untapped legitimate market for handguns, and the gun industry is acting in a reasonable manner in trying to sell as many of its legal products as the market will bear.

People who make straw purchases, and dealers who KNOWINGLY abet them are breaking the law and should be prosecuted. People who comply with the law should be left alone.