Hi! Probably a stupid question because I don’t know a lot about US law, but why isn’t anyone considering a class action suit against gun manufacturers or something? Isn’t selling powerful weapons to untrained and unstable people like encouraging a blind person to buy and drive a car? Or selling dangerous medication to small children? Or something? To me it’s weird that you can sue because your hot coffee is hot, and yet the gun industry gets away with this continuous slaughter.

plaidadder:

plaidadder:

Because in 2005, shortly after George W. Bush’s reelection, Congress passed a law to protect gun manufacturers from class action lawsuits.

After Las Vegas, This Law Protects Gun Manufacturers

Class action lawsuits had some success in the 1980s and 1990s, so the gun lobby got Congress to pass this fucking thing. 

It may also surprise you to know that the CDC is prevented, by another gun-lobby inspired law, from collecting information on gun violence and tracking it as it would any other epidemic.

Congress also passed an assault weapons ban in 1994. It expired in 2004. Congress has not tried to pass another.

This should give our international members some idea of the extent of the problem. This situation didn’t just happen. The gun industry has spent a lot of money protecting itself, and the NRA has spent a lot of money persuading American citizens that what’s good for the gun industry is good for them. 

I find I have one more thing to say about this.

The reason we don’t regulate guns is that we don’t regulate capitalism.

This comes down to money in the end. The gun industry is behaving no differently from any other industry or corporation: it’s protecting its profits at the expense of human beings. It just happens that in the case of the gun industry, because its products are designed to kill human beings, the human cost is unusually high. 

In a sane country, where it was accepted that sometimes corporate greed has to be curbed for the good of the society, the gun lobby wouldn’t have been allowed to get this powerful. But, that is not where we live. Not since the 1980s and the unholy fusion of evangelical bigotry and antisocial greed that historians call the Reagan Revolution.