How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled

rubyvroom:

Here’s how much gun safety matters in America:

no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.

To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.

How bad are Taurus guns? Read the article for depictions of:

• guns firing with the safety on
• guns firing while holstered
• guns firing while holstered with the safety on
• guns firing when dropped
• guns fucking exploding into pieces and destroying someone’s hand

Here’s a video of a Taurus handgun firing just by being shaken, no finger on the trigger

A car with this many safety flaws would be banned immediately, but these guns are still sold in the US today, because of the overpowered Gun Lobby. 

How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled