Guns In The Courtroom

When his teenage son was mowed down on the streets of Chicago by a reputed Latin King gang member, Stephen Young was heartbroken. When he learned how the triggerman got the gun, he was furious. The Bryco 9-mm semiautomatic handgun that killed Andrew Young was one of 40 weapons a suburban gun shop sold to a single purchaser. In gun lingo these are "straw buyers," shady middlemen who do a brisk business reselling guns to convicted felons, minors and others with itchy trigger fingers but no legal right to own a gun. "You want to tell me this guy needs 40 guns for self-protection?" asks Young. "The gun industry knows what's going on in the street."

In fact, Young wants to hold the gun industry responsible for it. He is lead plaintiff in a high-profile lawsuit by three Chicago families seeking to make gun companies pay for the violent deaths of their loved ones. The suit spells out what plaintiffs say is a cozy relationship between the gun industry and criminals who use its products. Manufacturers design certain guns to appeal to criminals, the plaintiffs say, like snub-nosed revolvers that can be easily hidden under a shirt. The companies then advertise to criminals with felon-friendly claims, the suit charges, like the boast that the TEC-DC9 assault weapon offers "excellent resistance to fingerprints." And the weapons are distributed to gun shops that wink as straw buyers snap them up and whisk them off to be sold out of car trunks in high-crime neighborhoods.

This Chicago suit is part of a wave of lawsuits against the $2 billion gun industry in which several new legal theories are being tested. In a New York City suit against 60 gunmakers and gun sellers, survivors of victims of gun violence are charging gun companies with distributing weapons in a way calculated to evade gun-control laws. Two California cases are going after the gun industry for making cop-killer bullets and guns that fail to indicate they're loaded when they have a round in the chamber but an empty clip. The families of two people killed in the Jonesboro, Ark., school massacre are preparing a lawsuit against a gunmaker for not including a trigger lock. And the mayors of Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities may sue to recover the cost gun crimes add to city budgets.

To the gun industry, these suits defy established law and basic fairness. Guns are legal to manufacture and safe when used properly. It isn't their fault, the manufacturers say, that criminals buy their products and use them to shoot people. "You don't sue General Motors when someone drives drunk and hurts someone," says Smith & Wesson lawyer Anne Kimball. The gun manufacturers say that going after them distracts from the real problems: crime and social breakdown.

So far, courts have largely sided with the gun companies. Victims of guns that misfire because of a mechanical defect have won some cases, and stores have been held liable for selling guns under wildly unreasonable circumstances. But suits blaming the gun industry when its products are used in crimes or by careless third parties almost always fail. Just this spring a jury cleared a Tennessee company that sold a mail-order MAC-11 assault-pistol kit, the so-called MAC in a sack, used in a sniper killing on the Brooklyn Bridge.