gun industry with attempts to make the gun manufacturers and sellers responsible for health costs and related costs because a purchaser has misused the product. Several cities have filed such suits, and the industry has been faced with having to defend themselves against the questionable legal arguments being raised. While it is clear that there is a problem with the dissemination and misuse of guns in our society, politicians are simply finding ways to make business do the job of the police and other governmental entities because they have been unable to develop a workable policy on their own.
In an article some years ago in a legal journal about the issue of liability by handgun manufacturers, Andrew Jay McClurg made the interesting point that all this firepower and all these deaths by handguns has had a devastating effect on the American psyche:
Americans are becoming desensitized to violence and I fear this colors all debate about handguns. Every day, we read horror stories of sleeping children killed by random bullets flying through walls or other innocents gunned down while standing on street corners, yet we do little more than shake our heads and mutter "how awful" (McClurg 601).
This desensitization takes place from childhood. By the age of eighteen, the average American child will have watched more than 200,000 violent acts on television, 40,000 of them murders, and handgun violence is a part of television entertainment and news accounts alike. Some 22,000 people are killed by handguns each year. The public at large has become so inured to this violence that the gun control debate has also become commonplace.
Opposing all gun control measures of any kind is one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation, the National Rifle Association. The NRA was founded in New York State in 1871. In part, this was a response to the problems that had been encountered by many northerners entering the army during the Civ...