Tuesday, October 25, 2005

What, like you've never lost 238 guns?

So last week Congress passed the immunity for negligent gun dealers act, which we covered earlier.

Today the Atlanta Journal Constitution has a great editorial on it, love the imagery in the lead.

OUR OPINIONS: A bullet in our hearts
By protecting gun makers from civil liability lawsuits, Congress has put industry rights before human life

Congress swaddled the gun industry in a blanket of legal immunity last week and left victims of gun violence shivering in the cold.

In a vote of 283 to 144 on Thursday, the House joined the Senate in awarding firearms manufacturers far-reaching protections from civil liability lawsuits that no other industry enjoys. The bill also includes the extraordinary provision that the immunity apply retroactively to lawsuits already under way.

That includes the suit filed by the family of Danny Guzman, an innocent passerby shot to death on Christmas Eve in 1999 in Massachusetts. The family is suing because security at Kahr Arms --- a gun manufacturing plant in Worcester run by the son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon --- was so lax that an employee with a criminal record walked out with new guns that carried no serial numbers. One of those guns was used to take Guzman's life.

Apparently, guns go missing on a regular basis from dealers and makers. When federal agents ordered an inventory of the Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Wash., where the infamous Beltway snipers obtained their deadly rifle, they learned that 238 weapons were "missing" from the shop's inventory.