Why shouldn’t firearm manufacturers be held accountable for the use of their weapons in crimes?

How about camera manufacturers? If someone uses a Nikon camera to create CSAM ("child porn"), should the Nikon company be liable to the victims? Cameras are made, by design, to produce images of what's in front of them, even if that is a child being sexually abused. There have been proposals to require digital cameras to spy on their users to ensure that illegal images can be more easily tracked. If a camera manufacturer refuses to do this, citing "privacy" or "freedom of expression", should the victims of CSAM be able to hold that manufacturer liable?

Some countries, such as the Soviet Union, have restricted the ownership and use of printing equipment, including photocopiers, to deter their use to spread illegal capitalist propaganda. Should photocopier manufacturers be held liable for illegal material that a user photocopies?

Or, sticking to the gun example — How about 3D printer manufacturers? 3D printers can be used to create illegal guns. If you use a 3D printer to illegally create a gun, should the 3D printer manufacturer be held liable?

Alternately, we could stick to considering people liable for the choices that they themselves make, and not for merely creating the opportunity for bad users to make bad choices.

Car manufacturers aren't liable for every incident of drunk driving or every robbery getaway — but they are liable for defects in a car that cause it to go off accidentally. Similarly, gun manufacturers should be held responsible to ensure that guns work properly and do not go off accidentally, e.g. if a loaded gun is dropped.

What about the manufacturers of knives, screwdrivers, automobiles, hammers? Yes, firearms are made to be used to kill, where the others aren’t, but the intention to kill comes from the user.

“Spoons made me fat”
Sorry for the low effort reply, but I look at it as simple as that. People often want to find anything other than themselves to blame for their poor choices. Guns may make it easier to make poor choices (arguable), but it’s also hard to eat soup with a butter knife.

If firearms manufacturers are to be held liable, what would be the reasoning to also not hold vehicle manufacturers liable in the use of their product in criminal acts?

Vehicles are probably used in just as many crimes as guns are, I imagine, with vehicular manslaughter, running vehicles through protests and crowds, etc.

I can't see a logical reason to target one specific product over others when there are legitimate uses for them (i.e. hunting).

For the same reason we don't hold car manufacturers accountable for the use of cars in crimes. Or knife makers, or brick makers, or (insert item here). That being said, I'm very pro regulation, and I think guns should be treated exactly like cars. Insurance is required, licensee, that is required to be renewed every 5 years, training, and regular inspections are not too much to ask for a dead item that's sole purpose is intended to kill.

You can legally kill someone in a self defense situation so just because guns are designed to kill doesn’t make them different from another product that can be used illegally.

Cars can be used to kill people illegally and we don’t hold the manufacturer responsible.

IMO holding manufacturers responsible would just lead to a legal mess and a waste of court time/resources. I’d rather have better background checks, and other limits on gun purchases.

I would support this if there was evidence that manufacturers were knowingly (or purposefully not doing due diligence) selling to distributors who weren't following the rules or were somehow pressuring distributors to bend the rules to sell more (conspiracy). Otherwise its really on the distributors to be doing background checks, adhering to waiting periods, and using proper discretion. If we want less guns around then there need to be legal limits on sales and ownership, and those limits need to be enforced.

Firstly, I hate guns and wish they were far more tightly controlled.

But even I don’t think holding manufacturers responsible for crimes is a good way to go about that. Guns do have legitimate uses.

Should we hold auto manufacturers responsible for a pedestrian who’s hit by a drunk driver? How about we put the workers who built the road in jail, too.

This kind of overreaching liability litigation is why we can’t have quite a lot of good things in this country anymore. We can’t babyproof every aspect of our society.

Prefacing with my context here: I'm not a gun supporter. I'm also not an anti-gun advocate. But I wouldn't lose any sleep over a revocation or heavy restriction on the 2nd amendment.

That being said, I would not in any way support a law that held weapons manufacturers legally liable for the actions of their customers using their products without at least one of the following three factors being true:

1. The product, in itself, has no legitimate purpose or function other than one that is harmful to its user, illegal, or infringes upon the rights of others. (I agree guns are inherently destructive and primarily intended to end the life of a person or creature, but there are legitimate and legal situations where such destruction is legal and even necessary. Self defense and hunting being the primary legitimate uses, marksmanship a secondary one.)

2. The manufacturer is verifiably and willfully propogating non-legitimate uses of their product in a way that is inherently harmful to its user, illegal, or infringes upon the rights of others.

3. The manufacturer is grossly negligent in their business practices or sales in a way that they could directly have prevented with reasonable due diligence that results in the use of their product that is inherently harmful to its user, illegal, or infringes upon the rights of others.

The reason I think that this should be the case is that nobody should be held to account for actions that they did not take, are not promoting and could not have reasonably expected or prevented on a case by case basis. Just to illustrate the problem with holding the manufacturer responsible with a blanket liability, simply due to their production of a product with which a crime was committed, the buck wouldn't stop at the gun manufacturer. The gun companies buy products from vendors to produce their products and support their factories. Those vendors knowingly sell to the gun manufacturers. Would they not also be responsible to the ultimate products that were used in a crime? Not just the companies that sell their metals and hardware used in the gun assembly, but their tools, their work equipment, their consumables like their vending machines and water. All of those things play a part in the production of guns. Government employment grants and subsidies for business also mean that the US, state and local governments are in part responsible for their production as well. And we as tax payers and voters ultimately are responsible as well then.

No, legal liability is and always should be a matter of willful actions and/or gross negligence. Something like a manufacturer knowingly and intentionally selling directly/indirectly to a criminal organization/cartel. Or them not taking their due diligence to make sure that their client is a reputable retailer, not, in fact, a criminal organization or supplying one. Or running ads that seem to be inducing people to buy their guns to be used for armed robbery, intimidation or murder. All of those things are and/or should be criminal and they should be legally liable as such. But simply producing a weapon is not ultimately enough to hold them responsible for any eventual criminal use of that weapon.

Because it sets a precedent that has ludicrous outcomes where the manufacturers of any product that are used for wrong are liable for the damages caused by their use and suddenly nobody wants to manufacture screwdrivers any more. PC manufacturers are now responsible for the actions of hackers and so no more pc manufacturing, auto manufacturers are now responsible for vehicular homocides so no more auto manufacturers, etc, etc.

Imagine if this applies to other tools, like hammers.

Should the manufacturer of the 5 lbs MurderSpike SkullBleeder with night camouflage handle, extra inset bone crackers and instashatter blood flow accelerator head (r)(TM), licensing games and movies to show people murdering each other gloriously with their hammer... be held responsible if by some off chance some person ends up murdering someone with it??? It's ludicrous.

Are you looking for an answer to a question, or are you looking for a debate?

At any rate, reducing the utility of an item to what it's "lowest performance" should be to lower it's ability to harm for non-intended uses is asinine. Who sets the limits? Does a knife need to be razor sharp? I can cut a lot of things with a dull knife and some time. It would pose less danger to you if all knives I had access to were purposefully dull. To prevent me from procuring an overly sharp knife, make the material strong enough to cut foods, but brittle enough to not be one overly sharp. Knives, after all, we're made to stab, cut, and dissect a wide arrange of materials, flesh included. This specific design poses limitless danger to you, and needs to be considered when manufacturing these tools.

Guns are not majorly sold specifically to kill people, in the grand scheme of things. Hunting is probably the largest vector of volume gun sales in the US. How do you design a weapon that can be useful for hunting, but ineffective at killing a human? They all possess the innate ability to do so, but so does even the smallest pocket knife or kitchen knife.

I'm also a big gun control advocate, so I'm not defending anything I like. The failings of US gun control are squarely on the idea that everyone should possess a gun until they prove they shouldnt; it's reactive policy. Active gun control would limit who can possess a gun from the start to those that will only use it for "appropriate" reasons.

It makes a lot more sense to require insurance, like a vehicle.

In the US at least, you cannot sue manufacturers of legal products unless there is defect or negligence. Firearms are legal products and there are many legal uses of them in the US.

If the product is defective in someway such as it discharges in a manner that isn't intended, they'd have to recall that product or be subject to liability. They are not liable for the deliberate misuse of their otherwise legal product, that's on the end user.

Happy to see some good replies here. Yes, it would mean that we'd need to hold car makes responsible for DUIs, Cutco responsible for knife attacks, even baseball bat manufacturers for violent attacks done with baseball bats.

It could also hold companies responsible even if they aren't actively manufacturing the dangerous item anymore; for example, let's say that Smith & Wesson stops manufacturing guns. Their guns will still be out in the hands of folks, and they will still be held accountable for the violence.

Edit: To respond to this:

Guns were made, by design, to be effective and efficient at the ending of human lives. Using the firearms in the way they were designed to be used is the primary difference for me

At a very basic level, guns are designed to, I would argue, send a bullet somewhere. If the gun reliably fails to do so (i.e. it jams constantly), or inappropriately deploys the bullet (i.e. it explodes in your face, shoots backwards at the shooter, or is wildly inaccurate), then I could see why the manufacturer could be held responsible, since the product isn't doing what it's supposed to do.

You already answered your own question with the car analogy. Notwithstanding all the rest of it, guns are inherently dangerous. There's no way to make them "safe," like removing the points from lawn darts. Gun manufacturers would have a conga line of ambulance-chaser lawyers following them around 24/7 seeking a payday every time someone so much as scratched themselves with the rear sight while cocking their own pistol.

If you think American citizens like their guns, let me tell you this: The American government really, really, really likes their guns. They want to have all the guns and if they had their way you would have none. But the problem is, they buy all their guns from private manufacturers, just like us. If gun manufacturers were liable for what idiots did with their products (arguably including, but realistically probably not including the various police and governmental forces in the US) they'd all be bankrupt tomorrow. And then what? The cops and military would have to buy all their guns from some other country.

Arms production could theoretically be nationalized, but realistically in America it won't be, either, because everyone in American politics is really against that sort of thing.

Permanently Deleted

The question is one of negligence calculus, aka The Hand Formula.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_negligence

I would state the question this way: should a gun maker have a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure the ultimate purchaser will not use it in a crime?

The concept of negligence calculus comes from a case involving what steps a mariner must take to ensure their boat does not breakaway from its mooring and smash the whole marina to all to shit?

The rule was stated:

[T]he owner's duty, as in other similar situations, to provide against resulting injuries is a function of three variables: (1) The probability that she will break away; (2) the gravity of the resulting injury, if she does; (3) the burden of adequate precautions.

A good example is the duty of a railroad to protect people at road crossings.

Is it enough to have a policy that conducters blow the whistle? Must the railroad ensure that there are gates, lights, and bells, at every crossing? If it is a blind intersection, must the conducter send the engineer down to the roadway to manually wave off any traffic?

1. The probability of the train causing an injury depends on how busy the intersection is.

2. The gravity of train injuries is very serious; I've seen it, they chop you up like a fish.

3. The burden of blowing a whistle is minimal, if it's a remote crossing that might be an adequate precaution; the burden of installing and inspecting crossing devices such as bells and gates is massive, but again the gravity of injuries resultant from trains is catastrophic.

The evidence a plaintiff puts forth in a civil lawsuit, to a jury of peers, in public, is to say: this is the extent of my injury, these are the circumstances in which I became injured, and this is what the defendant did or did not do to cause the circumstances. The question for the jury is, was the defendant's conduct reasonable?

The thing with guns, not unlike trains, is that second part of the equation: that the nature of resultant injuries are so serious, such as classrooms full of dead kids so blown apart by bullet that it takes DNA identify the bodies, or shopping plazas strewn with dead families who bled out trying to crawl away. You must think of all the injuries, not just the primary victims. The taxpayers of Newtown, Conn. had to build a new elementary school, paying workers' comp. benefits to town employees spouses and kids that could go on for decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

The burden of prevention could be comparatively minimal. Doing a private background check on every purchaser is minimal. Insurance companies do it for every policy they write and every claim they adjust. And with data analytics it is easier than ever. Family status, work status, gun and ammo buying habits are apparently the major predictors of whether someone is likely to commit a serious gun crime. Here's another example: credit scores are apparently a better predictor of driving risk than driving history!

These questions of risk can be analyzed and can be apportioned.

In my view, gun owners and makers should be liable in tort for damages caused by their weapons. This is a matter of the intended use of the product and the privity of contract between the manufacturer and the end purchaser, no different than product liability law. People injured by guns should be able to bring the manufacturer before a civil jury and say: these are my injuries, these were the circumstances in which they happened, these are the steps the manufacturer took or did not take to prevent it, and let a jury decide if the steps were reasonable based on the probability that the harm would result and the extent of the burden of avoiding it.

It would be a lot of risk to manufacturers. If found liable, they would be able to sue the end user for contribution, just as in a product liability case; that's called subrogation.

You can get gun insurance right now but it's not required, which makes gun owners self insured. Gun makers could get business liability insurance, too; I think most of them self insure these risks, now, though, because they are immune from such lawsuits, that's why Remington went bankrupt after the suit against it for Sandy Hook went forward, and it was non or under insured.

If end users were required to carry insurance, the risk of damages is on those insurers, which it bear voluntarily in exchange for premiums. This relieves the manufacturers, the end users, and the public. Right now, the communities bear the entirety of the risk, gun owners can buy whatever guns they want, however many they want, and when they're mental facilities eventually decline to the point of the violent instability, they have no responsibility beyond their net worth.

And, as a matter of principal, even right now, nobody can claim to be a responsible gun owner if they are non or underinsured for damages caused by their gun.

You said it yourself when you compared cars to guns. Can’t really have it both ways by holding some manufacturers liable for the unintended uses of their products and giving others a pass. You could argue the same for knifemakers, baseball bat makers, etc. They’re both fairly good at causing traumatic injury or death. Cars OTOH are designed to prevent injuries or death as much as possible, even if they hit a pedestrian.

That said, you are absolutely correct about guns purpose being to deliver injury or death at a distance. That’s why they exist in the first place. No equivocation can change that, I don’t care if people target shoot with them or whatever, they’re killing machines.

Problem is that guns are a right in the US. There is absolutely no way on this earth that the people who wrote that right as an amendment had any clue of what guns would turn into, how they would be politicized, how people would have personal arsenals, or how much death they would cause among the population. Their shortsighted brevity when writing that amendment has killed tens of thousands of people every year.

Why shouldn't Microsoft be held accountable for everything illegal people do on Windows? Why shouldn't pharmacists be held responsible for prescription drug abuse? Why shouldn't a social media website be held accountable for users infringing copyright? If something is used illegally and the person who made it is held accountable, that doesn't really make sense even if you dislike the thing. For example, I hate YouTube, but it doesn't make sense for them to be held accountable for users posting copyright infringing content.

What I don't like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just an unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn't trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren't trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it's a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.

Because they have a lot of friends who make laws. So coincidentally, the laws benefit them.

I use guns to shoot paper. Your argument for what guns are created for is flawed. My gun is not created for the ending of human lives.

My gun was made to end paper from being completely without holes.

Are you saying that my use of the gun is wrong? Or am I allowed to have a gun that is not used for killing?

-Signed a bleeding heart lefty with a gun

You'd like the film Runaway Jury.

I'm not sure "this was used in a crime" is the sort of thing that can be legislated or sued over, if that makes sense. I think the more reasonable standard for successfully adjudicating criminality is people's or their constructs (corporations) acting negligently in the production, marketing, sales, and distribution of "things that can be dangerous" or "things that can be used to commit crimes."

The huge issue most of the responses in this thread have is that they say "you can't sue someone for making something just because the end user did a bad thing with it" oversimplification of how basically the entire world works.

The only reason manufacturers of anything have plausible deniability on being partially responsible for crimes committed with their wares is the strong likelihood that they could not have known the end user would do that.

If I hand craft a knife on and sell it on the Internet to someone who sends me a message asking "hey is this knife good for stabbing my bitch ex?" there's a decent chance a good lawyer could get me for negligence at a minimum and possibly accessory to a crime. Because a reasonable person might conclude that knife would be used for a crime.

There's a reason a Remington settled the lawsuit from the Sandy Hook families for $75 million: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/us/sandy-hook-shooting-settlement-with-remington/index.html

They were never going to be liable for making the gun (particularly since gun manufacturers have a special law protecting them). But they clearly determined there was a decent chance they'd lose in court regarding how they marked, sold, and distributed guns, so they decided shelling out $75,000,000 was a better business decision.

If there's a company making screwdrivers out there and they're aware there's a screwdriver murder problem in a city and they manufacture and distribute their screwdrivers to that city and put up billboards and take out magazine ads glorifying how good their screwdrivers are in a fight... they ought to be liable. Not because a screwdriver can be used to hurt people, but because they should reasonably be aware that in that city their screwdrivers had a good chance to be used to hurt somebody.

Because the manufacturer didn't use the gun in a crime. If anything, the only person who could be responsible is the seller of the firearms, and even then it's unlikely that they could be sued as, again, their not the ones who used the gun in a crime, unless that crime is selling to a minor or someone who isn't allowed to own a gun.

One, people can make their own guns, it's not that hard, and secondly, criminals can and do steal stuff. They don't care about commiting extra crimes, they are already going to jail if caugh. All this will do is to make it harder for non-criminals to obtain guns for hunting or self defense.

Instead of the alternative? Holding people responsible for how they use a tool? I'm very pro common sense gun law. But I also recognise that education and training (throughout a lifetime, not just a one and done) makes more sense and does more good. What is the supposed outcome of holding gun manufacturers accountable? What does that look like? They get fined? Who in that organisation takes the criminal charge in a murder where A Smith and Wesson was used? The CEO? The engineering team?

If you'd said you want to dismantle gun lobbies? I would agree. If you had said you wanted to mandate background checks, licensing, and mandatory 2-3 year training for each class of firearm on the market, I'd agree. But I have a lot of questions about who would be to blame in what amounts to a faceless capitalist organisation. What if to combat this trend they decided to hire someone specific to the role of taking any legal blame in the event they were sued or criminally charged? Could they hire a death row inmate to be that person?

Yeah. They're obviously 'co-liable' once they deliberately design something to be dangerous to people.

They should be forced to make the guns harmless to humans and animals and then I'd be okay with it.