Author: Elan.Samarin (Page 2 of 5)

Elan Samarin

“Can Guns Be ‘Safe’?”

Every year in the United States, there are hundreds of accounts of people dying or getting severely wounded from accidental gunshots. A cause of this is due to the lack of regulations for safety features for firearms sold in the US. All of these accidents include people from all walks of life, whether it’s a small child who has found a new “toy” to play with or an accident while hunting. By holding firearm manufacturers to a higher degree of safety just like we view our automotive manufacturers, we can prevent these accidental deaths from happening every year. By helping enact new laws where we can make the firearms sold in the US safe for people to use.

Did you know that the United States government requires no safety features new guns produced? This includes the basics, like a locking mechanism that prevents a firearm from being fired accidentally; or indicators which show whether a chamber is loaded from an exterior indictor on the gun to show it. There many types of firearms produced every single day, from a small handgun that’s designed to be carried every day, to a long rifle that’s designed for hunting, and every one of these companies are allowed to build their firearms with as many or as little safety features as the manufacturer desires.

Luckily, there are a few states that do mandate some sort of safety feature on the firearms legally registered in the state. New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, all require these safety features, and all these states apart from New York have an approved list of firearms which are deemed to be safe by these state governments and are permitted to be sold in those states. These firearms are proved to be safe by undergoing a test set up by government officials who proceed to fire the gun and ensure its safety features are operational before going on sale to the public. Any firearm that doesn’t meet these standards will not be able to be sold in that state.

Yet there are some states that do mandate safety features on firearms, it’s clear that gun manufacturers aren’t doing enough as there are still an estimated 430 accidental gun deaths a year in the United States. Manufacturers such as Remington are clearly not playing their role in keeping their customers safe; from 1962 to 2006, Remington sold more than 7.5 million 700 series rifles (a bolt-action hunting rifle). All these rifles had a flaw known to the manufacturer, where under certain conditions, the rifle could just fire by itself without the owner even touching the trigger. This of course led to many lawsuits towards Remington which forced them to create a recall for the 700 series rifle, yet in this recall it was stated that it was completely voluntary for the owner to complete the recall. This meant that not too many people decided to get their rifles repaired, it was estimated that only 25,000 out of the 7.5 million have been repaired so far.

Suing firearm manufacturers due to safety related issues did prove to be effective in some cases. Back in 1997, manufacturers of handguns were being sued as they did not have any safety locks on these guns in order to prevent accidental fire scenarios. This resulted in the accidental shootings of many people including children. All these deaths and lawsuits brought upon the major handgun manufacturers forced them into equipping their handguns with safety locking mechanisms. The cost of the increasing number of lawsuits began to get too expensive for some pistol manufacturers so they decided to add safeties to their handguns in order to help prevent these lawsuits from happening. Occurrences like this don’t happen often as this recorded one happened in 1997 and I could not find anything similar to this afterwards.

All this time it seems that the federal government has not done much to help mandate these safety features for the firearms produced and sold in the US. Due to the vagueness of the 2^nd Amendment, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”, it becomes very difficult to pass laws in order to do with firearms at all due to the very aggressive lobbyist groups such as the NRA (National Rifle Association), and more Republican based states which generally oppose more gun restrictions such as Arizona and Texas. These lobbyist groups, help prevent cases from getting to judges and juries to decide upon.

“The gun lobby insists that these lawsuits are an improper use of the courts to resolve issues that should be decided by legislatures. If this argument justifies blocking suits against the gun industry, then it also would apply to lawsuits against manufacturers and sellers of all kinds of defective products. It is worth noting the hypocrisy of this argument.”

It’s truly baffling to see the lengths that firearm manufacturers are going to in order to prevent change. Some states are even aiding in the prevention of safety mandates being imposed by passing laws that grant immunity for these manufacturers. Laws for immunity for firearm manufacturers were also put in place in multiple states, preventing mandatory safety features on weapons. “Poorly constructed guns can fire even when the trigger hasn’t been pulled, or do not fire when the trigger has been pulled. Commonly referred to as ‘junk guns…’”, these firearms are horribly unsafe especially in the hands of the wrong person. If a child even drops one of these “junk guns” on the ground the gun has the possibility of shooting anyone in the room. The industry will be lazy to change as it requires time and money to make firearms safer, this same issue is even seen in automotive manufacturers where they try to leave out safety features for customers until they were mandated by the government to add these features. After the safety features were mandated, vehicles produced were still sold in large volumes and were a lot safer for their owners. Standards like these can be applied to the firearm industry to make firearms safer for people to use and can still be sold in the same volumes they are selling in today. These mandated features are updated often in order to keep automotive manufacturers constantly focused on not only the operation of the vehicles, but the safety of the people using them as well. These safety mandates are required in some states, and it is a great start to helping make firearms safer.

States such as New York, Maryland, and California were able to pass laws in order to mandate safety features and approve firearms to be sold in that state. This is remarkably similar to the automotive industry where California forced automakers to sell only emissions and safety compliant vehicles in their state, so automakers decided it was cheaper to produce the same cars for all 50 states instead of making California specific cars. Legislative pushes like the one seen in the automotive industry could help to be adapted to the firearm industry. The addition of more safety features on a firearm, or any at all is a great deterrent of accidental shootings that very often turn fatal. By being able to keep the weapons that we produce safe for the public to use, we can decrease the number of accidental shootings. People shouldn’t have to suffer rom the negligence of these manufacturers just so they can save some money. Safe firearm sales and usage can really help this nation reduce the number of accidental gun deaths we have every year. By taking a similar initiative by states such as California and Massachusetts on a larger scale, firearm manufacturers will still be able to prosper in the US as long as what they are selling is safe for the people to use.

Works Cited

• Green, Ronald M. “Legally Targeting Gun Makers: Lessons for Business Ethics.” Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1, Jan. 2000, pp. 203–210. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/3857706.
• Henigan, Dennis. “Should Cities Be Allowed to Sue Gun Manufacturers?” Spectrum: Journal of State Government, vol. 72, no. 3, July 1999, p. 20. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=511121735&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
• “Pros & Cons of Gun Violence Research: Gun Safety versus Second Amendment Rights.” Congressional Digest, vol. 99, no. 5, May 2020, p. 30. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=142699365&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
• William F. Godbold IV, Constitutional Law—Shooting Blanks: Smart Gun Mandates and their Concomitant Constitutional, Regulatory, Public Policy, and Practical Issues, 37 U. ARK. LITTLE ROCK L. REV. 167 (2014). Available at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview/vol37/iss1/7
• Witkin, Gordon. “Childproofing Guns.” U.S. News & World Report, vol. 124, no. 24, June 1998, p. 24. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=710522&site=ehost-live&scope=site.