Subscribe! Note: this first appeared in the March 14 RightWisconsin Daily Update.
Dear Readers,
One of the great liberal fantasies that you’ll often hear being promoted is “reasonable restrictions” on gun ownership. When you press liberals on what those reasonable restrictions are and whether or not they would be effective in stopping crime/mass shootings/domestic violence/etc., you quickly discover that most liberals are not interested in “reasonable restrictions” at all.
Their only “reasonable restriction” is to end private gun ownership. Trust me on this. Next time you’re debating a liberal friend of yours about gun ownership, watch how fast the conversation becomes whether or not owning a gun is bad, not how to keep guns from bad people while allowing good people to own guns.
Now they know they cannot just legislate gun ownership away. Michael Kinsley wrote an honest column on this topic years ago for The New Republic back when the magazine had some legitimacy. Kinsley, a gun rights opponent, said the only honest way to implement real gun control would be to eliminate the 2nd Amendment.
If they cannot do something about the demand for guns, perhaps liberals can do something about the supply-side of the equation by going after the gun manufacturers. For years, liberals have tried to go after gun manufacturers in the courts claiming they are responsible for what a person does with the product. The goal is to make gun manufacturing such a financial liability that these manufacturers would have to shut down, the right to keep and bear arms be damned.
If someone uses propane, as the Columbine killers intended to do, to make bombs, no liberal seriously considers going after the propane bottlers in court to argue that a product intended to create heat (even fire) should be held responsible. Nor were they willing to punish fertilizer manufacturers and pressure cooker manufacturers for the explosive use of those products to kill innocent people.
But now the Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that the manufacturer of the AR-15 used in the Sandy Hook massacre can be sued by families of the victims and the survivors of the attack.
“The court ruled that the owner of the Bushmaster rifle brand wasn’t shielded by a 2005 federal law that gives firearm sellers and manufacturers protection from liability claims over gun violence,” the Wall Street Journal is reporting. “The ruling allows the plaintiffs to move forward with their claims that Remington Outdoor Co. violated Connecticut’s law against unfair trade practices by allegedly promoting the rifle as a combat weapon intended for waging war and killing human beings.”
Perhaps every liberal that has recently written about how the AR-15 is a “weapon of war” should have been named in the lawsuit, too, since they wrote what Remington Outdoor is accused of saying about the weapon. And, of course, saying the AR-15 can be deadly is merely stating the facts, even if the case is often overstated.
Unfortunately nothing about this lawsuit addresses the fact that the mass murderer at Sandy Hook Elementary School was able to take the gun from his mother after killing her with a different gun and use the AR-15 rifle, along with other firearms, to kill children and teachers. He was a mentally ill person who should not have been allowed near firearms, yet his mother (who paid the ultimate price for her bad decision) kept the guns anyway. But would we have felt better if he used a hunting rifle, or just the Glock pistol, or some other means of committing mass murder?
So many bad decisions and illegal acts by the killer led up to the mass shooting, yet the gun manufacturer is being sued because “somebody” has to be held responsible if the killer and his mother are dead. This isn’t justice. This is bad public policy masquerading in a lawsuit.
The case will probably proceed to federal court where the courts will probably side with Remington. But gun owners and manufacturers can’t count on that. The Connecticut case was another reminder that a narrow majority on a state Supreme Court can attempt to take away the rights of gun ownership if we’re not vigilant.
Liberals are attempting to remake the Wisconsin Supreme Court into a liberal super legislature. Their goal is to defeat Judge Brian Hagedorn this April and then defeat Justice Dan Kelly next year when the Supreme Court election falls on the same day as the Democratic Presidential Primary for in Wisconsin.
This week the National Rifle Association endorsed Hagedorn in the Supreme Court race. They don’t want another state Supreme Court like the one in Connecticut that will take away individual rights and ignore the Constitutional right to bear arms.
Voters cannot take their 2nd Amendment rights, or any individual right, for granted, as the Connecticut case proves. That’s why all of us, gun owners or not, should vote for Hagedorn on April 2.
James Wigderson
Editor
RightWisconsin
