Imagine a product that serves no purpose but to kill people and each year causes many deaths. Surely politicians would compete with each other to pass laws to control it. If nothing else, the manufacturer of such a product, which is foreseeably used to murder people, would be held liable. Not, though, if the product is an assault weapon. The federal law banning assault weapons expired in 2004, and another federal law precludes civil liability for gun manufacturers. It is time to re-enact the Federal Assault Weapons Ban and to repeal a federal law adopted in 2005 that protects gun manufacturers from civil liability.
James Holmes allegedly went into an Aurora, Colo., movie theater with an arsenal that included a semiautomatic assault rifle and 6,000 rounds of ammunition. In a very brief time, he shot 70 people and killed 12. This was facilitated by the semiautomatic weapon, which when fired automatically extracts the spent cartridge casing and loads the next cartridge into the chamber, ready to fire again. If Holmes had used a handgun, far fewer would have been hurt or killed before he was stopped.
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