Stopping the Next Predatory Lawsuit

"Guns must become the next tobacco." So says the nation's leading gun control organization, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. What the gun control group means is that the same predatory legal tactics that have produced multi-billion settlements between the states (including Vermont) and the tobacco industry are now to be used against the nation's firearms industry.

Like tobacco, firearms are politically incorrect among the nation's liberal elite. But unlike the use of tobacco, which is demonstrably harmful to the user and entitled to no special legal status, the ownership of firearms has a powerful history of explicit constitutional protection. Firearms were seen by the Framers of the Federal and Vermont constitutions as the people's indispensable means of resisting tyranny. That's why they wrote the Second Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights, and Article 16th of Vermont's Bill of Rights: "the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State."

Of course this doesn't matter to predatory trial lawyers and their willing partners in governments. Having pocketed enormous legal fees from extorting the tobacco industry, the trial lawyers (many of them the same ones) are going after the next pot of gold. Already four cities (Chicago, New Orleans, Miami and Bridgeport) have filed huge liability lawsuits against the firearms industry. The purpose of these far fetched suits is, plainly, to cripple an industry despised by liberal opinion, while not incidentally making a bunch of politically generous trial lawyers even richer. The racket works just like it did against tobacco. A dozen law firms pony up $100,000 each to underwrite the venture. Then they show up at state capital and city hall, offering to bring suit against the targeted industry in the name of state or city.

The state or city doesn't have to put up any litigation costs. If the lawyers win, they get a huge chunk of the settlement. If they don't, it costs the taxpayers nothing. What attorney general or progressive mayor could resist such a sweet deal?

Attorney General Bill Sorrell, strongly backed by Gov. Dean, jumped at such a deal when tobacco was the target. The two of them even persuaded the 1998 legislature to enact a special law stripping the tobacco industry of its legal defenses in court, certainly the most ethically shabby performance in this state in a long time. Last month the Georgia legislature passed a bill prohibiting Georgia cities from getting in on this squalid little game. Similar legislation sponsored by eleven Senators headed by Sen. Julius Canns (R-Caledonia) has been the subject of a Senate Judiciary hearing in Montpelier. The less restrictive Vermont bill (S. 32) simply says that neither the attorney general nor a city or town can get into a civil liability suit against the firearms industry without first getting permission from the General Assembly.

Sorrell doesn't like this at all. He thinks it violates the "common benefits" clause of the Constitution for the legislature to limit the kind of cases that can be brought by an officer (him) created and financed by the legislature. Of course, last year Sorrell didn't mind singling out the tobacco industry for an uncommonly negative benefit when he knew that would guarantee a cheap victory for his own lawsuit. Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, newly re-elected, is also strongly opposed to any legislation that would limit the litigation deals he might want to make.

The partisans of this latest version of legal extortion against a politically incorrect industry have no intention of stopping with firearms. Yale Prof. Kelly Brownell is licking his lips over suing McDonald's for selling burgers. Caffeine is high on the hit list. The New York City Anti-Dairy Coalition says that "milk products, like tobacco, are an enormous threat to the health of both children and adults." Sorrell is unlikely to sue the dairy industry, but he has pointedly refused to rule out a suit against firearms or anything else.

It is time to call a halt to this whole contemptible business. If a defective gun blows up in a state trooper's hand, sure, the state should sue for damages. But the use of the predatory lawsuit to victimize a politically disfavored industry ought to offend every fair minded person. At the very least, the representatives of the people ought to pass judgment on the ethics and merits of such a suit before attorneys general and mayors succumb to the trial lawyers' big money temptations.

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March 1999