Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [113]
However frivolous these arguments seem when juxtaposed with year-end tallies of America’s gun-shot dead, they nonetheless tug resilient strands from that web of beliefs that define America and Americans: the free market, self-determination, the right to keep and bear arms, an armed populace as a check against tyranny.
But reform of America’s firearms regulations will continue. One day a truly rational system of firearms laws will exist, because such a system must exist. It is the only rational course, and for a culture like ours that still prides itself on common sense and rationality, it is an inevitable course. Stranger things have happened in the world. The Soviet Union collapsed. Israel and the PLO settled their feud. A truce was declared in Northern Ireland amid talk of an end to the Troubles. And America at last seemed to have awakened to what doctors and the American Cancer Society had said all along, that tobacco is indeed inherently dangerous, that smokers ought to be isolated, and that tobacco companies ought at last to begin bearing the social costs incurred by smoking.
A similar sea change seemed under way with regard to guns. Gun buy-backs and swaps began to proliferate, providing little direct impact on crime but helping to raise consciousness about guns and their prevalence in America. Major newspapers around the country launched multi-part investigative reports on guns and the gun trade. Grassroots organizations, similar in design and spirit to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, began forming in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And for the first time, large masses of individual citizens began marching for firearm-regulation reform. In Maryland, marchers advanced on Annapolis, the state capital, in support of new gun legislation. In San Francisco, some one hundred thousand people marched down Market Street at the center of the city on the one-year anniversary of Ferri’s law firm rampage. By the fall, grassroots activists were planning a “Silent March” on Washington. They proposed to set down an empty pair of shoes for every man, woman, and child killed with a firearm, and to array these shoes in a single line ending at the Capitol steps. Public service ads, including one featuring President Bill Clinton, began urging a reduction in violence. Granted, no gang leader in South Chicago is likely to pay much attention to such ads, but, like gun buy-backs, they help energize the plasma of public opinion and reinforce the still all-too-novel idea that firearms violence is unacceptable.
Increasingly, victims and gun-control advocates have turned to the courts to try to force the firearms production and distribution network to a higher level of accountability. In the spring of 1994, a civil jury in Texas—a state known for its tolerance of guns—assessed a $17 million penalty against Remington Arms Co. after finding that the company knew of a design defect in one of its rifles, a defect which cost the plaintiff one of his feet. Just over $2 million of the award represented actual damages; the rest were punitive damages. In 1994, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, an affiliate of Handgun Control Inc., went so far as to file a lawsuit against Intratec, alleging the TEC-9 pistol used by Ferri was an unduly hazardous product.
I have often thought that such lawsuits could show the way to the ultimate solution to the problem of limiting the flow of guns. Suppose once again America repealed all its gun laws—but now imagine replacing those laws not with my Life and Liberty Preservation Act, but with a single federal law assigning to gun