Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [99]
Judge John K. Moore struck his testimony from the record, calling it inflammatory and prejudicial.
At one point, Beverly Cook, principal of the Atlantic Shores Christian School, took the stand to describe the impact of the shootings on the Farley family. Karen Farley, she said, had been the force that held the family together. It was Cook’s daughter, Jennifer, who spent the second evening after the shooting with Lora wrapping the presents and choosing Karen Farley’s funeral garb. The scene was so wrenching, Cook said, obviously fighting tears, that she was concerned for her own daughter’s mental health, how the trauma would affect her. At one point Cook herself visited the Farley home. “I left physically ill. It wasn’t the same home. It was darker, or I may have perceived it that way. Lora was boiling hot dogs while I helped Will with his schoolwork. It wasn’t alive like it had been. I just thought, this is one night, it’s tearing me up. They have to face this every night.”
On Valentine’s Day she called Bill Farley to check on him before going out to celebrate with her own husband. He was home by himself.
“I feel like Bill was just on automatic pilot for those months afterward,” Cook said. “He’d tell me he was fine, but I never felt that he was.”
Things got tougher still for the Farleys.
Bill Farley lost his job, found another, and lost that one too. “Within a six-month period,” he told me with a rueful laugh, “I lost two jobs and a wife.”
He told the court, “I really couldn’t imagine my children having a better mother than she was.”
The jury ruled in Farley’s favor, which in itself constituted something of a landmark in the history of firearms legislation, but the jury awarded the family only $105,000. “I was real happy that we won,” Farley said, “there was no question about that. The main thing we were interested in was winning. I was disappointed in the award, and there’s no question about that either. I have no idea what they were thinking about, with the numbers they came up with. I just have no idea what they had on their minds.”
Still, he said, he accomplished his goal. “I definitely got the attention of the gun store. But we didn’t get their attention as well as we had hoped. I gave it my best shot. I felt something needed to be done. We did all we could do.”
In one respect, however, the suit had failed entirely.
Long before the trial Judge Moore cut S.W. Daniel free of the case. In an order sustaining arguments made by S.W. Daniel’s attorneys, Moore wrote that reigning legal theories concerning negligence and product liability dictated that the “plaintiff must first show ‘goods were unreasonably dangerous for [the] use to which they would ordinarily be put or for some other reasonably foreseeable purpose.’ ”
One way to establish unreasonable danger would have been to prove that the gun was defective. But Farley, the judge wrote, had not made any such allegation. And even if he had, he might have had difficulty persuading the court a defect existed.
“Unfortunately,” Judge Moore wrote, “the weapon worked.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE NEW TYRANNY
WHEN ONE FOLLOWS THE PROGRESS OF A single gun from design to homicide, the gaps in existing firearms regulations become painfully obvious. We accomplish little in this country by enacting bans on assault weapons and establishing waiting periods without first addressing the regulatory vacuum that allows manufacturers, distributors, and dealers to shrug off all responsibility for the diversion of guns from legitimate gun-distribution channels. An effective body of firearms laws must recognize an obvious truth obscured thus far by our cultural indulgence in the romance of guns and the effective propaganda of the gun lobby: when guns are easy to get, the wrong people get them easily.
Buying a gun should be the most difficult consumer ritual in America, instead of one of the easiest. Toughening acquisition will not harm legitimate gun owners. The right laws, in fact, can only help them. The right