TOP STORY: GUNS AND JUSTICE: Bereaved women take on the gun industry

c. 1996 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ In a cramped and cluttered Wall Street office, there is the female attorney with a hair-trigger temper and the passion for a longshot. Fifty-one stories below, in neighborhoods across the length and breadth of this city, are wives and mothers, each of whose lives was transformed in […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ In a cramped and cluttered Wall Street office, there is the female attorney with a hair-trigger temper and the passion for a longshot. Fifty-one stories below, in neighborhoods across the length and breadth of this city, are wives and mothers, each of whose lives was transformed in a flash from the barrel of a gun. And in the quiet of a Connecticut suburb is a former Smith & Wesson executive who now spends his days at home caring for his grammar school child.

Their lives will soon converge in a Manhattan courtroom. There the lawyer, Elisa Barnes, hopes to persuade a federal judge to let her put the firearms industry on trial for failing to do more to stem the epidemic of gun violence.


It is an epidemic that has claimed among its hundreds of thousands of victims the sons and husbands of the 20 women plaintiffs in the case.

And, it is Robert Hass, the former Smith & Wesson vice president, whose decision to testify against the industry he served makes this case hard to dismiss as just some gun-hating women’s flight of fancy.

Armed with Hass’s affidavit, Barnes argues that the gun manufacturers know that their method for distributing guns, while legal, in effect, “supplies a vast and uncontrolled black market, which puts guns into the hands of underage shooters.”

Federal Judge Jack Weinstein will decide in September whether to dismiss the case or let it proceed to trial. If Barnes and the women she represents clear that legal hurdle, they may make legal history.

“This is a new case based on an old principle. It is different from other firearms cases,” said Barnes.

For two decades, lawyers have pursued product liability litigation against individual gun manufacturers. But Barnes is suing all of the nation’s 46 gun makers, as well as a number of trade associations representing the gun industry, charging them with collective negligence.

The industry produced slightly more than 3 million handguns in 1994. There are 140,000 federally licensed gun dealers in the United States, but only about 19,000 gun dealers actually operate from stores. The remainder sell weapons from their homes, at gun and antique shows and other venues.


Barnes contends that the gun industry could take steps to reduce the number of guns going into an illicit market by requiring distributors to sell only to gun dealers with bona fide stores.

The gun industry thinks Barnes’ case is laughable. Holding gun makers responsible for gunfire deaths, the industry says, is like holding General Motors responsible for drunken driving deaths. They say there is no legal precedent that would hold an industry liable for manufacturing and distributing a nondefective legal product.

“I am surprised it has gotten this far. All other courts have dismissed cases like this quickly. I would be surprised if it went to trial,” said attorney Anne Kimball of the Chicago law firm of Wildman, Harrold Allen & Dixon, which represents five gun manufacturers including Smith & Wesson, the world’s largest manufacturer of handguns.

Kimball notes that Barnes’ claim against Smith & Wesson involves a handgun that was made 26 years ago and legally sold and possessed for 20 years until it was stolen from a home in Mill Valley, Calif., four years ago. Within months, the gun was used to kill New York resident Katina Johnson’s husband, David, a book editor. (Barnes said she is still researching the history surrounding that gun.)

“She wants Smith & Wesson to be responsible for that murder,” Kimball said.

Richard Feldman, director of the Atlanta-based American Shooting Sports Council, said the real culprit in cases of gun violence is plain _ “the person who pulled the trigger.”

Guns, he said, aren’t made to kill people. “Most guns are used for sport, for punching paper in a target. In fact, most guns are used for fun.”


But, of course, guns are also used to kill.

“A lot of kids are packing (carrying guns),” said Gail Fox, of Jamaica, N.Y. “Some for just the fun of it, a fad, like sneakers or having the best beeper.”

Fox is one of the plaintiffs in the case. Two years ago, her 16-year-old son finished his homework and lit out for a friend’s house before dinner. He was gunned down within steps of his front door. She ran out to see him “on the sidewalk bleeding from the head. Police said he got caught in the crossfire.”

“He wanted to be an architect. He wanted to build,” said Fox. Now with a bullet lodged in his brain, he suffers nerve damage, attends special education classes and no longer plays sports.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that a 10-year study found that guns were reponsible for three-fourths of the 23,720 homicides in 1994. A decade earlier, 61 percent of the homicides were caused by guns.

Barnes and her clients believe the gun industry ought to be held responsible.

Kristen Rand, who follows gun litigation for the National Violence Policy Center, considers the case a longshot but adds that it has gone further than she expected. If it succeeds in federal court, she said, “it would be a landmark ruling.”

Hass, who left the company in 1989 when Smith & Wesson reorganized after it was purchased by a new owner, declined to be interviewed for this article. He had served 11 years as vice president of marketing and sales. As Barnes explains his involvement in the case, Hass approached her after reading about the suit in a trade magazine. Hass will be her key witness.


“He feels a moral responsibility. He gives the case the substance, the heft,” said Barnes. “It is not just lawyers saying it. It’s somebody who actually was in the business and making observations based on his experiences in the business.”

Hass has said that the gun industry is aware that guns end up in the black market because existing laws provide little oversight.

“In spite of their knowledge, however, the industry’s position has consistently been to take no independent action to insure responsible distribution practices,” he charges in his deposition.

Bill Bridgewater, spokesman for the National Alliance of Stocking Gun Dealers, believes that Hass has a point that the firearms license system allows too many lone individuals to buy guns for sale. Bridgewater’s North Carolina-based association represents about 19,000 gun dealers, most of them with retail sts.

But, he said, the government, and not the industry, bears responsibility for any flaws in its licensing system.

Yet Rand believes that companies are purposely making guns favored by street criminals. She cites the TEC-9, “the No. 1 assault weapon seized by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms). It is intimidating. It has a high-capacity magazine. It is the assault pistol you see on TV. It has no legitimate purpose to exist.”


(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Anita Villafane, of Springfield, Mass., where Smith & Wesson is headquartered, doesn’t know if the gun industry should be held responsible for the deaths of children.

All she knows is that her oldest child, Carlos Falcon, 18, who would spontaneously announce, “I love life,” went to meet three friends at the KFC restaurant in Mason Square on a cold and rainy school night in February 1995.

She asked him to stay home.

“He just looked at me, it was the last look he gave me,” Villafane said.

A few hours later, police called Villafane to the hospital, where she stayed the night to learn if her son would survive a bullet to his head. He and his friends had been mistaken for gang members by members of Los Solidos, a street gang.

“In the morning, the doctors came out and told me that he was brain dead, that the machines were working,” Villafane said.

“At that moment, I said, `Forget about the machines. Take his heart, his organs, his kidneys, his bones, his tissue _ everything that somebody could use to live. Take it from my son.’ ”


The story is echoed in Tarrytown, north of New York City, where Anne Cargill, and her husband raised five children. Five years ago, the couple’s only son was driving with two friends on the Westside Highway on his way home from the city when he cut off a car.

Three members of the Wild Cowboys street gang were in the other car, which pulled up alongside her son’s car and shot into the driver’s side. Her son died instantly. His two friends, while not injured by gun shots, have never emotionally regained their footing.

“Guns end up in the hands of teen-agers and gangs; (The gun manufacturers) send out guns anyway they want. They don’t track them,” said Cargill, who came to believe that the only way things would change was if mothers like her brought the law to bear against the industry.

“The only time you get change is when you sue them and hit them in the pocketbooks,” Cargill explained. “Then, they will listen.”

JC END MORIARTY

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