Avoiding responsibility when best laid plans go awry is human nature. Whether the motivating factor is
psychological solace or an attempt at moral coherence, things are just easier when they’re someone else’s fault.
This problem has likely bugged
humans as long as we’ve been around to wrong each other (and harm
ourselves) and inevitably point the finger elsewhere.
But recent years have seen a
grip on American legal consciousness tighten to nearly asphyxiating proportions — not the regular avoidance of responsibility, but our willingness to accept it at a cost of clarity of reason, and more to the point, (relatively)
innocent parties.
Naturally, this shift in lay philosophy has surfaced where it is most profitable: the already waterlogged
legal system. Increasingly, poorly measured decisions promote a
“compensation culture” that offers individuals compensation for infringement (perceived or real) on their livelihood, even if those forced to pay aren’t those who should.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider dismissing a lawsuit that would hold responsible companies involved in the production and sale of a gun used in a 1999
rampage. Buford Furrow killed one and injured five at a Southern California daycare center. The Court’s go-ahead leaves open a possibility for a bizarre, dangerous and absurd precedent.
Court records show that the gun in question, which was sold by the wholesaler to the Cosmopolis, Wash., police department, was later sold to a gun shop, where it was sold to a
collector, who in turn sold it to Furrow at a gun show. The convoluted history of the gun’s ownership, however,
didn’t stop Judge Richard Paez — of the jurisprudentially loopy Ninth
Circuit Court — from opining that the manufacturer’s marketing strategy
creates a “supply of post-police guns that can be sold through unlicensed dealers without background checks to illegal buyers.”
Even if police departments sell guns in a secondary market, and even if some of the intermediate dealers are unlicensed, and even if background checks are for some reason skipped, and even if the final buyers can’t legally make the purchase, it’s inconceivable to hold the manufacturer culpable for any of this, let alone the final result of what may be others’ improprieties. Moreover, if a wholesaler selling a firearm directly to a law enforcement agency doesn’t constitute a reasonable firearm sale, what does?
What actually constitutes causality — in the world that the courtroom attempts to address, anyway — is a subjective point, and what makes up
responsibility even more so. But this ambiguity can walk so far before it exits completely the realm of plausibility. And recognition of this fact is encoded into law. In his dissent in the circuit court case, Judge Consuelo Callahan captured this point, cautioning courts to be wary of “adopting broad new theories of liability.”
Our legislature and culture should do the same, and trade a philosophy of “broad new theories of liability” for one of cleaner courts and defensible legal and ethical reasoning.

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