Tom Teepen: NRA really is in charge
Tom Teepen, Cox News Service

It's nice to have friends in high places. When George W. Bush was first running for the presidency, a pooh-bah of the National Rifle Association, wrongly thinking he would be heard only by fellow denizens of Gunland, was taped boasting that with Bush in the White House, the NRA wouldn't have to bother lobbying. It would be like having one of the lobby's own officers as president.

It has turned out that way. Having said he favored an extension of the ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons, the president didn't lift so much as a pinky to accomplish that and the ban expired.

Now Bush has championed and, with flourish, signed legislation that exempts the firearms industry from the reach of civil justice in all but a few very narrowly drawn and unlikely circumstances.

An industry that exists solely to manufacture products that have no other purpose except to kill and wound is thus granted a privileged shelter from lawsuits enjoyed by no other business. Is this a precedent for the political purchase of legal safe harbors, and never mind what misfeasance or negligence might be implicated? Well, already the food industry is angling for similar protection from obesity lawsuits.

Granted, the larger number of suits against firearms makers and dealers have been more harassing than meritorious, and it would be one thing if the courts were falling for them. But in fact most have flopped. No body of menacing case law is creeping up on the industry. The "need" for protection exists only as symbolic, so the gun lobby can show its muscle to memberships that are constantly fed scare stories that gun-banners are on the verge of kicking in their doors and confiscating their weapons.

In short, the legal system is already solving whatever potential problem nuisance suits once seemed to pose. Gratuitous filings are becoming notoriously futile.

The few successful suits have been confined to especially egregious cases, like that of the D.C. snipers. The families of six ambush victims and two survivors won a $2.5 million settlement from the manufacturer of the Bushmaster rifle and from Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Wash., the dealer that had been unaware the rifle had been stolen and couldn't account for some 200 other missing weapons.

The makers and purveyors of a lawful product shouldn't be liable for subsequent misuses of their products if they acted prudently in the first place. But this liability shield is so encompassing that it appears to block any hope of using civil justice to hold the notoriously sloppy commerce of largely unregulated gun shows to any sensible account, and dealers now have little to worry about if they look the other way in selling to what are obviously straw buyers.

The firearms lobby likes to grouse that there are laws aplenty to keep the gun trade on the up and up. That's not really so, but to whatever degree it is true, the claim loses any purchase in an administration with no zest for enforcement.

With semiautomatics back in circulation, with the states increasingly permitting concealed weapons and passing shoot-first, ask-later laws, and now with this industry privilege, the gun lobby is finally nearing its goal: an OK Corral that runs coast to coast.