Comment on Why shouldn’t firearm manufacturers be held accountable for the use of their weapons in crimes?
Apepollo11@lemmy.world 1 year agoI feel like the analogy of the camera would be more valid if Nikon designed a camera that was specifically designed to cater to the needs of child molesters.
Almost all guns are designed as weapons first and foremost. That’s it.
Fencing is a sport that allows people to duel each other. The foils are items of sports equipment - they have specifically been designed to not be lethal.
Guns, on the other hand, are not items of sports equipment. They are weapons that some people use for sport.
In the US, gun companies are quite happy to produce these for supply to the untrained, unregulated masses. And actively promote this as totally normal. I’d say they hold some of the blame.
FireTower@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Theirs an entire field of shooting sports. The Olympics has shootings events. There’s guns made specifically for specific competitions like PRS & IPSC.
When manufacturers do market guns for the purposes of broadly shooting at other humans it’s more specifically the self defense market. There’s a difference between making a product for self defense and making firearms for drive by shootings.
Additionally you have companies in the industry who specifically created entirely new branches just for training. Here’s a link to Sig Sauer’s training side.
The core issues are not that individuals have the capacity to do ill but the motivation and desire. To meaningfully impact homicides you need to first understand the different motivations behind them and change the system that created poor circumstances.
For example tackling drug related gang violence by changing the laws on drugs so as to not create room in our societies for criminal organizations structured around their illicit trade.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Sure if a hunting rifle was used to kill someone then the manufacturer wouldn’t be liable. Killing people isn’t the primary purpose of that kind of firearm.
But a gun that’s primary purpose is to kill people and is marketed as such? Yeah they should be liable for that.
If they are marketing guns for home defense and not making purchaser of the firearm aware that they’re statistically more likely to kill themselves or a family member than ever need the gun for a burglar, that seems like negligent behavior to me.
Also if they’re marketing anything other than a shotgun for home defense they are creating a dangerous situation unnecessarily. Suggesting someone should fire a weapon which has bullets that can penetrate through the drywall inside a house while the person firing is scared leads to all kinds of foreseeable life threatening scenarios. Shotguns exist, they would be better suited for this (extremely rare) scenario. If they are marketing anything other than a shotgun for home defense they are needlessly putting people’s lives in danger.
If people approach this logically (without the standard gun nut wackiness) then yeah there’s a lot of negligence going on, possibly gross negligence.
FireTower@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t know which kind of shotgun loading you have in mind but sufficiently effective shotgun loadings (read not bird shot) will 100% penetrate dry wall several times before reaching a not fatal velocity. High mass projectiles maintain course better when flying through materials like dry wall.
A cartridge like .223 which relies on velocity, instead of mass, tends to penetrate walls the least. This is because upon it’s first impact it begins to destabilize, resulting in a faster loss of velocity.