Has America’s legal system gone mad? From the looks of the last
seven days it seems quite clear that it has. In just one week,
courts on opposite sides of the country have released the
scoundrels who make things such as violent video games and movies
and deadly handguns from any responsibility for the crimes
committed on account of their vile products.
On Monday, a federal judge in Denver dismissed a lawsuit in
which the family of Dave Sanders, the teacher killed in the
Columbine massacre, sued for damages from the death merchants over
at Time Warner Inc., Sony Computer Entertainment America,
Activision and Id Software. These despicable companies were the
ones responsible for pushing violent filth, such as the video game
“Doom” and the movie “The Basketball Diaries” (starring Leonardo
DiCaprio), down the throats of otherwise-docile Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold, turning the young boys into veritable human time
bombs.
The family here, and all the families of the Columbine tragedy,
clearly deserved a lucrative financial award from these companies,
which were clearly not just innocent bystanders in this horrific
episode. Unfortunately, Federal judge Lewis Babcock denied these
families the cold, hard cash that was their due.
Across the country on Wednesday, the Maryland Court of Appeals,
the state’s highest court, committed another travesty against
justice when it threw out a suit against a gun manufacturer in the
accidental death of a three-year-old boy. In 1999, a Maryland man
bought a Ruger pistol from a gun store in Maryland. When the man
left it loaded in his bedroom, his son found it and fatally shot
himself in the head. The mother of the boy filed suit against Ruger
as well as the store that sold the gun (though not against the
father, who was really just as much a victim as the boy).
The court cruelly ruled in a 6-1 decision that the suit was
improper as a matter of law, despite the obvious malfeasance of the
gun manufacturer. Apparently this reckless arms dealer and the
court believe that a free lock box, an instruction manual
containing warnings and instructions about firearm safety, safety
warnings printed on the gun itself, a safety pamphlet from the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and an offer for a free
safety training course (which the buyer didn’t have time for) were
enough. As this case shows, however, these things were clearly not
sufficient to prevent a needless tragedy.
When will our courts learn that corporations with deep pockets
must be held accountable for the no-account actions of helpless
individuals? When will they realize that video games like “Doom” or
“Donkey Kong” are bound to lead to violent outbursts from their
Manchurian players, making the companies that produce these games
no better than murderers? When will they realize that it’s not
people that kill people, but the people that lull people into a
false sense of security with “safety locks” and “safety manuals”
and “safety courses” that kill people?
Luckily, there are some signs of hope from our wayward legal
system. A young lady matriculating at Southwest Texas University
just won a $5 million verdict against the makers of a video
entitled “Wild Party Girls” who had the gall to use footage of her
baring her breasts at a wet T-shirt contest in Mexico in their
video. And last month, a woman won the right from New York’s
highest court to sue Germany’s Volkswagen for their part in costing
the life of her husband, who died in a crash with twice the legal
amount of alcohol in his blood.
Hopefully, these cases will prove to be the beginning of a new
trend in American jurisprudence. Soon, may we all live in a country
where Americans aren’t held responsible for their own actions, but
instead rich corporations are called to answer for the ways they
manipulate and endanger stupid, irresponsible, violent and reckless
individuals.
