Negligent Parents, Guns, and Children
By Larry Bodine, Publisher of The National Trial Lawyers
There is a reason that young children are not allowed to drive cars or buy fireworks. This logic applies when kids are prevented from purchasing power drills, rat poison, or sulfuric acid. Similarly, grade schools don’t provide students with steak knives, gasoline, or bleach to play with.
All these things are hazardous. Some are “inherently dangerous” under the law, which makes the owner or operator automatically liable for the injuries that they cause. Besides, young children don’t know better and they are legally considered incompetent, or not responsible, for their actions.
So what can we say about the parents of a 9-year-old daughter who let her fire an Uzi submachine gun at an Arizona gun range on August 25? How do we evaluate the NRA-certified shooting instructor when the girl lost control and shot him in the head?
They were stupid, or as the law expresses it, “grossly negligent.”
No Criminal Charges and No Liability
But in this case, no criminal charges were lodged and no lawsuit has been filed. The fourth-grade child cannot be liable for her parents’ recklessness and the instructor died because of his own incompetence. The parents will escape liability unless child welfare authorities pursue them. The girl is the real victim and she will be scarred for life.
Ordinarily a person has a duty of care, meaning that they are responsible for reasonably foreseeable results of their actions. In this case, an Uzi fires 600 rounds per minute, which generates a powerful recoil. It is a war weapon introduced by the Israeli Defense Forces and typical users are soldiers and security forces.
What could go wrong by handing an Uzi to a child who is just learning grammar and multiplication?
Children, Guns, and Negligence
A similar catastrophe happened before. In 2008, an eight-year old Connecticut boy, Christopher Bizilj, killed himself firing an Uzi at a machine gun expo. As the boy struggled to handle the gun’s recoil, the barrel reared up and the child was shot in the head. Christopher’s father had been warned twice by a gun show staffer that the Uzi was too powerful for the little boy.
The organizer of the expo was indicted for involuntary manslaughter by wanton and reckless conduct. He had put a 15-year old in charge of the Uzi display. The organizer blamed the boy’s father, who had signed a waiver, and the expo subcontractors, saying he should not be made a scapegoat for the actions of others.
A jury acquitted him in 2011, so no one was held responsible.
Who is Responsible When Children Shoot Themselves or Others?
There is a legacy of no responsibility for firearms violence in the U.S. For example, Congress gave legal immunity to gun manufacturers, distributors and dealers, and their trade associations in 2005. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (pdf link here) means that none of them have any liability in negligence and products liability actions. They have no responsibility in the courts when they sell weapons to gang members, convicts, and little children.
Arizona has passed “permitless carry,” which means that anyone who can buy a gun can carry a concealed firearm without any type of permit, or brandish it openly like a Wild West outlaw. Four months after the shooting of a congresswoman and a federal judge in Arizona in 2011, lawmakers there named the Colt Army Action Revolver the official state gun.
It is any wonder that the shooting range where the 9-year- old’s Uzi shooting of the gun instructor occurred was in Arizona?
The U.S. has twice as many gun stores as McDonald’s restaurants, so we can see where the priorities are. A gun is designed to do one thing: kill something. It is an inherently dangerous instrument. But so long as it is considered a common household item that children can use, there will be no responsibility for what happens.
Larry Bodine is a lawyer and journalist who speaks and writes frequently personal injury law. He is the publisher of the National Trial Lawyers and is the former Editor in Chief of Lawyers.com. Readers can follow @Larrybodine on Twitter, on Google+ and on LinkedIn, where he moderates several law-related groups.
