Legal Logic

Police fatally shoot civilian; victim's gun manufacturer sued

An early sign of a system going totalitarian is the disarming of its population. Rob Racansky sent me the following, which comes from the April 12 entry at http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/00apr2.html

Cops shoot civilian; city blames maker of victim's gun. In a suit filed last week, the city of Riverside, Calif. says gunmaker Lorcin Engineering should bear legal responsibility for the shooting by Riverside police of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller of Rubidoux, because it sold the weapon she had on her lap at the time she was shot in a locked, idling car. Officers from the force were later fired for the tactics they used in the shooting, which led to a wrongful-death lawsuit by Miller's survivors. The city is now seeking to dodge that suit by impleading Lorcin on the theory that had it provided better user training Miller might have known not to keep a gun on her person in a way that approaching officers might interpret as threatening to them, though her gun was later found to be inoperable. Lorcin shuttered its plant in nearby Mira Loma and declared bankruptcy last year, but an attorney for the city suggests it still has money. "Every single claim against Lorcin was dismissed, but at a very expensive cost of $100,000 here, $100,000 there" in legal fees, said owner James Waldorf. (Lisa O'Neill Hill and John Welch, Riverside Press-Enterprise, April 7) (discuss at Press-Enterprise site).

With this kind of reasoning, it's only a matter of time before they start suing the banks of mugging victims for issuing them the cash that provoked the mugger.