How to Save Our Children from the Gun Industry and the NRA

How to Save Our Children from the
Gun Industry and the NRA

by Thomas Coffin

In previous articles, I described how, beginning in the 1980s, the arms industry and the NRA initiated a propaganda machine to recast the Second Amendment into some sort of deranged mandate to arm private citizens with military weaponry so that they could wage war and commit treason against their own government. 

Their propaganda is nonsense. While the Supreme Court has recognized that the Second Amendment confers a limited right for a private citizen to possess a handgun for self-defense purposes in his or her home, it expressly declined to extend the contours of that right to military weapons (M-16 rifles and the like) and constrained its holding to the “sorts of lawful weapons that [citizens] possessed at home” at the time of the enactment of the Amendment (District of Columbia v. Heller, opinion of the Court, p. 55.) As recently held by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, “weapons that are most useful in military service—M16 rifles and the like—may be banned” without infringement upon the Second Amendment right. Kolbe v. Hogan.

But the Courts are not Legislatures. While they can limit the NRA/arms industry’s expansive and self-serving interpretation of the Second Amendment, they cannot enact the laws necessary to ban or curtail the commercial sale of military weaponry to the general public. Only Congress and State Legislatures have that authority, and this is where the distortions of the Second Amendment and related misinformation tactics have been most effective. 

How often do we hear NRA spokespersons say they are only supporting the “constitutional rights” of gun owners by opposing virtually any and all efforts to control and regulate commercial gun sales? How often do we hear complicit and obeisant lawmakers explain that they cannot vote for sensible gun control legislation “because of the Second Amendment?” 

It is all a lie. The Constitution nowhere requires the arming of citizens with military weaponry. It is simply a convenient excuse for legislators to kowtow to arms industry demands by pretending their hands are tied by the Constitution. They are not. 

They can act if they have the courage to do so, i.e., to stand up to the pressure and financial clout of the NRA and arms industry. When politicians tell you they would charge into a school under siege by an AR-15 armed shooter to save the children, ask them why they are not courageous enough to protect the children by promoting legislation that would disarm the shooter in the first place.

A few more points I wish to make: A model of the NRA political tactics is found in its promotion of the so-called “Hearing Protection Act” before Congress, which is euphemistically characterized as legislation to protect the health of shooters by removing restrictions on silencers (a.k.a. suppressors) to reduce the noise from their firearms. Of course the title of the proposed act is a much better sound byte than the “Assassin Protection Act,” and I give their PR people credit for that, but are we really supposed to buy into the notion that this is about hearing loss issues when, if you check the facts, even the military, with all of its extremely loud military weaponry, does not use “silencers” for ear protection but instead opts for external ear protection product.

A second point: these military weapons (silencers are merely hors d’oeuvres) the NRA/arms industry is pushing on the culture of America are exponentially more dangerous, destructive, and harmful to civilian life than the traditional handguns and sporting rifles of our parents’ generation. To put it in the words of an ER physician who responded to the school shootings at Parkland, Florida:

In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal. Source: What I Saw Treating the Victims from Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns, (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/ )                        

This is what military weapons are designed to do. They are not sporting or hunting weapons. They are killing machines, designed for mass annihilation and lethality against enemy combatants in warfare. What rational society authorizes the distribution of such weaponry to the general public?

Third point: the easy access to and availability of the mass killing machines to anyone who wants them. I went online, googled “military weapons for sale,” and within less than a minute found sites for buying and selling not only AR-15s and other military assault rifles, but also machine guns, silencers, explosive devises, and other highly lethal weapons of warfare.  There is no shortage of such arms dealers within your communities.

 My final point concerns the congressional immunity granted to arms manufacturers and dealers for any liability to the victims of these mass shootings that would otherwise arise from the production, marketing, and sale of military weaponry to the general populace:

“In 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a federal statute which provides broad immunity to gun manufacturers and dealers in federal and state court. Generally speaking, the PLCAA prohibits “qualified civil liability actions,” which are defined as civil or administrative proceedings which “result[] from the criminal or lawful misuse” of firearms or ammunition.

There are six exceptions to the blanket civil immunity provided by the PLCAA:

1. an action brought against someone convicted of “knowingly transfer[ing] a firearm, knowing that such firearm will be used to commit a crime of violence” by someone directly harmed by such unlawful conduct;

2. an action brought against a seller for negligent entrustment or negligence per se;

3. an action in which a manufacturer or seller of a qualified product knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought;

4. an action for breach of contract or warranty in connection with the purchase of the product;

5. an action for death, physical injuries or property damage resulting directly from a defect in design or manufacture of the product, when used as intended or in a reasonably foreseeable manner, except that where the discharge of the product was caused by a volitional act that constituted a criminal offense, then such act shall be considered the sole proximate cause of any resulting death, personal injuries or property damage; or

6. an action commenced by the Attorney General to enforce the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act.”
   
   Source: http://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/other-laws-policies/gun-industry-immunity/.

It is no coincidence that this broad grant of immunity granted by Congress to the arms industry came shortly after the expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), which was enacted in 1994 after a series of mass shootings in which the perpetrators used semi-automatic assault rifles and handguns to kill or wound 98 people in Stockton and San Francisco, California, and in Killeen, Texas. The AWB by its terms expired after 10 years (in late 2004), and a different Congress not only refused to renew it, but reversed course and essentially encouraged the sales of assault weapons by enacting PLCAA, which effectively immunized arms manufactures and dealers from civil liability for the inevitable and eminently foreseeable mass shootings following the demise of the Assault Weapons Ban.

Such a double-fronted blow by lawmakers—allowing the assault weapons ban to expire and immunizing the arms industry from civil liability for designing, producing, promoting, and marketing the weapons was a deliberate choice. It enhanced the revenue stream of the industry over the lives of innocent victims. It is analogous to—and even more irresponsible—than legislation which would immunize the auto industry from civil liability for marketing automobiles with exploding gas tanks, failing brake or steering systems, etc. Automobiles, at least, are not designed for the purpose of killing large numbers of people. Military weapons, on the contrary, are designed expressly for that purpose.

So how do we save our children from the golden calf of military weaponry that is the center-piece of the fake Second Amendment mythology? First, we must educate ourselves regarding the distortion misinformation and political strategies being employed to influence public opinion on the primary question before us: should military grade weapons, which have the primary purpose of killing large numbers of enemy combatants in warfare, be distributed to the public at large?

Second, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by the terminology employed by the arms industry in its efforts to wrap themselves in the flag and Second Amendment to justify unleashing these weapons on society. Silencers are not ear guards; AR-15s, mega capacity magazines, bumper stocks, and fully automatic assault weapons are not for hunting game.

Third, and most importantly, we must hold fast to the concept that we—the parents, teachers, children, and all the people placed in jeopardy by the wholesale distribution of military weaponry by the arms industry— have the moral and legal high ground on this critical issue: nothing in the Constitution mandates the sale of military weaponry such as assault weapons to the public at large.

Our Right to Life, which is protected by our country’s founding documents including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, easily supersedes the commercial interests of the arms industry in selling such military grade weaponry to the private sector.

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Thomas Coffin was the keynote speaker at the Blackberry Pie Society’s Political Party in February, 2020 and at Politics and Pie in October, 2022.  He is a retired federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and a former professor at the UO Law School. Thomas retired in 2016 after 24 years on the bench, prior to which he had a career as a federal prosecutor spanning 21 years. He is married with 7 children.  The Blackberry Pie Society is pleased to include a collection of his essays on our website.  We will post them as they become available.

posted 6.10.2025