Firearms remain the only product that when works as advertised, kills things, and when the product is clearly defective, it's still deadly. Brazilian gun manufacturer Taurus has sold potentially a million firearms in the US with defective safeties that can still fire even when in the safe position when the gun is bumped, jarred, or dropped, and the NRA has made sure that no gunmaker can be touched for such a lethal product liability. Bud and Sonie Brown found that out the hard way on New Year's Eve in 2016.
The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.
To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.
For Brown, none of that explains why he hadn’t heard that Taurus had sold bad guns. It’s one thing if the government didn’t do anything, but he reads every issue of American Rifleman, the NRA’s official magazine, and he never saw a warning about Taurus guns. “Why didn’t the NRA warn us? I guess there’s too much money and politics going into the NRA, so they had reason not to tell us,” he says.
The NRA lists gun safety as among its concerns, and in recent years, American Rifleman has covered voluntary safety recalls from Colt’s Manufacturing, FN America, and SIG Sauer. But articles on Taurus’s class-action settlement or any of the lawsuits could not be found by search on the magazine’s website. Shooting Illustrated, another NRA publication, ran a three-paragraph story on the class-action settlement.
Taurus and the NRA have had a mutually beneficial relationship for years. A lot of that was the work of Robert Morrison, president of Miami Lakes-based Taurus International Manufacturing Inc., until 2011. Morrison is a close friend of Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president. Taurus has received at least eight NRA awards and has been mentioned in dozens of articles in American Rifleman.
Morrison started as an independent Taurus salesman in 1994 before moving up through the ranks to run U.S. operations in 2004. He aggressively used the NRA to sell guns, introducing a program, still in effect, whereby anyone who buys a Taurus weapon is given a free one-year membership in the NRA. The strategy appears to have worked: In 2016, American Riflemanprofiled an Alabama pawnshop that sold 1,000 Taurus firearms in a month with the promotion. The standard price for an NRA membership is currently $40.
Many Taurus models are considered starter guns. Bass Pro Shops, one of the largest firearms sellers in the country, sells nine Taurus-made models for under $400, including the $179.99 Heritage Rough Rider revolver. The cheapest Glock—a brand that works a different part of the handgun market—is $469.99.
The low end sees plenty of activity. Last year, six Taurus guns made category-based top-10-selling lists published by Gun Genius, a website owned by GunBroker.com LLC, the country’s largest online auction platform for firearms. That included the Taurus Model 85, the No. 1-selling revolver in America, which goes for as little as $219 on GunBroker.com. (The NRA didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. Morrison, reached at his Florida home by phone, didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
The NRA is not an enthusiast's group or consumer protection organization, although it used to be. For the last couple of decades the NRA has been a gunmaker's lobbyist group, the most effective industry lobbyist organization in political history. They always win. And like any pusher, they need cheap foreign starter product with shoddy safety to get new members hooked.
But maybe, just maybe, that will start to change.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment