Enticed by the proposed $ 516 billion tobacco settlement, some crime-ridden cities are mulling similar class-action lawsuits against gun makers. The cases may look alike, but the legal arguments are much different. And the difference is in the data.
Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell first raised the possibility of a city's suing firearms makers to recoup costs from gun-related injuries and deaths. And if Philadelphia sues, Detroit and Miami may follow.
But the case is much harder to make than these mayors imagine. Simply claiming that murders are committed with guns is not enough. Unlike tobacco firms, gun makers have powerful arguments pointing to the benefits of gun ownership.
Until recently, tobacco suits went nowhere because juries usually found that smokers knew the risks of smoking. But the states' class-action suit against tobacco firms was different. It emphasized what the companies knew about their product, pushing what smokers knew about the dangers of their habit to the background. No comparable strategy exists for guns, since no one denies that guns can kill.
In the tobacco suit, the states relied on specious claims. They argued that smoking costs them money. That was wrong. Of course, people die from smoking. The question of state health- care costs isn't whether people die -- we all die sooner or later - but whether the illnesses produced by smoking are more costly.
Smokers live shorter lives. When they get sick, they tend to die relatively quickly. It's true that states must bear these health-care costs sooner, but that's offset by shorter illnesses. And once the long-term savings to state pension programs are taken into account, tobacco clearly saves states money.
For obvious reasons, tobacco companies were never comfortable with this argument, and judges weren't sympathetic. That left the state attorneys general to make wild accounting arguments in which they counted only the costs and not the benefits to state coffers from smoking-related deaths.
But the cities shouldn't expect to have the same leeway in a gun lawsuit. With city police officers carrying guns, it will be difficult for cities not to acknowledge some benefits. More important, criminals also tend to attack victims that they perceive as weak, and guns serve as an important deterrent against crime.
The Justice Department's annual National Crime Victimization Survey shows that while passive behavior is normally a safer course of action than active resistance, that's not true for all types of crimes or victims.
The chance of serious injury from an attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for those resisting with a gun. For men, behaving passively is 1.4 times more likely to result in serious injury than resisting with a gun. People use guns defensively about 2.5 million times each year, and 98% of the time simply brandishing the weapon is enough to stop an attack.
The defensive nature of guns is further reflected in the different rates of "hot burglaries," in which the victim is at home when a burglar strikes. In Canada and Britain, where gun-control laws are strict, almost half of all burglaries are "hot." In the U.S., where greater gun ownership is allowed, only 13% of burglaries are "hot."
Criminals aren't behaving differently by accident. U.S. felons say in surveys that when committing crimes, they worry more about armed victims than about police.
In my own research on gun ownership rates across states over time, I found that higher gun ownership rates are associated with dramatically lower crime rates. Further, the poorest people in the most crime-prone areas benefit the most from gun ownership. Lawsuits that raise the costs of gun purchases will reduce gun ownership and hit poor people the hardest.
Suing gun makers is surely a lose-lose proposition. If the cities lose, Mayor Rendell is right to worry about the $ 1 million such litigation could cost his constituents alone. If the cities "win," law-abiding citizens across the country will pay much more for the right to protect themselves. And the poor, who can least afford to pay these higher prices, stand to lose the most.
John R. Lott Jr. is the John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law and author of "More Guns, Less Crime" ( University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Comments on this posting?
Click here to post a public comment on the Trash Talk Bulletin Board.
Click here to send a private comment to the Junkman.
Material presented on this home page constitutes opinion of the author.
Copyright © 1998 Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved. Site developed and hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.