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T A B L E+T A L K Clinton acquited! Share your reactions in the Politics area of Table Talk
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BY BRUCE SHAPIRO | It is hard to imagine anything further from the legal-political soap opera that has gripped Washington than Judge Jack Weinstein's courtroom in Brooklyn last week. Standing at the bar of justice: not a president and members of Congress, but a bereaved mother from Fort Greene and six other families whose children or spouses fell to gunfire. Opposite, the makers of the guns. Arguing the survivors' case: not a White House lawyer or independent counsel or well-heeled legal foundation, but an overworked solo practitioner who five years ago took a case that seemed unwinnable. At issue: not who touched what body part when, but the precise measure of a handgun manufacturer's responsibility for the weapon's use. The outcome: the deepest shake-up for the American weapons industry since Colt and Smith & Wesson invented the mass consumer market in guns in the 19th century. I first heard about this case, Hamilton vs. Accu-tek, in 1996. I was interested in crime victims-turned-social activists, and was interviewing Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband, Dennis, had been killed and whose son Kevin had been left partially paralyzed by Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson. McCarthy was running for Congress from Mineola, Long Island s -- the gun-control candidate, as she was portrayed by friends and enemies alike. But "gun control," I found, didn't quite capture where McCarthy's thinking was headed. Although she had testified in favor of a law banning ownership of assault weapons in New York, she was more preoccupied with an issue conventional "gun control" wouldn't touch: corporate accountability. "The question was, could this have been prevented?" she said to me. "I thought a lot about the people who made and sold those weapons without any sense of where they would end up." Before running for Congress, McCarthy had brought a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Ferguson's assault weapons. She won her election, but her suit was tossed out before trial. McCarthy mentioned another survivor she'd heard of, who had filed her own lawsuit. The woman turned out to be Freddie Hamilton from Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood far removed from the suburban complacency of Mineola. Hamilton's teenage son, Njuzi Ray, had been killed by accident in a Brooklyn drive-by shooting the same year as Ferguson's rampage on the commuter train. And like McCarthy, Freddie Hamilton's life had been transformed by the experience. The young man accused of shooting her son was acquitted, but Hamilton said she didn't care: "I just want to prevent it from happening to someone else." Hamilton was the head of a foster care agency, and she thought she understood what might have led a teenager little older than her own child to pick up a weapon: "We're talking about power. The young man who killed my son didn't have any power. He had a gun. That gave him the power." Hamilton -- part of a too-little appreciated movement of crime victim-activists who have turned not into vengeance-seeking right-wingers but crusaders for constructive social change -- formed a Brooklyn protest network called Parents United to Rally for Gun Elimination. And together with a Staten Island woman named Katina Johnstone, whose husband had been shot in 1991, she filed suit against 43 gun manufacturers and distributors -- charging that the industry as a whole was responsible for negligently distributing a dangerous product. Eventually, Hamilton and Johnstone would be joined by five other families of people who'd been killed or wounded in New York. Up until the Hamilton case, every lawsuit brought by a victim or survivor against a gun company had met the same fate as McCarthy's suit in Brooklyn: They never even got to trial. Gun violence was seen by courts as the responsibility of the actual perpetrators. And because the whole issue seemed like a no-winner, high-powered law firms were not exactly lining up to take such suits. The attorney who agreed to take Hamilton's and Johnstone's case seemed like an unlikely prospect to challenge an entire industry: Elisa Barnes, partner in a two-person (and eventually one-person) firm in lower Manhattan. But a few years earlier, Barnes had helped women win a suit against makers of the fertility drug DES, which had been based on companies' negligent distribution of the product. And from that experience, she brought to the Hamilton case a theory untested in handgun litigation. Past lawsuits, she reasoned, often hinged on the idea that guns were dangerously designed. What if you bypassed the design and focused instead on distribution: on how those guns ended up on New York's streets? Since legitimate adult gun-owners around the country were experiencing no shortage of weapons, the vast number of guns in the hands of New York teens and gangbangers and adult criminals meant that someone, somewhere, was producing firearms far in excess of what the legitimate commercial market could support. In other words, gun companies knew they were selling weapons destined for the criminal marketplace, like the weapon that killed Njuzi Ray. And that, she argued, ought to be punished. N E X T+P A G E+| Two extraordinary breaks - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. |
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