Before you answer that,
consider what your opinion would be if you owned the company that had
manufactured the article used in the aforementioned heinous crime. Suppose that
your product was legal to produce in the United States, that you were in full
compliance with all state and Federal laws regarding the production,
distribution, and sale of your products, and that the heinous crime in question
was committed by a person unknown to you in a location hundreds or thousands of
miles from any facility that you own. What degree of responsibility would you
and/or your company have for the heinous crime mentioned above?
As you’ve probably guessed, there
is such a case currently before the courts following the Santa Fe Texas School
shooting, as the families of some of the victims have brought suit against the
gun store that sold the guns used in the shootings, and the companies that
manufactured them. People who identify as pro-gun and/or libertarian are
calling these actions absurd, and are comparing them to the lawsuits filed
against food companies for making the plaintiffs obese. People who identify as
in favor of gun control and/or victim’s rights have responded by saying that if
you’re going to manufacture and/or sell devices that make it remarkably easy
for a single deranged individual to injure or kill a great many other people in
a short period of time, you’re going to have to expect to be held responsible
when exactly that happens…
As an amateur historian I
actually do have some knowledge of both the inclusion of the Second Amendment
in the Bill of Rights and the ways it has been interpreted in modern times, but
I’m not going to offer opinions about Constitutional Law without a license. The
legal exposure (or lack of it) that these companies might have in this case is
up to the court system, not scruffy business bloggers. For now let’s stick to
the issue at hand: what ethical responsibility do the people who make and sell
guns have for atrocities committed by their customers?
On the one hand, one could
argue that any customer could conceivably use any tangible object to commit a
crime, regardless of whether or not that object is normally considered to be a
weapon. Nothing else appearing, a customer could use the objects you have sold
them to stab, bludgeon, or smother their victim, and the number of things that
can be used to poison an adult human being are appalling once you start to
enumerate them. On the other hand, guns generally have no practical function
other than launching small quantities of lead into targets at extremely high
velocities. Guns do not, in fact, kill people. They do, however, make it far
too easy for people who have one to kill other people. And while there are some
people who do have a legitimate need for a gun, decades of historical data
covering millions of incidents very clearly establishes that the odds of being
killed in a gun mishap (or a gun-related suicide) are several hundred times
more likely than the odds of defending one’s self or one’s family with a
personal weapon…
All of which brings me to the
question: Do we, as business people, have an ethical responsibility to prevent
customers from purchasing consumer products that could be used to injure or
kill another person, either by them or by someone who has stolen the products?
Alternately, do we have the right to tell anyone what kinds of products they
should or should not be allowed to purchase, let alone prevent them from doing
so by refusing to make and/or sell those products? Even granting that the
current gun laws in this country are clearly not sufficient to prevent multiple
school shootings every month in America, do we want to have private citizens
deciding which Constitutional rights their neighbors should or should not be
allowed to exercise? Or should we just make products that people want to buy,
offer them for sale at competitive prices, comply with all Federal, state and
local laws, and let the people decide for themselves?
It’s worth thinking about…
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