I'm okay with that.
Car companies only implemented safety features after lawsuits came. Safety rose and fatalities dropped.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
256 points (93.0% liked)
Technology
60073 readers
3459 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Are you suggesting this was caused by an accident due to insufficient safety devices?
This one? Not sure. Others? Definitely.
There’s studies showing that the gun industry doesn’t evolve like other markets due to laws giving them immunity. Normally the industry would add safety features like built in trigger locks ( fingerprint sensors or NFC ring that’s required to fire) but without the motivation they’re not adding them.
It's because those are terrible ideas. You'd trust your life to a fingerprint censor or nfc nonsense? I sure as fuck wouldn't
Depends. Thousands of kids a year are accidentally shot (and many cops and others are shot with their own weapon), so if it reduced that then I’m for it. There’s plenty of reliable guns with some sort of key or unlock code already.
There’s plenty of reliable guns with some sort of key or unlock code already.
like what
There is exactly one firearm on the market that has reliable fingerprint/facial ID. It's made by a company called Biofire, and it starts at $1500.
People who have children in their house can choose to buy one, but no one should rely on this sort of safety mechanism to stop their kids from killing themselves. Education and a simple gun lock works perfectly fine for kids and standard firearms when taught/used correctly. There's nothing wrong with layering safety like with the ID features in Biofire's gun, but requiring these features by law is just unnecessary, short sighted, and prices put poor people from arming and defending themselves.
Prices would plummet if guns were a normal market that responded to pressure like lawsuits. That’s because giving gun manufacturers legal immunity means they spent nearly nothing on new safety features. That’s what I was talking about.
Stop trying to concern troll that gun safety cuts off gun access for the poor. Poor people also have to take mandatory driving education classes and driver licensing, because cars can kill people.
Clearly voluntary education and simple gun locks are not enough, given the tens of thousands of gun deaths a year. The gun lobby won’t have it any other way and spend more money lobbying politicians to block these than any education.
Gun makers don't have legal immunity if they design an inherently unsafe product. If someone makes and sells a firearm that can go off when on safe that person could be sued. The PLCAA is about not being held accountable for the crimes of third parties.
And how would law suits drive prices down? You suggested if they were sued more that'd lead to more R&D. But those both are just two expenses that contribute to overhead.
Safe firearms handling should be compulsory thing in highschool even if it's just a single 45 min class period. It'd benefit people a lot more than pre-calc.
It seems kinda nuts. But if everyone sued everyone every time there was a mass shooting, things might actually start happening to minimize their frequency.
Or judges will just start throwing out the cases.
Probably that.
the only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a lawsuit
It’s the people vs the shooter. And let’s be honest, eventually the people of the USA is at least as guilty of this and all the other crimes like this as the actual shooter.
According to the lawsuits, YouTube and Reddit “transformed and addicted” Gendron and prepared him for the attack on Tops market.
I'd like to see what they're actually claiming.
I dunno about reddit but it's no secret that YouTube will push you down a rabbit hole with their algorithm. Watch one video popular with right wing people and suddenly everything is about "Jewish space lasers" and "antifa coming to murder you"
They're claiming "I went through a tragedy and want money, give me a settlement out of court quickly." Anyone that thinks this will go to court and win is a nut.
I strongly suspect that the suit against the gun companies will be thrown out. They complied with the laws, and the guns functioned as firearms are intended to function. The PLCAA was written precisely to prevent this kind of bad-faith lawsuit, where a company is being held responsible for the illegal used of their product. Imagine how batshit crazy it would be if you sued a Ford dealership for selling a car to someone that had a secret drinking problem, and that person then drove drunk and killed a bus full of schoolkids. What magic divination is the gun store supposed to use to figure out that a person is a mass-murder-to-be, and how do you ensure that no people that aren't going to be mass murderers aren't being denied their constitutional rights? Now, if the shooter was buying guns and armor, and told people, hey, what gun is going to be best for killing people in a supermarket?, then yeah, they have a case for negligence. But I've got an AR-15, and I'm working on saving up for body armor, because I need both for the kind of shooting competitions I'm interested in. Given how many AR-15s there are--over 24M in civilian hands, or about 1 for every 13 people--and given how many people own some form of body armor, compared to the number of these random, mass-murder events there are, neither purchase would normally raise any suspicion.
The case against the social media companies will be a challenge, because that's going to largely be covered by 1A issues, unless they can point to issues that amount to incitement.
Parents are a stretch as well. They'd likely have to have some kind of finding of gross negligence in order to hold them responsible.
If you really, truly, deeply care about preventing this kind of tragedy, then you need to start addressing root causes of this. The FBI published a report a year or two back about profiling this type of murderer, and it turns out that it's really hard because they're so very rare.
I really hate these kind of lawsuits, while yes what happened fucking sucks I feel like this always leads to repeal section 230 bullshit. I feel like we need to realize that having all eggs in one basket for social media is bad and decentralization is better. Secondly if section 230 was repealed the extremism excuse could be used to shut down anarchist mastodon instances