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He who pulls the trigger bears the responsibility
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
He who pulls the trigger bears the responsibility
By J.R. LABBE
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH, Texas - Help wanted: Sporting goods clerk. No sales experience necessary; will train. Doctorate in psychology or psychiatry required.
If the plaintiffs in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the nation's largest retailer had prevailed last week in a Fort Worth courtroom, that's what employment ads for Wal-Mart might have looked like in the future.
The family of Chris Marshall, one of two attorneys killed in a July 1992 shooting rampage in the Tarrant County Courthouse, and survivor Judge Clyde Ashworth tried to pin civil responsibility on Wal-Mart for not training its sales clerks to recognize the visual and verbal traits of someone who might be mentally unbalanced.
In a $24 million civil suit, attorney Art Brender argued on behalf of the victims that the corporation didn't have "proper procedures" in place to help a sales clerk recognize George Lott as a potential threat.
Never mind that the federal laws requiring criminal record background checks before a handgun could be sold weren't enacted until two years after the shootings.
Discount the fact that Lott, when filling out the "yellow sheet" on May 2, 1992, for the purchase of the gun he would use so fatally 60 days later, did not reveal he had been indicted a month earlier in Illinois on an aggravated sexual assault charge - something that would have automatically disqualified the transaction.
Forget that neither the sales clerk nor anyone else wearing a Wal-Mart nametag pulled the trigger.
The sole party responsible for the death and destruction that occurred that horrible July day was arrested in 1992, tried and found guilty in 1993, and rightfully executed by the state of Texas in 1994.
And jurors apparently recognized that, even if the Marshall family and Ashworth don't. It took all of 30 minutes for them to decide that Wal-Mart was not culpable.
Related lawsuits, in which victims or their survivors have attempted to hold gun makers responsible for crimes committed with their products, also have failed. Courts across the country have realized that manufacturers of legal products aren't responsible for a purchaser's misuse or abuse of the merchandise.
The jury also must have recognized the impossibility of expecting a minimum-wage sales clerk - who may or may not have a high school diploma - to discern who is mentally unbalanced and who isn't. That's a challenge for professional men and women with an alphabet soup of degrees behind their names who spend hours observing an individual before making an assessment.
The attempt to place liability where it didn't belong was just one troubling aspect of the case. The other was that mental illness equals mentally unbalanced and therefore the potential for violence.
A number of studies have shown that people with mental illnesses are not more violent than the general population. If mental illness is one of several factors including a criminal record and a history of substance abuse, then the potential for violence increases, but studies show the violence is more likely to be directed inwardly, and not at others.
To stigmatize people with mental illness as a tragedy waiting to happen is unfair and inaccurate. It is exactly the kind of stereotype that keeps people with treatable depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses from seeking help.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy - Democrats from New York - have done in a bill they jointly sponsored that will require state mental health facilities to send the names of patients to the national background check system.
"Common sense says that someone who is mentally ill shouldn't be able to buy a gun," McCarthy said at the news conference.
Of course, one must consider the source when reading quotes about guns by the honorable representative from New York. Having your husband killed and your son wounded by a madman who shot up a commuter train will skew your perspective. Like Ashworth, McCarthy makes a great witness during victim impact testimony - but she isn't the level-headed, detached thinker needed to make national laws.
A horrible event took place in Fort Worth on July 1, 1992. The lives of the people directly involved and their families were forever changed. But the person responsible for that tragedy has already been held accountable - and he can never kill again.
c 2002, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
By J.R. LABBE
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH, Texas - Help wanted: Sporting goods clerk. No sales experience necessary; will train. Doctorate in psychology or psychiatry required.
If the plaintiffs in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the nation's largest retailer had prevailed last week in a Fort Worth courtroom, that's what employment ads for Wal-Mart might have looked like in the future.
The family of Chris Marshall, one of two attorneys killed in a July 1992 shooting rampage in the Tarrant County Courthouse, and survivor Judge Clyde Ashworth tried to pin civil responsibility on Wal-Mart for not training its sales clerks to recognize the visual and verbal traits of someone who might be mentally unbalanced.
In a $24 million civil suit, attorney Art Brender argued on behalf of the victims that the corporation didn't have "proper procedures" in place to help a sales clerk recognize George Lott as a potential threat.
Never mind that the federal laws requiring criminal record background checks before a handgun could be sold weren't enacted until two years after the shootings.
Discount the fact that Lott, when filling out the "yellow sheet" on May 2, 1992, for the purchase of the gun he would use so fatally 60 days later, did not reveal he had been indicted a month earlier in Illinois on an aggravated sexual assault charge - something that would have automatically disqualified the transaction.
Forget that neither the sales clerk nor anyone else wearing a Wal-Mart nametag pulled the trigger.
The sole party responsible for the death and destruction that occurred that horrible July day was arrested in 1992, tried and found guilty in 1993, and rightfully executed by the state of Texas in 1994.
And jurors apparently recognized that, even if the Marshall family and Ashworth don't. It took all of 30 minutes for them to decide that Wal-Mart was not culpable.
Related lawsuits, in which victims or their survivors have attempted to hold gun makers responsible for crimes committed with their products, also have failed. Courts across the country have realized that manufacturers of legal products aren't responsible for a purchaser's misuse or abuse of the merchandise.
The jury also must have recognized the impossibility of expecting a minimum-wage sales clerk - who may or may not have a high school diploma - to discern who is mentally unbalanced and who isn't. That's a challenge for professional men and women with an alphabet soup of degrees behind their names who spend hours observing an individual before making an assessment.
The attempt to place liability where it didn't belong was just one troubling aspect of the case. The other was that mental illness equals mentally unbalanced and therefore the potential for violence.
A number of studies have shown that people with mental illnesses are not more violent than the general population. If mental illness is one of several factors including a criminal record and a history of substance abuse, then the potential for violence increases, but studies show the violence is more likely to be directed inwardly, and not at others.
To stigmatize people with mental illness as a tragedy waiting to happen is unfair and inaccurate. It is exactly the kind of stereotype that keeps people with treatable depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses from seeking help.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy - Democrats from New York - have done in a bill they jointly sponsored that will require state mental health facilities to send the names of patients to the national background check system.
"Common sense says that someone who is mentally ill shouldn't be able to buy a gun," McCarthy said at the news conference.
Of course, one must consider the source when reading quotes about guns by the honorable representative from New York. Having your husband killed and your son wounded by a madman who shot up a commuter train will skew your perspective. Like Ashworth, McCarthy makes a great witness during victim impact testimony - but she isn't the level-headed, detached thinker needed to make national laws.
A horrible event took place in Fort Worth on July 1, 1992. The lives of the people directly involved and their families were forever changed. But the person responsible for that tragedy has already been held accountable - and he can never kill again.
c 2002, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
Peter Page (The National Law Journal) --
A Texas jury has rejected the contention of two victims of a shooting rampage 10 years ago that Wal-Mart was liable for selling a semi-automatic handgun to the shooter -- a mentally unstable attorney.
The plaintiffs unsuccessfully contended that store personnel should have been trained to ask provoking questions that might have revealed the customer's dangerous paranoia. Plaintiff's counsel Art Brender of the Fort Worth, Texas, Law Offices of Art Brender, said the verdict underscored the difficulty of picking a jury on the highly polarized gun issue.
"We did some focus groups on this and there are really only two positions on guns," he said. "There are the people who don't think they ought to be sold at all, and those people frankly are more honest about their feelings, and people who feel that sellers shouldn't be held responsible for the guy who pulled the trigger. Despite nearly a full day of voir dire, we ended up with a jury that had decided before they ever sat down that unless there was overwhelming evidence they were not going to hold the seller responsible."
Defense counsel Ramona Martinez of Dallas' Cowles & Thompson said the jury simply rejected the plaintiff's theory that gun sellers have a duty to "screen" potential purchasers for dangerous mental illnesses. "They [the plaintiffs] were looking for an application of the law that just wasn't there," she said.
The suit was brought by the family of Chris Marshall, an assistant district attorney in Tarrant County, Texas, who died in the shooting spree, and by retired Judge Clyde Ashworth, who was wounded. The killer, Gregory D. Lott, was convicted of killing two people and wounding three others in a rampage on July 1, 1992, at the Court of Appeal in the Tarrant County Courthouse.
Lott, a lawyer who practiced law sporadically for seven years before surrendering his law license in 1988, has since been executed. Brender described Lott as a "manifestly irrational" person who came to view the Tarrant County court system as his enemy following a bruising divorce and custody battle between Lott and his former wife, Margaret Best. A court-ordered family study by a psychologist concluded that Lott had a paranoid disorder and a violent temper.
On May 2, 1992, Lott, apparently bent on revenge against the Tarrant County courts, purchased a 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic handgun from a Wal-Mart store, then known as Hypermart, in Arlington, Texas. Brender argued that store personnel should have been trained to ask "screening questions" that might have provoked a suspicious reaction from persons suffering paranoid disorders.
"If you ask what is the purpose for purchasing the weapon you don't expect Lott to answer, 'I am going to shoot people at the court of appeal' but you will get a reaction out of the ordinary," he said. Martinez said gun sellers have no legal obligation to determine the mental health of gun purchasers beyond a standard of what is reasonable. Lott, she said, gave no outward appearance of having mental problems.
"He didn't appear aggressive or angry," she said. "He was a graduate of law school. He was a smart man. This mass murder was a plotted event. I don't doubt that even if he is a crazy man and very angry, he could mask that for the 20 minutes it takes to buy a firearm."
Brender said screening questions, like those used by airlines, will elicit revealing responses from dangerously mentally ill people.
Marshall v. Wal-Mart Super Centers Inc., No. 236-154399-94, (Tarrant Co., Texas, Dist. Ct.). http://biz.yahoo.com/law/020503/82454-4.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878