A taste of their own medicine
In their rush to permit the state of Texas to deputize private citizens to bring lawsuits against women seeking abortions and their abortion providers, the U. S. Supreme Court left the door open to some deliciously unexpected payback. California Governor Gavin Newsom now wants to take that legal precedent and use it to allow private citizens to sue manufacturers of assault weapons and ghost gun providers. When New York Attorney General Letitia James heard about Newsom’s plan she went to her team and told them, “We need to follow his lead.”
Seeking injunctive relief against assault weapons and ghost guns is the new payback for Republican tyranny, and I can almost hear Republicans reaching for their pearls to clutch. But the message is unequivocal: if Republicans want to take vengeance on women for exercising control over their own bodies then Governor Newsom and a growing list of others are going to jolly well take their penis extenders away from them.
My first thought was, as a former resident of California, does this law include American citizens living outside the United States? Because if it does I just might make suing gun companies my new hobby for 2022. I could use as a basis for the lawsuits my own experience of the difference between living in a country where guns are ubiquitous and one where guns are rare. I understand, in a way most Americans don’t, how much safer you feel when people around you aren’t, generally speaking, packing heat. I want the same thing for my fellow Americans I left behind. It’s a great feeling and I want to share it with my embattled brothers and sisters back home.
So it’s now open season on gun manufacturers and I hope it puts them straight out of business. I hope it makes them finally understand that tyranny is a weapon that can be pointed at them just as easily as the murder weapons they so heartlessly churn out. Suddenly, getting rich on the graves of dead children ain’t what it used to be.
But unlike the despicable law that allows anyone in America to sue, say, a Texas Uber driver for driving a woman to an abortion clinic, Newsom’s law can be used for righteously non-corrupt purposes. Until now gun manufacturers have been immune to legal redress. Until now parents of dead children murdered in school shootings couldn’t sue the companies that got rich on their tragedies.
Well, with ironic thanks to the alt-right faction on SCOTUS, now the creators of the deadly technology of murder can finally get what’s coming to them. From now on manufacturing weapons used exclusively for killing other people will suddenly be a dangerous occupation. Who would have thought such a thing could ever happen in the United States of America? And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.