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District of Columbia v. Beretta4/21/2005
. Code § 7-2551.02, has eased the liability-limiting elements of traditional tort law to create a cause of action against gun manufacturers and distributors for injuries to individuals caused by a particular class of lethal firearms having little or no social utility. In these circumstances, we are doubly unpersuaded of the necessity or wisdom of adopting judicially a right of action for public nuisance applied to the manufacture and sale of guns generally, where an effect may be a proliferation of lawsuits "not merely against these defendants but . . . against . . . other types of commercial enterprises" - manufacturers, say, of liquor, anti-depressants, SUVs, or violent video games - "in order to address a myriad of societal problems . . . regardless of the distance between the 'causes' of the 'problems' and their alleged consequences." Sturm, Ruger, 761 N.Y.S.2d at 203.
V. Strict Liability
In Count I, the plaintiffs all have brought suit under D.C. Code § 7-2551.01 et seq. (2001), the Assault Weapon Manufacturing Strict Liability Act of 1990 (the "SLA" or "Act"). The operative provision of the statute, § 7-2551.02, states:
Any manufacturer, importer, or dealer of an assault weapon or machine gun shall be held strictly liable in tort, without regard to fault or proof of defect, for all direct and consequential damages that arise from bodily injury or death if the bodily injury or death proximately results from the discharge of the assault weapon or machine gun in the District of Columbia.
The SLA defines "assault weapon" to include a number of specific products, and invests "machine gun" with the same meaning defined in D.C. Code § 7-2501.01 (10), i.e., "any firearm which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily converted or restored to shoot:
(A) Automatically, more than 1 shot by a single function of the trigger; (B) Semiautomatically, more than 12 shots without manual reloading." In enacting the SLA, the D.C. Council understood assault weapons to "include both automatic and semiautomatic weapons," as well as "some handguns and rifles," a class of weapons it found have little or no social benefit but at the same time pernicious consequences for the health and safety of District residents and visitors. See SLA § 2 (2), D.C. Law 8-263 [Act 8-289], § 2, 37 DCR 8482 (Dec. 28, 1990) (hereafter "Findings").
The trial court dismissed this count as to all defendants, concluding that (1) the statute provides no cause of action to the District of Columbia and (2), in any case, (a) the plaintiffs failed to state a claim within the Act and (b) the SLA is an unconstitutional attempt at extraterritorial regulation, violating both the Commerce Clause and principles of due process. We therefore confront three issues:
A. Does the SLA, or any other statute by implication, give the District of Columbia a right of recovery for liability under the SLA;
B. Did the complaint sufficiently plead the defendants' liability to the plaintiffs under the SLA; and, if so,
C. Does the SLA impermissibly burden interstate commerce or violate due process?
We answer these questions in order.
A. District of Columbia
"The text of an enactment is the primary source for determining its drafters' intent." Stevenson v. District of Columbia Bd. of Elections & Ethics, 683 A.2d 1371, 1376 (D.C. 1996) (citation and quotation marks omitted). "In the ordinary case, absent any indication that doing so would frustrate [the legislature's] clear intention or yield patent absurdity, our obligation is to apply the statute as [the legislature] wrote it." Hubbard v. United States, 514 U.S. 69
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 District of Columbia Personal Injury Attorneys
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