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District of Columbia v. Beretta4/21/2005
ege a duty and foreseeable harm to "the District [of Columbia] and its residents." Complaint, 151. That duty is unlike even the one claimed to be owed subclasses of residents (shoppers at a particular store, children at a given school, attendees of a particular event) regarding whom we have repeatedly said that "generic" proffers of foreseeability do not suffice to create a duty of care. The class to whom the defendants allegedly owed a duty here is potentially unlimited except by the population of the District of Columbia, any member of which could be a shooting victim. That indeterminacy, as other courts have recognized, results from the sheer number of ways in which firearms, despite any reasonable precautions manufacturers can be expected to take, may reach the hands of criminal wrongdoers - the sheer number of causal links, in other words, between the licensed manufacture and distribution of firearms and their use to kill or injure others. This court's decisions, we conclude, do not permit recognition of a common-law tort resting on such limitless notions of duty and foreseeability. See also Lacy v. District of Columbia, 424 A.2d 317, 320-21 (D.C. 1980) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted) (recognizing, as a matter of "policy," the existence in our law of "various liability-limiting considerations which relieve the defendant of liability for harm he actually caused where the chain of events appears highly extraordinary in retrospect").
Among courts rejecting claims of negligent distribution of firearms similar to the plaintiffs', the New York Court of Appeals in Hamilton v. Beretta, U.S.A., Corp., 750 N.E.2d 1055 (N.Y. 2001), leave to appeal denied, 801 N.E.2d 421 (N.Y. 2003), has provided the most cogent analysis. Like our Delahanty decision, Hamilton answered certified questions of law from the federal Circuit Court, including whether under New York decisional law, "the defendants owed plaintiffs a duty to exercise reasonable care in the marketing and distribution of the handguns they manufacture." Id. at 1059. The federal District Court had "imposed a duty on gun manufacturers 'to take reasonable steps available at the point of . . . sale to primary distributors to reduce the possibility that these instruments will fall into the hands of those likely to misuse them.'" Id. at 1061 (citation omitted). The New York Court of Appeals rejected that duty as a basis for common-law negligence. Its prior decisions, like this court's, were "cautious . . . in extending liability to defendants for their failure to control the conduct of others," a "judicial resistance to the expansion of duty [growing] out of practical concerns both about potentially limitless liability and about the unfairness of imposing liability for the acts of another." Id. at 1061. Under the duty imposed by the District Court, by contrast, " he pool of possible plaintiffs is very large - potentially, any of the thousands of victims of gun violence." Id. (footnote omitted). Moreover, the court reasoned, the connection between defendants, the criminal wrongdoers and plaintiffs is remote, running through several links in a chain consisting of at least the manufacturer, the federally licensed distributor or wholesaler, and the first retailer. The chain most often includes numerous subsequent legal purchasers or even a thief. Such broad liability, potentially encompassing all gunshot crime victims, should not be imposed without a more tangible showing that defendants were a direct link in the causal chain that resulted in plaintiffs' injuries, and that defendants were realistically in a position to prevent the wrongs.
Id. at 1061-62.
The court therefore rejected the plaintiffs' assertion of "a general duty of c
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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