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Timothy Lytton, distinguished professor at Georgia State University College of Law and editor of the book Suing the Gun Industry: A Battle at the Crossroads of Gun Control and Mass Torts, said litigation can help to push the issue of gun violence to the front of the public’s minds and also “reframe” the discussion of America’s gun crisis.

“Instead of focusing a lot of attention on the criminal shooters or mental health issues this litigation has focused attention on gun manufacturers, in terms of their design decisions, their distribution decisions and their marketing strategies,” Lytton said.

In addition, the litigation process itself could help to expose any egregious or cynical business decisions made by gun manufacturers.

“It compels [gun] industry defendants to disclose information that regulators may not have. The civil discovery system is a powerful way to force companies that do not want to disclose proprietary information to disclose that information,” Lytton said.

“That might include decisions about how they think about gun design, who they think their market is, their awareness of siphoning of their products to illegal markets.”

Lytton said there are comparisons between those lawsuits and the impact of lawsuits on the opioid industry. Victims of opioid addiction – both addicts and their families – began to file lawsuits against opioid companies in the 2000s, Lytton said, as did states and local health departments.

They made the same legal arguments that people suing gun companies are using: that the design, marketing and distribution of opioids was having an impact on people in the US.

— Adam Gabbatt in Wave of lawsuits against US gun makers raises hope of end to mass shootings

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79 COMMENTS

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  2. “Instead of focusing a lot of attention on the criminal shooters or mental health issues…”. And there it is. Go after law abiding Americans because that’s easy. So when Dodge makes an ad for an 800 horsepower charger they probably aren’t marketing to the geriatric set. How about booze company ads with 20 something’s partying away with an afterthought warning to “drink responsibly”. The real enemy is OFWGs from Alabama who own 95% of all the firearms in America and the manufacturers.

    • “So when Dodge makes an ad for an 800 horsepower charger they probably aren’t marketing to the geriatric set.”

      Wrong, that’s actually their primary market.

      “What?” you say? That’s right, that’s who are buying the majority of those ‘super cars’. Why?

      Simple – They can afford it, and being seen in a car like that stokes their ego…

      • Geoff,

        You are partly right. “Back in the day”, I would have loved to own a car like that (I was a “wannabe” gearhead), but couldn’t afford it. Now, I could afford one, but . . . I need it like I need another nipple. I had my “crazy fun car”, and enjoyed it, and . . . even then, it wasn’t practical. Now I drive trucks or SUVs, because they make sense for what I do.

        My ego ain’t that big, nor is it defined by what I drive (or what I shoot, for that matter, which is why I own two Glocks!).

        • Lamp being honest with everyone how typical is your mindset around others of your age group? I do not doubt what you say applies to you as you have always come off as sensible but that is not a common trait.

    • I know a lot OFWG’s in Minesota and Wisconsin who likely own as many or more firearms than all the legal gun owning red necks down here in Alabama. I used to be 1 of those aspiring white guys until I froze out and moved south.

  3. The intelligent firearms makers produce firearms and accessories that the general public wants. Pretty simple, I fixed it for you.

    Only in Marxist-type regimes would the people be forced to live under rules under which they may not prosper, like mandatory EVs, electric only cooking and heating, firearms that won’t work in a dire emergency, the type and size of housing, or even being able to own property, paying for an invasion at our borders, funding foreign nations at the expense of our own… Hell, it appears we’ve gone over the edge years back.

    • From many companies I’ve worked in, marketing decisions are usually the result of a long liquid lunch with a very high ethanol content.

      As for design decisions, the engineering department try to meet a set of design goals within a cost limit set by finance.

      And as for “illegal markets”, once the product is beyond the retail vendor that is no longer the maker’s problem. It is a problem for the last recorded owner.

  4. “Victims of opioid addiction – both addicts and their families – began to file lawsuits against opioid companies in the 2000s”

    And now we got fentanyl and xylazine. Nice work, traitor commie lawyers.

    • Lawsuits were effective there because the opioid manufacturers straight out lied to doctors about how addictive they were. Presumably the gun grabbers think they’re going to uncover some secret trove of documents where gun manufacturers deliberately schemed to supply guns to illegal straw purchasers and/or tried to appeal to mass shooters. From what we’ve seem from the Bushmaster/Remington lawsuit, all they’re going to get is that manufacturers marketed guns with appeals to military service and manliness. Takes some contorted reasoning to interpret military service or manliness with shooting up a school.

      • If you give a hundred people a glass of water, and tell them it is addictive, six will go into withdrawal. If they can get a lot of money, nintynine will have their lives ruined.

        Do you really think I can’t convince a CA jury that guns are addictive, and that the manufacturers straight up lied about it?

        • Corporate demon with oodles of cash on the one hand, relatable plaintiffs on the other…

          IQ ain’t the key factor, I would say.

      • The drug leg@liz@tion crowd. And their marijuana supporters, I predict will become targets for similar lawfare lawsuits.

        They will have some explaining to do. Since they said Marijuana is not addictive. When in the past, they have worked to raised the THC content by the thousands.

        Also I wonder how many of these “liberal gun owners” supported these lawsuits against the tobacco companies back in the 1990s?
        I bet a lot of them did support those civil law suits. And a lot of them that don’t want to talk about it now.

    • To be fair, there’s reasonable evidence that the pharma companies willfully deceived virtually everyone about the addictive potential as well as the upsides of many of the opioid based painkillers.

      It’s like how heroin was introduced to curb morphine addiction and morphine was supposed to reduce laudanum abuse.

      These two things both happened before 1900 and were pretty obvious mistakes. Later pharmies like Oxy quite obvious had a PR team working overtime to downplay risks and they clearly went from “spin” to “fraud” at some point.

      I don’t think we can say that about firearms manufacturers. They’re pretty straight up about what their products do and don’t do.

  5. “My rage won’t fit on a sign.”

    Willfully ignorant, hateful people.

    Where is Mothra when you need her?

  6. adam abbatt should file lawsuits against the democRat Party for Reparations…evidence is overwhelming.

    So called Lawfare is another scheme to tie crime around the necks of firearm manufacturers, firearm owners, firearm publications, websites, etc.

    Of course Gun Control was not mentioned anywhere in the biased one way street article…As usual Gun Control and its baggage skates by while The Second Amendment gets butchered.

    If you are are a Gun Owner talking 2A and not Defining Gun Control by its History of Rot you damned sure own what’s between the ears of the idiot holding the Rage sign.

    • That’s me. I’m a gun owner who does not define Gun Control by its History of Rot.

      I’m responsible for what someone puts on a protest sign. And you know what? I agree with her.

      You see, she is extremely angry with the criminals who misuse guns. And, like me, she doesn’t know what we can do about it. That, my friends, is the root of her rage. And we all should be outraged — not at the tool, but at the sick person who uses it for a purely evil purpose.

      Evil doesn’t give a damn about the History of Rot. Evil will do as it does, and we will feel the effects of evil until we can wipe it out — which we will never be able to do.

      Who was that great American philosopher who once said, “I have a feeling it’s really gonna be a good, long battle?” (Oh, yeah — that was me in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”)

    • Debbie,

      However true your basic premise may be (and it largely is), you need to acknowledge that the Shannon Watts’, David Hoggs, and “Mini-Mike” Bloombergs have moved way beyond that. The MODERN “gun control” movement is all about CONTROL. Sure, it was racist in its inception, and REMAINS racist in its impact, but . . . they want to control YOU (and pardon me if I incorrectly assumed your race). Not that they aren’t ALSO racist, but . . . it’s all about control.

  7. We gotta ban tractors. People get hungry, wanna grow food, make money, so they buy tractors. Then somebody gets hurt, especially the people who would have already died from famine if those damn tractors had not been easily available.

    We gotta act! Those azzholes are making money from the Earth’s crust! Use discovery to force JDeere to disclose proprietary info, which we can sell to the CCP. Forcing profitable American corporations to disclose proprietary info is ALWAYS good. We can always use the money to defund the police.

    Don’t mind me, I am just your friendly invulnerable perfessor, using my superior intellect to benefit the global community.

    Send me your children so I can mold their minds.

    Drool…

    • “We gotta ban tractors.”

      They did pretty much that recently in the Netherlands.

      Guess what happened? A major election :

      “Result calls into question premier Mark Rutte’s ability to implement harsh policies to cut nitrogen emissions from farms.”

      https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-farmers-party-bbb-mark-rutte-netherlands-big-winner-in-provincial-elections/

      The Leftist fascists have a blind spot that can be exploited. The delude themselves into believing everybody thinks like they do. They don’t. So, they reach too far, and then act all surprised when they draw back a bloody stump (Trump instead of the HildaBeast in 2016).

      Trump won in 2016 because of the blowback from Obamacare. They fucked with the healthcare of middle America, and wrecked it for many people. The 2014 midterm blowout ensured the Leftist fascists never had the votes again to push for any other major piece of legislation for the next 6 years.. Like, banning MSRs and large capacity magazines. They ‘shot their wad’ on the ACA. and paid for it in 2016, when the public was queasy at the prospect of her in office, and chose Trump instead.

      We really ought to thank the fascists for the ‘Bruen’ decision, it was their over-reach with Obama that made it happen… 🙂

      • Remember when Hillary was advocating to make Vitamin E a prescription-only item? And B12, iirc. That back in Hillarycare two-fer days.

        One scary female.

        • Why would you assume his/her/its gender???? What is your evidence that he/her/it is remotely female (Billy Zipperpants clearly didn’t think so)?

  8. “My rage won’t fit on a sign”

    Neither will my “rage” that you anti-gun idiots presume you have the right to infringe and remove my Second Amendment right.

    The difference between my ‘rage’ and your ‘rage’ is that you want to make me responsible for your ‘rage’ because you are too stupid to understand that the law abiding are peacefully exercising their Second Amendment right and have done you no harm instead of focusing your ‘rage’ on the left wing and other politicians that are using you to disguise the fact they are not doing anything about, and in fact are emboldening and facilitating, the very unlawfully acting mentally ill and criminals that are causing the problem you ‘rage’ against.

    It makes me very sad that you idiots can vote.

    • Given that the pic used is just a stock picture and may not reflect what actually happened; a very big part of what the left refuses to see (or deal with) is that people like the person in that photo are the very ones they should be afraid of as potential mass shooters. These are the nut cases doing all of it.

  9. NOTHING done will ease the endless shootings in Chiraq. All the commie simpletons do is disarm the good folks!

  10. Well…
    Marketing strategy might play a role for some but My decisions in this area wouldn’t be any different if there were NO commercials, ads, or or whatever else is considered to be part of the ‘marketing world’. That is no different from car ads that try to sell me the latest automobile based on this ridiculous notion that it’s won some JDPower&ass. award. Like that means anything at all to me.

    The gun manufacturers design choices on the other hand play a huge role. I would sooner have a Ruger 10/22 rather than than a KelTec Sub2000 any day of the week. But then for me, I would rather build a desktop computer than buy one from any company. Partly because they come pre-infected out of the box.

    Guns are NOT advertised to children. It would make no sense to do that. Although there are more and more companies throwing money out the window through advertising making self destructive fools of themselves. Bud Light, Target, Dicks, Walmart, etc. are all examples or this. It’s interesting to see how more shoppers are opting for online ordering as opposed to everyone’s favorite ritual of going to the store itself. Now I’ve seen some pretty dumb ads from the gun makers but then there are huge amounts of stupid commercials being made. Things that just make me want to go elsewhere.

  11. “Timothy Lytton, distinguished professor at Georgia State University College of Law”

    Just enough education to be extremely dangerous to the firearms industry. I hope these companies can find some form of redress.

        • @ Geoff

          I’m surprised that video is still up.

          Since 2000 there have been several thousand videos quietly scrubbed from social media outlets from people in Europe, especially the U.K., warning against letting the democrats socialist movement in the United States take place like they are trying to do now. They are well aware of the dangers, and some of their people are starting to wake up and realize how their governments modern day versions of feudal tyranny have been subjecting them to tyranny all this time and realizing they don’t have inherent rights and freedom but rather those their government grants and control.

    • An educated idiot is still an idiot including T Lytton.
      Smoking pot/using drugs is a privilege.
      The 2nd Amendment is a Right everyone has whether they desire to exercise it or not.
      The choice is individual, if T Lytton doesn’t want to exercise his right, that is his business.
      And, if POTG want to exercise their right, then that is their business and none of his or others.

  12. I look forward to my doctor prescribing me guns and ammo and my insurance company paying the bill.

    I wouldn’t even mind getting addicted.

    • I started smoking gunm powder, I dont know if the addiction is physiological of physical a bit of both perhaps?

      • You’re supposed to mix it with cocaine and snort it, though you might be able to poke it.

        It’s called brown-brown, coke+nitroglycerin being the major active ingredients.

        AKA “Child Soldier Fuel®”. Great shit if you want a bunch of kids to nail a villagefull (or two) of innocent people to a tree.

        • Getting all heart of darkness on us there. Yeah Africa was a continent I was happy to miss deploying to especially with the immigrants telling me what they went through in Rhodesia.

  13. Thank you Professor Lytton for admitting that you don’t give a damn about actual causes of the violence so common in our large cities. Clearly, for you this is nothing more than a strategy to attack people you hate because of your politics.

      • “name of the game”

        Good point. A “certain amount” of what I call guild-ism is going on here – as in a river of revenue flowing into the lawyer’s guild.

  14. The idea that these unconstitutional lawsuits could bring an end to mass shootings (or more bristly mass murder) shows how ignorant these people are.

  16. Why aren’t lawyers that threaten freedom the most endangered species on our planet?…Just wondering…

  20. “Victims of opioid addiction – both addicts and their families – began to file lawsuits against opioid companies in the 2000s, Lytton said, as did states and local health departments.”
    And overdose deaths are at an all time high thanks to Fentanyl, why it’s almost like the laws only served to make things worse.

    • The suits were about drug companies pushing more opiate drugs than were necessary for the prescribed uses getting people hooked on legal prescribed opiates. Those are the people fentanyl imported from Mexico and China is now killing. The laws that make it illegal to distribute prescription drugs to get high also apply to fentanyl. The laws didn’t make anything worse because the laws are the same. Civil liability imposed on the legitimate manufacturers and distributors who got people hooked caused the pharmaceutical and medical professions to reign it in; that would have only created a deficit in the supply of illegal opiates. Fentanyl has filled the demand.

      • Kinda hard to “push” exactly the right amount of opiates.

        The people that Mr Fentanyl is now killing mostly did not ever take prescription meds (pers obs)…

        They are very hard and expensive to get – whereas black market stuff is easy and cheaper – when and if you have severe chronic pain, you will begin to comprehend that Hell is a world in which you cannot die.

  21. The gun industry ought to counter strike with law suits of their own about the lies of the gun control freaks.

  22. counter sue any municipality who sues to run discovery on them and their lax enforcement of laws against habitual offenders.

    I wonder if they are over confident coming off the Bushmaster settlement though. They neglect it was a settlement I suspect.

    I most certainly wouldn’t market any of my guns as fingerprint resistant but I don’t know that they will find the stuff they are looking for.

  23. “…said litigation can help to push the issue of gun violence to the front of the public’s minds and also “reframe” the discussion of America’s gun crisis.”

    Oh, look, an open admission that the lawsuit is part and parcel of a propaganda campaign. (Oh, God, here I go again.) Oh, and it’s bidirectional and also multifaceted in its approach too, shocker.

    Let’s take a look.

    First, let’s look at the intelligence gathering side of this.

    “…That might include decisions about how they think about gun design, who they think their market is.

    They say this because they know to a certainty that marketing and PR departments ARE propaganda departments. Ed Bernays created the term “PR” specifically because the term “propaganda” was toxic after WWI. This is literally because Bernays was too good at his job and successfully demonized “propaganda” as a German war tool. Therefore when he transitioned to the private market he had to use his own manipulative tools to rebrand the techniques lest they be seen in a negative light.

    Because of this, the anti gun propagandists know that a marketing/PR shop within a gun manufacturer or working with one will necessarily follow a set of rules and steps in development of a marketing plan and that such information will contain information that can be “spun” to make the company look bad.

    As Bernays pointed out in 1928, it was already a thing at that time to “create the market” for your supply because this was a facet of mass manufacturing. It would, by necessity of economies of scale, produce excess product for which a market must be created. (See Propaganda Chapter V, “Business and the Public”).

    Further still, the marketing department will take steps to essentially manipulate people into a position so that the “market is created” by creating the illusion that customers came to a conclusion on their own. This is Marketing 101. It will be there. And it can be shown in the cold light of day too.

    The PR shop for the antis knows this and they want to find out exactly how it was done so that they can selectively use aspects of this information to make the gun companies look bad.

    Secondarily, they can look at the exact tactics the gun companies are using and then counter attack on those specific grounds, blunting any advantage in marketing that the gun world has. This is essentially the type of competition one manufacturer might use against another to steal market share but instead it’s being used in an attempt to simply erase a portion of the market.

    Further, what the first sentence I quoted reveals is an open admission to the use of a tactic called “high-spotting”, which is basically defined as “vividly seizing the attention of the public and fixing it on some detail or aspect of the enterprise which is typical of that enterprise”.

    Usually high-spotting is done to highlight what a company wants to have perceived as a benefit. A soap company loves cleanliness, just like you! A car manufacturer loves safety features, just like you!

    However, all these tactics can be reversed. They’re going to high-spot “dirty little secrets” and then claim to have done the public a favor. The highly manipulative propagandists point to the other propagandists and say “Look, they’re manipulating you and we don’t like that. Just like you!”. Classic projection but when expertly done, very effective.

    The set of questions, always at the root of this sort of thing are 1. What is the prevailing custom? and 2. How do we change that custom in such a manner that something appears to recommend itself?

    Part of this has to do with purely emotional manipulation of GROUPS, not individuals (the psychology of groups is different from that of individuals in many ways which are not insignificant but that’s a topic for another day).

    Trotter and Le Bon pointed out that groups don’t think but rather act on emotion, cliché, habits or impulse. This is part of what makes a crowd dangerous in some circumstances.

    Generally, groups tend to follow impulse first and that impulse is to follow a trusted leader. Lacking such a leader the group will fall back on clichés or images which serve as a stand-in for a whole group of ideas or experiences (see Jung, Man and His Symbols, again something for another time).

    Therefore the manipulation of clichés, or the creation of new ones can, statistically, cause a group to move in a predictable direction. Once the group is is motion, the vast majority of members will follow it. The cliché here, obviously, is a distrust of big business and the assumption that they lie. This is an appeal that cuts across political lines to some extent thanks to recent events involving pharma.

    And this crosscutting effect undoubtedly goes farther than that. Quality propaganda, as businesses have known since the early 1900’s, appeals to as many basic emotions as possible while simultaneously avoiding extraneous emotional appeals that waste resources and reduce punching power of each individual portion of the propaganda.

    As Bernays points out in Chapter VI, Propaganda and Political Leadership, there are rules for emotional appeals. The three biggest ones, applied to a multi-media approach are as follows:

    Emotional Content Must:
    1. Coincide in every way with the broad/basic plan and all of its minor details. (He’s referring to a political platform, again, something for another day).
    2. Be adapted to the many groups of the public at which it is aimed.
    3. Conform to the media of the distribution of ideas. (Print must work in print, radio in radio etc. Think about something like the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960.)

  24. There’s no secret here. All anyone needs to do is just look at the magazine advertising from the turn of the century about firearms. It’s all open to the public.

    They marketed guns for self protection. From against animal attacks. And criminal attacks. As well as a mother’s concern about firearm safety with her children around.

    • They already do look, it’s an area of sociology called “Gun Studies”. Do you want three guesses which way most of the people in this area of “study” lean on guns?

      There’s a cottage industry here and it’s all designed around a singular purpose, to create the image of gun companies selling “death machines”.

      The increase in “gun advertising for self defense” coupled with the drop in “sport” and “hunting” means guns are being sold specifically as objects to kill other people, dontcha know?

      Here’s an article on just that from Nature (!), with graphs too: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0437-0

      The moneyshot of this paper is “As Yamane (2017) has argued, social institutions—including the legal system, economy, and technology—shape American gun culture. These institutions require greater attention, as well.”

      Oh look, now they have “experts” they can call on when making an argument. It’s science. It’s in Nature, afterall.

      Now, they want internal gun company marketing research as evidence from inside the companies and they’re pretty sure they’ll find it because PR people know how PR works, nothing is done without stupid amounts of market research and that research will follow some general rules. The fact that it does this means it can be used to make the company look bad. Any time the company looks to try to expand sales this will be shown to be “creating the market”… for a death machine.

      Now they’re building an argument that “creating the market” = murder. The companies are selling murder. And they have scientific proof as well as internal documents. They already make this argument, this just gives them more ways to attack the companies with it rather than just blathering on MSNBC.

      If they end up getting to make that argument in court to a jury, gun companies are in a heap of financial trouble.

      On top of that, if they’re successful, they can start to really shift the Overton Window while at the same time forcing companies to spend resources defending BS lawsuits which will come in greater numbers once they have those internal documents “as proof”.

      There’s a reason Shannon Watts had her position and that reason is exactly why her background was carefully “curated” to the maximum extent possible.

      • I downloaded the article. Thanks for the link. And welcome back to the comment section. I hope all is well with you and the family.

        • Thanks, same to you.

          That one’s a good place to start “source mining” if you want to see where these… people… are headed.

  25. You mean how Smith and Wesson came up with the “M & P” name as a way to appeal to pathetic, groveling bootlickers?

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