this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Buffalo Shooting Survivors Sue Social Media & Gun Companies::Survivors and a family member of a victim of the mass shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York are suing social media platforms, gun companies, and the shooter's parents.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm okay with that.

Car companies only implemented safety features after lawsuits came. Safety rose and fatalities dropped.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you suggesting this was caused by an accident due to insufficient safety devices?

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This one? Not sure. Others? Definitely.

There’s studies showing that the gun industry doesn’t evolve like other markets due to laws giving them immunity. Normally the industry would add safety features like built in trigger locks ( fingerprint sensors or NFC ring that’s required to fire) but without the motivation they’re not adding them.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's because those are terrible ideas. You'd trust your life to a fingerprint censor or nfc nonsense? I sure as fuck wouldn't

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Depends. Thousands of kids a year are accidentally shot (and many cops and others are shot with their own weapon), so if it reduced that then I’m for it. There’s plenty of reliable guns with some sort of key or unlock code already.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There’s plenty of reliable guns with some sort of key or unlock code already.

like what

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is exactly one firearm on the market that has reliable fingerprint/facial ID. It's made by a company called Biofire, and it starts at $1500.

People who have children in their house can choose to buy one, but no one should rely on this sort of safety mechanism to stop their kids from killing themselves. Education and a simple gun lock works perfectly fine for kids and standard firearms when taught/used correctly. There's nothing wrong with layering safety like with the ID features in Biofire's gun, but requiring these features by law is just unnecessary, short sighted, and prices put poor people from arming and defending themselves.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Prices would plummet if guns were a normal market that responded to pressure like lawsuits. That’s because giving gun manufacturers legal immunity means they spent nearly nothing on new safety features. That’s what I was talking about.

Stop trying to concern troll that gun safety cuts off gun access for the poor. Poor people also have to take mandatory driving education classes and driver licensing, because cars can kill people.

Clearly voluntary education and simple gun locks are not enough, given the tens of thousands of gun deaths a year. The gun lobby won’t have it any other way and spend more money lobbying politicians to block these than any education.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gun makers don't have legal immunity if they design an inherently unsafe product. If someone makes and sells a firearm that can go off when on safe that person could be sued. The PLCAA is about not being held accountable for the crimes of third parties.

And how would law suits drive prices down? You suggested if they were sued more that'd lead to more R&D. But those both are just two expenses that contribute to overhead.

Safe firearms handling should be compulsory thing in highschool even if it's just a single 45 min class period. It'd benefit people a lot more than pre-calc.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems kinda nuts. But if everyone sued everyone every time there was a mass shooting, things might actually start happening to minimize their frequency.

Or judges will just start throwing out the cases.

Probably that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

the only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a lawsuit

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s the people vs the shooter. And let’s be honest, eventually the people of the USA is at least as guilty of this and all the other crimes like this as the actual shooter.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

According to the lawsuits, YouTube and Reddit “transformed and addicted” Gendron and prepared him for the attack on Tops market.

I'd like to see what they're actually claiming.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I dunno about reddit but it's no secret that YouTube will push you down a rabbit hole with their algorithm. Watch one video popular with right wing people and suddenly everything is about "Jewish space lasers" and "antifa coming to murder you"

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

They're claiming "I went through a tragedy and want money, give me a settlement out of court quickly." Anyone that thinks this will go to court and win is a nut.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I strongly suspect that the suit against the gun companies will be thrown out. They complied with the laws, and the guns functioned as firearms are intended to function. The PLCAA was written precisely to prevent this kind of bad-faith lawsuit, where a company is being held responsible for the illegal used of their product. Imagine how batshit crazy it would be if you sued a Ford dealership for selling a car to someone that had a secret drinking problem, and that person then drove drunk and killed a bus full of schoolkids. What magic divination is the gun store supposed to use to figure out that a person is a mass-murder-to-be, and how do you ensure that no people that aren't going to be mass murderers aren't being denied their constitutional rights? Now, if the shooter was buying guns and armor, and told people, hey, what gun is going to be best for killing people in a supermarket?, then yeah, they have a case for negligence. But I've got an AR-15, and I'm working on saving up for body armor, because I need both for the kind of shooting competitions I'm interested in. Given how many AR-15s there are--over 24M in civilian hands, or about 1 for every 13 people--and given how many people own some form of body armor, compared to the number of these random, mass-murder events there are, neither purchase would normally raise any suspicion.

The case against the social media companies will be a challenge, because that's going to largely be covered by 1A issues, unless they can point to issues that amount to incitement.

Parents are a stretch as well. They'd likely have to have some kind of finding of gross negligence in order to hold them responsible.

If you really, truly, deeply care about preventing this kind of tragedy, then you need to start addressing root causes of this. The FBI published a report a year or two back about profiling this type of murderer, and it turns out that it's really hard because they're so very rare.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I really hate these kind of lawsuits, while yes what happened fucking sucks I feel like this always leads to repeal section 230 bullshit. I feel like we need to realize that having all eggs in one basket for social media is bad and decentralization is better. Secondly if section 230 was repealed the extremism excuse could be used to shut down anarchist mastodon instances