PISSING CONTEST BETWEEN MASS. AG AND GUN MAKERS

By Bob Walsh

Maura Healy is the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She hates guns. She hates people who own guns. She hates the fact that guns exist in the world. She hates the fact that she cannot control people. She has asserted thru her office that Remington and Glock manufacture an essentially unsafe product. Both of those makers are suing to block her from accessing their records of safety complaints about their products.

Much of Healy’s beef with Glock is that their guns fire when you pull the trigger. She cites three specific instances:

One was a negligent discharge of a Glock pistol by a Sheriff’s Deputy in the San Francisco Hall of Justice.

One was the shooting of a LAPD officer by his 3-year-old son, who accessed his gun under his car seat and shot daddy thru the seat back, leaving him crippled. (The gun did work like it was
supposed to; when you pulled the trigger it went bang.)

The third was the accidental-negligent discharge of a Glock in the pocket of a man in Massachusetts, who was dancing at a Fourth of July party when the gun, sans holster, allegedly
fired all by itself from inside his pocket.

So, rather than allowing for the fact that human being on occasion do stupid things with firearms she wants to blame the guns.

Glock has asserted that Healy is engaging in a political action, pointing out that she is on the record as calling guns a “public health crisis” and an “epidemic.” It should be noted that Glock pistols cannot be sold to private individuals in Massachusetts, only to police departments or individual police officers. She countered that illegal purchasers are still residents of the state and entitled to consumer protection.

Remington has asserted that less than 1% of its consumer complaint files have anything to do with the state of Massachusetts and that it is unreasonable to expect them to supply files from complaints from other states or even other countries.

It also seems that these two manufacturers are not the only ones her office is targeting. In July Healy also moved to ban the sales of “military style assault rifles” in her state, including those whose sale was completely legal under Massachusetts law.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s a simple solution to this legal brouhaha. Glock and Remington should just pull their plants out of the state of Massachusetts and set up shop in the gun-friendly state of Texas where they won’t have to put up with such crap.