Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2003 - 5:27 pm:

"The defendants, viewed in the broadest sense, are less culpable than some other elements of society, but their culpability nevertheless cannot be ignored. In the twenty year period between 1979 and 1998, there were just under 300,000 firearm homicides in the United States; handguns were involved in countless more non-fatal injuries and other criminal activity. In the years between 1990 and 2000, on average 662,000 incidents of violent crime were committed nationally with handguns each year. While defendants are justified in disclaiming liability for all these violent crimes and the resulting injuries and deaths, that is hardly a justification for failure to take elementary steps that the evidence demonstrated would have saved the lives of many people unnecessarily lost to handgun violence, and could save the lives of a myriad more. The power of the gun industry to reduce deaths from their products is estimated to run into the thousands in any decade."

"The fact that the NAACP and the rest of the community can and would be better protected against handgun violence by relatively cheap and simple responsible policies of manufacturers and distributors of handguns is not decisive. Ironically, the demonstration that all New Yorkers would gain from this method of reducing a dangerous public nuisance prevents the NAACP from obtaining relief under New York law on the ground that it suffers a special kind of harm from irresponsible handgun marketing."