There’s an important public policy purpose in bringing this lawsuit, [Brady chief counsel Jonathan] Lowy argued. “Although it’s obvious that ghost guns arm dangerous criminals and harm innocent people, the companies that make and sell ghost guns make profits without bearing any of the costs,” he said. “That’s why it’s critical that they be held accountable to victims. We hope to establish a legal precedent that ghost gun companies can be held accountable for injuries and deaths they cause, to bring some civil justice to these innocent victims, and to lead companies to sell guns more responsibly.”
The three cases cited above are hardly exhaustive. Another case whose settlement should be announced soon involves another gun industry loophole custom-made for the “bad guy with a gun”: replica antique black powder guns (that are nonetheless fully functional). Collectively, what these cases show is how deeply dishonest the “good man with a gun” rhetoric really is. It’s not that such people don’t exist. But they’re not the people the NRA and the gun industry have been looking out for.
Quite the contrary: They’ve been used as human shields to fend off gun safety activists and reasonable regulation, while the “bad man with a gun” demographic has been catered to for decades, as the body count continues to grow. With the NRA in crisis and the industry’s PLCAA bulwark teetering, the time is ripe for a historic, responsibility-focused shift in gun policy. And the fact that Congress is still paralyzed no longer matters all that much. Change is coming anyway. Perhaps it already has.
— Paul Rosenberg in Real gun reform without Congress: Lawsuits demolish the “good guy with a gun”