2 Milwaukee police officers sue gun store

[johndoe3]

http://www.cbs58.com/story/30143029/for ... -selection

2 Milwaukee police officers (one is no longer working as a policeman) were shot in 2009 while on duty. They are suing Badger Guns in Milwaukee, because the gunstore sold the handgun used to shoot them.

A legitimate sale of the handgun took place, and then the purchaser gave/sold it to another person who used the handgun to shoot and wound the 2 police officers.

Do you think a jury would blame the gunstore when the person who bought the handgun later sold it(or gave it to someone else)?

To me, justice calls for tossing the case.

[poikilotrm]

Are they suing the car dealership that sold the car that transported the bad guys? How about the oil companies who sold the fuel? How about the farmers who provided the food to fuel the bodies of the bad guys? The supermarkets? How about the city for providing water?

[T-Rex]

Don't forget the guy that made the cord to power the register which rang-up the sale of the gun

[a_canadian]

If the parents of a girl who got killed at that Aurora theatre shooting got their suit against the guys who sold ammo to the shooter tossed out of court (and rightfully so as that was ridiculous) then obviously same rules apply. These fine policemen need their bottoms spanked publicly. That is all.

[cal50]

People sue the target with the most money and its rare its the person that pulled the trigger.

( Bottom feeders all of them , cops & Atty. )

[jreinke]

Well the cops won, and apparently justifiable so.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/10/14/wi ... tcmp=hpbt2

[D9M9TR9S]

I'd like to know what type was this $40 gun...

Investigators said Burton got the weapon a month before the confrontation, after giving $40 to another man, Jacob Collins, to make the purchase at the store in West Milwaukee.

[thecameraman79]

Guessing the cost of the gun plus $40 for his troubles...

I'd like to know what type was this $40 gun...

Investigators said Burton got the weapon a month before the confrontation, after giving $40 to another man, Jacob Collins, to make the purchase at the store in West Milwaukee.

[TROOPER]

I heard on the radio that this suit was victorious. The winning suit alleged that the gun-store facilitated a known straw-buyer purchase, and in fact, when the straw-buyer filled out the form, he inadvertently put down that he was purchasing for someone else... to which the attending clerk pointed out, then either corrected the form, or issued a new form.

I think this changes how I feel about the situation. I'll need to think on it some more.

In a trial that pitted the 2nd Amendment against the protection of police officers, the Badger Guns shop in Milwaukee was successfully sued by two wounded officers and city officials.

Officer Bryan Norberg and former Officer Graham Kunisch were both shot in the face in 2009 by a man who bought a semiautomatic pistol at the store using a “straw buyer” because he couldn’t legally buy the weapon. The shooter is serving an 80-year sentence.

“The lawsuit alleged the store was negligent and should have spotted clear warning signs that the gun was being sold to a ‘straw buyer,’” a local ABC affiliate reported.

The two officers were awarded combined sums of nearly $6 million, including $730,000 in punitive damages for Kunisch, who lost an eye and part of his frontal lobe in the shooting. The verdict was reached after nine hours.

The outcome was particularly noteworthy considering gun dealers and the industry at large are widely shielded by a 2005 federal law that grants them legal immunity. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act does provide six instances in which a gun dealer or manufacturer can be sued—negligence is one of them.

But those cases are rare. “It was only the second time in the last decade that a civil lawsuit alleging negligent sales by a gun shop reached a jury,” noted Erik Eckholm of The New York Times. According to lawyers for the defense, the verdict will be appealed.

The gun store isn't being sued for the legal sale of a legal handgun to a legal buyer, they're being sued for an illegal sale to a prohibited buyer. The whole case fulcrums on "should-have-known", as in, they should have known from the behavior of the two patrons and the slip-up on the pre-sale legal form.

All I know is that one time I was buying a gun from big-box store "Academy", and I misunderstood the "transferee" question, and I was prohibited from the purchase for 60 days (or something like that). I would think that had I been engaged in a straw-purchase, that the store's refusal to engage in the sale at that moment unless all items checked correctly on the first go-around would have provided that store with an impregnable defense had my situation been like the one in this story.

[whiterussian1974]

I've seen posters that read "Unless ALL boxes marked YES you won't be allowed to purchase a firearm."
Kind of like a Voters' Guide for ATF forms.