Serenity has a great post regarding the recent passage by the House of a bill that would ban lawsuits against the food industry that blam them for Americans' increasing obesity.
It comes down to the exact same issue behind the recently defeated Senate bill 1805 (which had previously passed in the House), which would have banned lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers when their non-defective, legally-sold products were used in crimes. That issue is personal responsibility.
In this country, there is a movement toward the abrogation of personal responsibility. People don't want to be responsible for their own mistakes or wrongdoing so they look for someone else to blame. Increasingly, this is finding expression in the form of lawsuits against those that did no wrong. The fact that it might net them some money in addition to placing the blame elsewhere is an additional incentive. This movement is being propagated in large part by the Democratic Left. Trial lawyers, seeing the chance to reap huge payoffs from large-scale class action lawsuits (like that against the tobacco industry*) are also supporting these types of lawsuits.
To paraphrase Jeff Snyder in his book "Nation of Cowards," the Left wants to make the concept of personal responsibility *irrelevant*. Instead of punishing people for wrongdoing, they want to make it impossible to do wrong in the first place.
Think about this for a minute. If someone steals my car and uses it to run over a bunch of people, who is responsible? Am I responsible because I didn't take greater precautions to secure my car? Is the dealer and/or manufacturer responsible because they didn't include additional theft-prevention devices and features? Of course not. Even if we were, how much more would we have to do to prevent theft in order for us not to be responsible? The correct answer to the original question is, of course, the person who stole the car.
It's the same way with guns. If someone steals my gun and shoots someone with it, he is the responsible party. I'm not responsible ** and neither is the dealer or the manufacturer. Now, if the gun is defective and, as a result, goes off accidentally and shoots someone, then the manufacturer bears some of the blame. And the recent legislation would *not* have banned lawsuits in such cases. It was completely disengenuous for its opponents to say that it granted immunity to the gun industry from all lawsuits.
And now we come to this new legislation. I support it, just as I supported S. 1805, but I'd actually rather see a more general law that covers the general case of all legal, non-defective, lawfully-sold products. As the title of this post says, I am overweight. I admit it. And I take full responsibility for it. I could eat less, eat a more healthy diet, and exercise more. I've made the choice to eat what I've eaten and to live the lifestyle I have. There's nobody to blame but me.
* I consider the lawsuits against the tobacco industry to be different for this reason: The tobacco industry deliberately covered up the mounting scientific evidence that smoking was harmful and, quite frankly, lied to the public. They engaged in fraud and should therefore have been held accountable.
** The argument can be made with some justification that I would be responsible if I left my gun lying around where someone could easily take it. Unlike a car, a gun is something that can be easily picked up. I would expect to take some of the blame if I were to leave it laying on the sidewalk, for example, and someone came along and took it. If it's in my home, though, even if it's not locked in a safe but simply stored in a bedside drawer, someone would still have to enter my home, find it, and steal it and, therefore, they would be entirely to blame.
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