Displacing blame onto underfunded regulators enables industries to deny responsibility.

Evidence

Wholesalers also argue that they, too, bear no responsibility because they are not selling guns to the public. Both the manufacturers and wholesalers use the additional exoneration that they are selling guns only to dealers with federal firearms licenses. They contend that it is not the industry’s responsibility to monitor the dealers for what happens to the guns they sell them. They argue that this is the job of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which licenses gun dealers. However, there are too few federal inspectors to oversee adequately what the dealers are doing. The agency lacks the resources to provide proper on-site inspections of how guns are sold. Given the high profits of illegal gun sales in the criminal market, corrupt dealers will figure out ways of getting around corrective measures if the responsibility is displaced entirely to understaffed and underfunded external regulators. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1102

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of displacement of responsibility onto a ‘licensed’ third party parallels how ordinary people defer to authority figures to rationalize supporting harmful policies claimed in the vault. — connects to: Bureaucrats absorb blame for system-level failures they did not decide. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1325
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1102