The gun industry displaces responsibility for lethal products onto understaffed regulators

Evidence

The California lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that gun manufacturers cannot be held responsible because they are too far removed from the point of sale (Dolan, 2001). 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. … In short, the gun industry has created a distribution system with scant oversight that institutionalizes a culture of nonresponsibility for an extremely lethal product. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1102

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis of moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility — the manufacturer/wholesaler/dealer chain echoes Milgram’s division-of-labor excuses.