Willful ignorance of product misuse lets industries deny responsibility for harm.

Evidence

Ricker further contended that the gun industry resists weeding out corrupt dealers because doing so would acknowledge the problem. This could create potential liability. They even canceled formal meetings to discuss illegal sales, according to Ricker, for fear that it would be construed as admission of a problem and expose them to charges of negligence for their inaction. Not knowing what happened to their guns permitted deniability of responsibility. Noting the distinction in tort law between misfeasance and nonfeasance, Professor Richard L. Abel at the University of California at Los Angeles explains that it is much easier to adjudicate doing harm than doing nothing to prevent harm. Those within the industry willing to stop the illegal gun trade were pressured to remain silent. … 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, 1100

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s claims about Cooper and authoritarianism: industries as institutions psychologically disengaging to rationalize harmful policy; also parallels Horkheimer’s observation that bourgeois society orients toward position not persons. — connects to: Government can reduce ecological cause-effect ignorance to steer consumer choices. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 1010; Organizations deny environmental change to protect their established roles and resources. — Robert B. McCalla, NATO’s persistence after the cold war, 71
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1100