Shooting victim's suit misses target

Two years ago, Barry Grunow was murdered by one of his students in a West Palm Beach classroom. Last Thursday, a jury awarded his widow $1.2 million in her lawsuit against Valor Corporation, a gun distributor who sold the murder weapon. In her lawsuit, Pam Grunow accused the Valor Corporation of distributing a gun that was "unsafe, defective and lacked features that would have prevented a minor from using it."

The gun in question (Grunow's attorney refers to it as a "Saturday Night Special") is a .25 caliber Raven handgun. It is a low-cost, simple firearm that often turns up in gun-related crimes. One could argue whether or not the gun serves any of the purposes that pro-gun lobbyists rally around (i.e. self-defense, collecting, etc.) but this is not what the Pam Grunow lawsuit is about. The argument here is whether or not the distributor of the gun should be held legally responsible (even partially) for Barry Grunow's murder.

It is important to point out the fact that Valor Corp. is a gun distributor, not a gun manufacturer. The only plausible way a gun distributor could be held responsible for a gun's use is if the distributor sold the gun directly to a minor, sold the gun to someone who did not meet the requirements for buying a gun, or sold the gun with the explicit knowledge that it was defective. Meeting regulations such as these are the only responsibilities that a distributor has.

It is the same in any industry. When an SUV blows up, one sues Ford, not the car dealership from which they bought it. Any unknown defect in the product must be traced back to the manufacturer. The boy who shot Barry Grunow got his gun from the unlocked drawer of a family friend (who had purchased the gun legally), not from Valor Corp. or any Valor Corp. affiliate. To hold Valor Corp. responsible for the boy's use of the gun is absurd.

Pam Grunow's charge against Valor Corp. states that the gun in question was "unsafe" and "defective." Because of this charge, one would assume that the gun that killed Mr. Grunow malfunctioned in some way or discharged prior to the trigger being pulled.

Under those circumstances, someone involved in the production of the gun should be held responsible. The only trouble is, a prior court decision determined that a malfunction did not take place. The boy who shot Mr. Grunow tried to defend himself by saying that the gun went off "by accident," but he was convicted of second-degree murder. If the gun really did go off "by accident" (or due to some malfunction, as Mrs. Grunow would like to claim), then why is this boy serving a 25-to-life sentence when he should only have been convicted of manslaughter?

The second part of Mrs. Grunow's claim is that the gun "lacked safety features that would have prevented a minor from using it." What "safety features" could she be referring to? We are not talking about preventing three-year-olds from swallowing Tylenol. We are talking about a 13-year-old boy. Whether there was a lock on the gun or not, if a 13-year-old wants to use a gun, I am pretty sure he is going to be intelligent enough to figure out how to do so. I would like to think that "child-proofing" becomes a nonsense term once the child in question has reached the age of reason. Even if this was not the case, how can a distributor be held responsible for putting an added safety feature on a gun that wasn't there at the time of manufacture?

Why, then, did the jury rule in favor of Mrs. Grunow? Actually, the jury ruled that Valor Corp was only 5% liable for her husband's death (the school board and the owner of the gun covered the rest…the boy who fired the gun was not even named in the lawsuit) and awarded her $1.2 million instead of her requested $76 million. To me, this looks as if the jury did not believe that Valor Corp. should be held responsible but awarded the money to Mrs. Grunow out of pity. In terms of setting legal precedent, this is preposterously irresponsible. In the hope that the concept of personal responsibility does not completely disappear, the decision should be overturned at the first appeal.