Why are the Democrats introducing a bill that allows victims of shooting events to sue the gun industry?

This is a tyre.

This one’s a little special though, it’s what caused the deaths of my grandparents.

At about 70mph in scorching heat, it burst, and well … you can guess what happened next.

And I’ve never seen my dad cry like he did that day. The loss of his parents impacted him for months afterwards. But a few days after it happened, he said something that I’d never expected him to say:

“This [tyre company name] needs to be sued.”

I’d never known my dad to say stuff like that. Yeah, the engineering wasn’t great, but it was a very old, low-cost tyre that has almost no thread left on it, my grandparents simply forgot to change it. The company probably couldn’t be held liable in the same way Porsche or Michelin couldn’t be held liable for the death of Paul Walker.

But I understood my dad’s anger.

So I understand.

I understand the desire to find an enemy and cast your anger on them. Without an enemy, there’s nothing to blame, nothing to avenge. Nothing to quench your turmoil.

Whenever a mass shooting pops up, it’s tempting to romanticize it. It’s more comforting to think that was caused by an evil source, so that their deaths will have “meaning.”

But there is no enemy.

God didn’t do it.

Fate didn’t do it.

The “Dark Side of America” didn’t do it.

A conspiratorial evil corporation didn’t do it.

Mass shootings are just stupid, random acts of violence.

Done without ideology, done for attention, done for no greater purpose.

That’s an unromantic, prosaic, disinterested way of putting it. But it’s reality.

And it takes an enormous amount of courage, maturity and wisdom to accept that what happened to you or your family was just that. Senseless and Random.

The guns were just tools.

That’s all they were.

They functioned exactly as expected. They had no manufacturing defects. The company sold what they advertised, fully legally.

They had limitations, they’re not smart enough to know when it’s being used by a “bad guy” and we can’t expect that.

So nothing productive will come out of suing gun companies.

This bill proposed is an act of manipulation, preying on distressed families, telling them it’ll change something when it really won’t.

It was the shooter’s fault and theirs alone.

The gun was just a means.

Namish Gali lives in New York, is a professional writer and studies Computer Science. View more of Namish’ writing here: https://www.quora.com/profile/Namish-Gali-3