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94   New Civil Hazards Agency
     Could Regulate Gun Sales
     The Washington Post  Saturday, April 20, 1968

     Guns, booze, cigarettes, drugs, fast cars... Human ingenuity
knows no bounds when it comes to inventing new pleasures and hazards.
Regulating hazards without stifling the individual pursuit of 
happiness is a major challenge to the designers of democratic social 
techniques,especially difficult when the effort is muddled by conflicts,
personal privilege, established economic interests, risks to 
uneducated users or innocent bystanders and controversy over the nature
and importance of the hazards.

     The criminal law is the historic tool, but a notoriously unwieldy
one for the regulation of personal behavior and especially, ancient
and customary vices.  In other spheres, regulatory agencies have been
endowed with a broad authority to achieve the purposes set by 
legislation.  Congress, does not have to pass a law to decide whether 
penicillin should be sold over the counter, to set telephone rates or to
renew a broadcasting license.  We should deal with the regulation of
civil hazards, like firearms, in the same way.

     The common-law doctrine of implied warranty already imposes
certain limited responsibilities on manufacturers and sellers of 
hazardous implements like automobiles but the limits of this doctrine 
are clouded by the absence of specific statutes covering contemporary 
situations.  Present law, for example, gives very shaky ground to sue a
gun dealer for damages inflicted by thugs armed with a weapon sold by
the dealer.  After all, a kitchen knife or a razor blade might also be
instruments of grievous harm.

     One solution might be a Civil Hazards Agency with authority to
judge which products are potentially so dangerous as to demand more
careful control.  If the agency did find that domestic use of handguns
was outweighed by their abuse in personal violence, it would not 
outlaw them. Instead, it would establish a chain of civil responsibility
back to the manufacturer, for specific abuses of the product.

     In self-protection, the handgun manufacturer would have to insist
on distributing the weapons through bonded dealers and, in turn, only
to responsible individuals who can be held to account for the damages
that the guns might inflict on others.  

     The law would not directly restrict the ownership of weapons
except to ensure that each one is covered by the system.  Purchasers
would, in effect, have to buy an insurance policy together with the 
weapon and thus register themselves with the insurance company.  
Possession or transfer of a weapon would be a crime if it lacked a valid
identifying mark, or if the new owner lacked a certificate of 
responsibity, either in his own name or derived from the dealer.

     The Advantages of this system are its flexibility and its 
pluralism.  It is not very different from compulsory insurance and 
registration of automobiles.  Manufacturers and their insurers would be
liable only to the extent that a jury found as a matter of fact that
a specific weapon was an instrument of crime or civil injury.  The
insurance rates could then reflect the actual statistics of the abuse
of a given class of weapons, and their owners.  For example, the 
National Rifle Association might undertake to insure the weapons owned
by its members.

     How many more assassinations will we have to suffer before 
imposing reasonable social controls on the irresponsible sale of lethal
toys?

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