As gun makers seek to limit liability, a family stands opposed

WASHINGTON -- The facts of Danny Guzman's death are beyond dispute: The 26-year-old father of two from Worcester was cut down by a stray bullet fired outside of a nightclub on Christmas Eve in 1999.

The gun used to kill him, police determined, was stolen from a local gun factory by an employee, a crack addict who supported his habit by trading half-finished guns for drugs and cash. The weapon was taken from an assembly line before it was stamped with a serial number, making it a hot commodity in the criminal underworld.

But while most of the details of the case are known, for Guzman's family, the search for justice in the shooting has been harder to find. The suspected gunman, Edwin Novas, remains at large. Kahr Arms, the small Worcester-based company that made the weapon, is fighting in court over whether it should share the blame for the homicide.

And a bill before Congress would shield the company, and others in the gun industry, from civil lawsuits like the one brought by the Hernandez family, on behalf of Guzman, the son of Juana Hernandez.

The bill, sponsored by Senator Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, would exempt gun dealers and manufacturers like Kahr from virtually all liability lawsuits involving gun deaths. Backers of the bill -- including most Republicans, several Democrats, and Senate minority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat -- say the law is necessary to protect the legitimate gun industry from an onslaught of what they consider baseless lawsuits.

But opponents of the bill, including Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, say gun makers would get more protection under the law than other US industries receive. And, they argue, the measure could help negligent gun dealers and companies escape punishment.

At a press conference this week, Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, stood with the Hernandez family and several other relatives of victims of gun violence at a press conference on Capitol Hill. Reed said the bill amounts to ''blanket legal immunity" for the gun industry and urged his colleages to stop it.

''What it would essentially do is legislate irresponsibility," Reed said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which tracks gun fatalities, more than 30,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2002, the last year for which statistics are available. Several municipalities affected by gun violence, including Boston, have filed lawsuits against the firearms industry, seeking the kind of massive financial judgments that changed the tobacco industry.

Robert L. Rabin, a law professor at Stanford University who studied the tobacco litigation, said that gun makers are potentially much more vulnerable to such protracted legal campaigns, because their industry is much smaller than tobacco. He said lawsuits are more threatening to the gun industry because ''it would take many fewer successes to bankrupt some of the companies."

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the advocacy group that organized the press conference, said gun companies faced about 57 lawsuits between 1993 and 2003, but few have gone to trial. Last year, survivors of the Washington-area sniper shootings reached a $2.5 million settlement against Bushmaster Firearms Inc of Windham, Maine, the first successful suit against a gun maker.

Guzman, a native of the Dominican Republic, was shot on the street after leaving a Christmas Eve party at the Tropigala nightclub.

According to their lawyer, Héctor E. Piñeiro of Worcester, the Hernandez family sued Kahr Arms, which is owned by the son of Unification Church founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon, in 2002. The family said the company should have conducted employee background checks and tightened lax security at the plant, which could have prevented the shooting. A Kahr spokesman did not return calls yesterday.

With Piñeiro acting as her interpreter, Juana Hernandez, 60, said in Spanish that the bill before Congress ''would facilitate the killing of more innocent people" by removing the threat of litigation against gun manufacturers.

But Dan Whiting, a spokesman for Craig, said the bill was intended to protect gun makers from being punished for the actions of others. Contrary to perception, he said, ''the firearms industry is not terribly large. We don't want to break the backs of the industry."

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms trade group, said in a press release that the gun industry needs the bill because it has spent more than $200 million since 1998 defending itself against ''these outrageous and patently false [gun-control lawsuits], with no end in sight."

Kerry, who interrupted his presidential campaign last spring to return to Washington to vote against a similar bill, met with the Hernandez family yesterday and pledged to fight the bill. He said he did not know whether supporters of gun control had enough support in Congress to block the measure.

Last year, a similar bill restricting gun makers' liability went down to defeat after Democrats successfully tacked on amendments restoring the ban on assault weapons and requiring child safety locks, leading Craig and other Republicans to vote against the overall bill. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said Democrats opposing the bill would probably pursue the same strategy again this year. ''Once amendments are added, the NRA, which has a take-no-prisoners attitude, may not want to see the bill pass," Schumer said.