MR. REED: Mr. President, I commend Senator Kohl for this amendment. He has worked with so many of our colleagues to ensure that children are adequately protected. There are too many deaths each year of children because the weapons are unsecure. They are able to get access to them, and they are able to discharge them. There are accidental deaths. Sadly, there are too many childhood suicides that result from having access to weapons. The Kohl amendment is a practical and appropriate response to that by requiring the sale of a child safety lock along with the weapon. There is huge public support for this issue. Over 70 percent of Americans polled think this is an appropriate and necessary proposal. In fact, I believe 6 out of 10 gun owners similarly believe this is a sensible approach to dealing with the issue of the accidental death of children with firearms. We are here today to move forward on this amendment, to have a vote which is scheduled. I would hope, also, that we can move to other amendments so they could be offered for votes. Several of my colleagues have offered amendments. It is appropriate, since we have begun the process of debate and amendment and vote, to continue that process forward. I hope we can do that. I certainly commend Senator Kohl for his efforts over many years. As he rightfully points out, there was overwhelming support for this measure last year. More than 70 Senators supported it. I hope we see that same support this year. Certainly, the danger to children has not diminished from the last Congress. The practicality and efficacy of this approach continues to be compelling. I would hope we would have another strong vote in support of the amendment, as we go forward. I yield the floor. Reclaiming my time, I say to my distinguished friend and dear friend from Alabama, I am not perturbed. I just fear for his safety, and I thank him. Mr. President, we have heard over the course of the last few days numerous homilies about personal responsibility. The irony, of course, is this legislation says everyone is responsible except for gun manufacturers, gun dealers, and gun trade associations. There has been a discussion about the law. If one breaks a law they should be punished, but such discussions fail to capture the fact that we have essentially two systems with our legal system. There is the system of laws, the statutes, the ordinances that are passed by legislative bodies such as this body, and then there is the civil law: the criminal law and the civil law. The Senator from Alabama went on at length about how we can enforce criminal laws more effectively; we can do good things with respect to criminal law enforcement. But I think we are ignoring the sense that there is also this civil law, where people can go to court if they have been injured and seek redress. What this legislation would do is prevent many Americans who have been injured from going to court and seeking redress, either some type of compensation or some type of equitable remedy. It is important that we recognize this bill will deny a voice to many people, modest people, who have been injured and who seek redress. I was trying to think of a somewhat mundane example about these different systems. Since so much of this legislation talks about, well, if a particular statute is violated, one will be liable, but there is this intersection of obligations both under the criminal law and statutes and under the general principles of civil law. The example I think of is there are some jurisdictions that make it a violation of the law to operate a cell phone in one's hand while they drive, and if one had an accident in that circumstance and someone is injured, the person could be prosecuted for violating the law, but they also could be sued because they have an obligation and duty to pay full attention as they drive. In other jurisdictions without this law, one could not be criminally charged but, of course, they could be sued. Here is what essentially this legislation does in lots of respects. It says we are disregarding those instances where one has a duty to someone under the civil law. We will let them proceed with their suit if there is a criminal violation or a statutory violation, a violation of regulations, but for the vast number of other responsibilities we owe to each other, that are defined for the civil law, one will not have the opportunity to go to court. Essentially, what we have said is we all have these obligations and responsibilities, except this now special, privileged class of gun manufacturers, gun dealers, and gun associations. There is the presumption that has been persistent throughout that the law of the United States in general does not recognize any type of obligation if there is a criminal intervention, if a criminal gets involved in proximity to the injury. As I mentioned before, the black letter law of this country that is established in the restatement of torts clearly says if there is a criminal intervention, one can still be held liable for negligence if they fail to perform their duty, even if in the chain of action of causation there is a criminal act. So this notion that we are charging these gun dealers and gun manufacturers with the crimes of another, a bad person or criminal, is without substance. What Senator Levin said so eloquently and others said so eloquently talking about his amendment, is this is about the responsibility of the manufacturer, the gun dealer, and the gun associations to fulfill their duties to the general public and to specific individuals who have been harmed: the duty to secure weapons, the duty to act reasonably, the duty to look beyond the superficial aspects of someone coming into a store. We have seen classic examples: The fellow who walks in with the girlfriend and picks out 12 weapons, gives her cash, she pays for it. It is so suspicious that the operator of the gun store calls ATF and says, well, I got the money, they got the guns, but watch out for them. That was the circumstance that led to a chain of causation to the serious wounding of two New Jersey police officers. That gun dealer had an obligation to avoid straw purchases. He did not even follow the standards of the industry in terms of being careful of selling multiple guns to some person under those circumstances. So it is not about the crimes of others being attributed to gun dealers and gun manufacturers. It is not about social conditions that are being excused by these suits. It is about whether an individual had a duty to another person who was injured and failed to carry out that duty. One of the major reasons we are here, taking very radical action to change 200 years of legal history in the United States, taking the radical action of going into 50 States and saying, We don't care about your laws--the General Assembly of Rhode Island, the General Assembly of North Carolina, of Alabama--we don't care about your laws, we don't care that for 200 years, you specified the standards for negligence in your State, we are changing them for these special people. We don't care that your courts should have the right to take the claims of your citizens who have been harmed. We don't care about that. And we are doing it for a very narrow, defined group of individuals. This is a radical departure from the standards we have adopted and abided by for 200 years. The pretext for all of this is that there is this huge crisis with respect to manufacturers that threatens their existence, that they are financially on the ropes, that these suits are numerous and literally driving them to bankruptcy. Where are the facts? The facts that we can establish from the public filings of certain companies suggest that there is no crisis. There is no crisis at all. This is a manufactured crisis. This is a pretext to do the bidding, I believe, of the gun lobby. If you look at the facts as reported, there is no financial crisis that is apparent. Yesterday, my colleague, the Senator from Idaho, read a letter from the president and chief executive officer of Smith & Wesson that talked about or tried to explain their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, their 10-Q filing, and concluded with a stirring passage about the necessity, the criticality of this legislation to Smith & Wesson. It gave the suggestion, of course, that my discussion of their financial reports was somehow inaccurate or incomplete. So I went back and I got their 10-Q report, which was filed on March 10, 2005, for the period January 31 to March 10. It was filed, let me say, March 10, 2005. They go on to describe these suits, as generally is done. They conclude: We monitor the status of known claims and the product liability accrual, which includes amounts for defense costs for asserted and unasserted claims. While it is difficult to forecast the outcome of these claims, we believe, after consultation with litigation counsel, it is uncertain whether the outcome of these claims will have a material adverse effect on our financial position, results of operations, or cash flows. They are not quite certain whether those cases will cripple them. They go on to say: We believe that we have provided adequate reserves for defense costs. They go on and say further: We do not anticipate material adverse judgments and intend to vigorously defend ourselves. In a sworn statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission, they say: We don't know if this is going to be critical to our financial status. In fact, we don't anticipate material adverse judgments. We don't think any of these cases will be resolved in a way that will negatively affect our position, and we will vigorously defend ourselves. They went on to say, and we said this before on the Senate floor: In the nine months ended January 31, 2005, we incurred $4,535 in defense costs, net of amounts receivable from insurance carriers, relative to product liability and municipal litigation. That is $4,500, basically, out-of-pocket costs they have received from reimbursements from insurance companies. That is the nature of insurance: You pay the premium; if something happens, you get reimbursed. During this period, we paid no settlement fees relative to product liability cases. As a result of our regular review of our product liability claims---- looking at these claims we talked about here as strangling their ability to be competitive and to survive---- we were able to reduce our reserves by $286,022 for the nine months ended January 31, 2005. This is such a perilous threat to a company like Smith & Wesson that they are actually reducing the reserves they have on hand to handle these claims. Again, this is not a crisis. Again, their own data suggest--this from their Web site. This is 2001. These are the industry municipal cases pending or on appeal: 32 and 10 in 2001; in 2002, 26 and 8; 2003, 20 and 5; 2004, 13 and 4; 2005, 4 industry municipal cases pending and 2 product liability cases pending against Smith & Wesson. The curve is going the wrong way for a crisis. It is going down: four, and two pending cases. It suggests that the courts are doing their job, that the present system we have in place is actually handling these cases pretty well. There is no flood of cases coming over the transom. In fact, this is exactly consistent with their reduction of the reserves for liability because it appears that these cases are dwindling, not increasing. It appears that the system is working pretty well right now. Yet we are here today debating legislation that will deny the rights of individual citizens to go to court, rights they have enjoyed for 200 years in this country, rights that stem not from the actions of criminal third parties but from the failure of the individual defendants to take appropriate action in their duty with respect to the general public and specific individuals. It is the same with respect to other companies for which we have public records. Many of these companies are privately held. Beretta USA is domiciled in the United States, but it is a subsidiary of an Italian corporation which is privately held, and they are not But all of this suggests again--not only with Smith & Wesson but with Sturm, Ruger--that there is no material adverse impact reflected by these individuals in their reporting under the pain of penalty for perjury under the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, there is a general record of claims and legal cases which goes to suggest that these suits are not an epidemic. As we have indicated before, from 1993 to 2003, 57 suits were filed against gun industry defendants out of an estimated 10 million tort suits. I am not good at math, but that is way below 1 percent. This is not an epidemic. This is not a crisis. Certainly this is not a crisis that is going to threaten our national security. We have heard claims that the gun industry is being forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. The alleged litigation costs have risen in $25 million increments. In fact, I think they have risen since we started this debate, from what I have heard, without any kind of factual data to support them. They are just claims that they are spending all of this money. In fact, if you look at these SEC reports, it hardly adds up to $200 million. Indeed, it seems, based on Smith & Wesson, that reflecting the declining cases they are actually reducing their reserves and potentially, hopefully, reducing what they have to pay out of pocket. But these estimates grow and grow and grow. In 2004, it was $150 million in July. In November 2004, other estimates, $175 million. Now it is up to $200 million. I think I heard in this debate $250 million. No substantiation, no documents, no data. This is not a crisis. Yet we have displaced the Defense bill to take up this legislation. We have displaced other legislation that could be extremely valuable in order to take up this legislation. Because there is no crisis---- I thank the Senator from Illinois for his question. There were a series of extraordinarily important questions with respect to the quality of life for our soldiers and their families: childcare amendments, amendments with respect to veterans health care, amendments that applied not only to active-duty personnel but their dependents. We had passed legislation already, an amendment that would increase the number of up-armored HMMWVs we are providing to our soldiers. That stands in abeyance until we finish the legislation. There were important inducements for additional service and enlistment that are necessary to meet the growing and real crisis in recruiting military personnel. If you want to talk about a crisis, it is a crisis, the fact that our Army, despite efforts, has fallen short of the recruiting goal at a time when we need every person to fill out the demand for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. It is extraordinarily serious. I don't know if I can find it, but I saw an editorial cartoon in a magazine, a newspaper, which had a picture of a humvee and three soldiers. The caption, if I recall it, is: Why don't we just take a 4-week recess during this difficult time and then return to this operation afterwards? Essentially, I think it captured the dilemma the soldiers are feeling right now. What are we doing? As the Senator previously indicated, in the Army Times, they wrote of this: Senate delays action on the defense bill. I ask unanimous consent to have two articles printed in the Record, one from the Hill and the other from the Army Times, which talk about this issue of leaving the Defense bill and also the impact on procurement of weapons because of this legislation.
