Wisconsin jury ignores federal law in gun shop case

BY JAZZ SHAW for Hot Air:

Radio personality and CNN host Michael Smerconish doesn’t limit himself to the broadcast world. He published an article at Philly.com this weekend smiling favorably on a Wisconsin jury who was actually doing something while the rest of the nation simply debated. But what feat of prestidigitation did this group of citizens manage? Did they team up with O.J. and finally find the real killers? Has Bigfoot been located at long last? No… it turns out that they managed to find a gun dealer responsible in a civil trial for the damage caused by a person who illegally purchased a weapon from a straw purchaser who fraudulently bought it from the dealer. Even though authorized gun dealers are specifically protected from such baseless accusations under federal law, justice has apparently been served, citizens!

While the candidates debated, a jury decided.

Despite a federal immunity statute for gun manufacturers and sellers, Wisconsin jurors held accountable the seller of a gun used to shoot two policemen, just as the Democratic presidential candidates began to argue about immunity for the firearms industry…

Some 1,789 miles away from Las Vegas on the same day, a Milwaukee jury did something that Congress made nearly impossible a decade ago: It invoked civil responsibility for an enabler of gun violence and awarded nearly $6 million in damages. But in so doing, it had to shoehorn its rationale into the law to which Sanders and Clinton had referred. “These are really, really tight windows,” the lawyer who circumvented the federal immunity told me.