Pete Sessions: “I thank my able colleague and will say, it is such a state we are in America that a company whose employees steal the…”

“I thank my able colleague and will say, it is such a state we are in America that a company whose employees steal the guns and go out and shoot somebody with them gets sued for it. That is a fact of what my friend is saying, that these companies ought to be sued as a result of the theft of a gun by their employees. If the law required them to do a background check and they failed to do so, they clearly would be liable under this act. The fact of filing off a serial number is, in fact, a criminal offense for which I have prosecuted quite a number of criminals. In addition, it would trigger, of course, a civil liability. Gosh, we can talk about it a lot, and I will be glad to continue to discuss it, but the basic fact is a lot of these lawsuits are claiming that if they know, if manufacturers or distributors or sellers either know or should know that some guns will be used illegally, they should be responsible for it. That is not good law. This is against what we are about in this country. All this legislation does is say if you sell the firearm according to law, if you manufacture it according to law and somebody commits an intervening criminal act with it and shoots somebody, you should not be sued. But we have this anti-gun crowd which doesn't care about general principles of law that have stood us in good stead for hundreds of years. They have learned to manipulate the matter as effectively as they can to maintain lawsuits.…”