OK, let’s talk about the recent gun lawsuit settlement.

The families of some of the Washington area sniper victims will share a cash settlement offered by a gun manufacturer and the store where the weapon used in the attacks was obtained.

The Bushmaster rifle used in the snipers shootings was shown during last year’s trial that convicted John Allen Muhammad. It was stolen from a gun store in Washington State.

Wednesday, the owner of Bulls Eye Shooter Supply of Tacoma agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle the suit and the manufacturer of the rifle, Bushmaster Firearms of Windham, Maine, agreed to pay $500,000 to the victim’s families as well as those who were wounded in the attacks.

In general, I’m violently opposed to far-reaching ‘product liability’ litigation aimed at gun manufacturers – whose guns work the way they are supposed to – as a backdoor way of driving the industry out of business while evading the messy necessity of passing clear laws that would do so.

I’m less certain in this case.

Bulls Eye was apparently a horrible gun dealer.

The shop had problems for several years. Records show that Bull’s Eye could not account for the sales of 238 weapons, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents conducted an audit. Owners blamed the disappearances on shoplifters. And, in fact, authorities think Malvo shoplifted the rifle — in a police interview, Malvo referred to it as a “donation.”

“Its security was so abysmal that it appears that a 17-year-old, Malvo, was able to stroll into the store and stroll out holding a 3-foot-long assault rifle,” Lowy said. “And Bull’s Eye didn’t even know the gun was missing until the police called several weeks later to tell them it was found in the trunk of the snipers’ car.”

There’s simply no excuse for this, and this level of carelessness – if in fact it was carelessness and not some criminal evasion of firearms laws – deserves to be hit with significant liability.

Bushmaster catches the splash of that hit; I don’t know enough about gun wholesaling to know what visibility a manufacturer/wholesaler has into a retailer’s operations, but given the level of paperwork I’ve filled out for various weapons I own I’ve got to believe there would be indicators available – jeez, don’t they at least have sales reps who visit and inspect the stores? And shouldn’t basic operational issues like security and clean paperwork be one of the things that are reviewed?

The process was severely broken in this case, the seller and manufacturer are being punished for that, and I really don’t have a problem with it. Maybe it will induce manufacturers to get aggressive with their dealers in keeping things clean.

That’s a far cry from a dealer who follows the rules and sells the product of a manufacturer who follows the rules being held to liability when someone does something bad with what they bought.

Triumph doesn’t pay my speeding tickets.