Smith & Wesson Agrees to Key Safety Reforms
The nation’s biggest maker of handguns--Smith & Wesson--agreed Friday to dozens of once-unthinkable safety and marketing restrictions aimed at keeping firearms out of the hands of children and criminals.
The settlement with the federal government and more than a dozen cities is a landmark victory for gun control advocates. It frees Smith & Wesson, one of the oldest and best-known names in the gun industry, from millions of dollars in potential liability.
In their lawsuits, the cities, including Los Angeles, were trying to hold gun makers responsible for carnage caused by their weapons.
Smith & Wesson chief executive Ed Shultz acknowledged that the settlement is sure to be unpopular with the powerful gun lobby, which is locked in pitched battle with President Clinton over gun control issues. But with the future of the 148-year-old Massachusetts company at stake, he said, “to us it makes sense and is the right thing to do.”
The gun maker agreed to about 80 reforms, including many provisions that Clinton has tried and failed to get Congress to mandate. The company pledged to put trigger locks on all its handguns, make gun grips too big and triggers too powerful for young children to fire, to imprint a hidden second serial number on guns to deter theft and to develop “smart” technology that would allow only an authorized user to fire a gun.
Compliance with the safety restrictions will be monitored by officials at the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The restrictions will begin taking effect in two months.
The company also agreed to a code of conduct for authorized dealers of its weapons. It said that it would stop doing business with dealers who sell firearms at gun shows that do not conduct criminal background checks--a loophole in current law--and would demand that its dealers take tougher steps to track inventory and cut off gun sales to felons.
In addition, the gun maker agreed to include within six months a cigarette-type warning in the packaging of its firearms. The warning will include statistics about the likelihood of guns being stolen or used in shootings and the numbers of accidental discharges and suicides.
“Failure to take reasonable preventative steps may result in innocent lives being lost, and in some circumstances may result in your liability for these deaths,” the warning reads in part.
Smith & Wesson’s dramatic break with the powerful gun lobby came at the end of a week of heated rhetoric between the White House and the National Rifle Assn. And the agreement seems likely to increase pressure on Congress to reconsider stalled gun control legislation that grew out of last year’s shootings that took 15 lives at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
“There are a lot of things in this agreement we’ve been told repeatedly by the gun lobby cannot be done,” said Michael D. Barnes, head of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. “It’s been shown it can be done, and I hope the Congress will see what’s happened today.”
Clinton said the agreement signifies “that gun makers can--and will--share in the responsibility to keep their products out of the wrong hands. And it says that gun makers can--and will--make their guns much safer without infringing on anyone’s rights.”
Said Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, whose aides helped orchestrate the negotiations: “This agreement is a historic step forward. . . . Because of the agreement reached today, fewer parents will have to bury their children.”
Federal officials said they expect that the message sent by Smith & Wesson, which makes an estimated 19% of all handguns sold in the United States, will prompt other gun makers to agree to settlements rather than risk costly court verdicts.
After a week of blasting Clinton--going so far as to accuse him of tolerating gun killings to advance his gun control agenda, the NRA had no comment on the Smith & Wesson agreement. An employee in the group’s public affairs office said that Wayne La Pierre, the NRA executive vice president who spearheaded the attacks on Clinton, “is not available today.”
But another leading industry group, the Connecticut-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, denounced Smith & Wesson’s decision to “run off and cut their own deal” with government officials.
“This is an ill-conceived action on the part of one of the most revered names in the American firearms industry,” said the group’s president, Robert Delfay. “I am deeply disturbed by the fact that Smith & Wesson has allowed the Clinton-Gore administration to manipulate the company in this manner.”
Some aspects of the deal are unenforceable, said Delfay, while others reflect what is already standard industry practice.
For example, Smith & Wesson has no authority to require that its dealers at gun shows conduct background checks, he said. And on the matter of safety locks, he said that 95% of guns now shipped by all manufacturers come with free locks.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo said in an interview that his department, which helped coordinate the talks with Smith & Wesson, is continuing negotiations with several other gun makers and that he expects to reach other deals soon.
“Smith & Wesson has set the standard for the industry. This is what a responsible corporation does in this circumstance,” Cuomo said.
HUD entered negotiations with the industry on behalf of residents of federally managed public housing--and with the threat that it would sue gun makers if they did not agree to change their practices. The Treasury Department, which oversees the ATF, also took part.
In recent months, gun manufacturers have been targeted in lawsuits brought by cities and government agencies seeking to hold them liable for deaths caused by guns. It is a relatively novel--and risky--legal strategy. Bridgeport, Conn., saw its suit thrown out of state court last year on grounds that the city had not suffered any direct harm.
Some gun makers have reacted defiantly to the lawsuits but Shultz at Smith & Wesson has become a vocal proponent of compromise in recent months. He has said that a “circle-the-wagons” posture by his industry would only prove self-destructive.
At a news conference in Washington on Friday announcing the pact, Shultz was praised repeatedly by government leaders for his “courage and vision” in taking such a controversial stance.
By late Friday, about half of the 30 plaintiffs had agreed to sign onto the agreement, clearing Smith & Wesson of any liability in their lawsuits. Those included the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Inglewood and Berkeley.
Cuomo said that he expects virtually all of the 30 plaintiffs to agree to the settlement in coming days, with the possible exception of Chicago and one or two other cities that are seeking financial damages.
The Smith & Wesson agreement does not award any financial damages to the plaintiffs. Richard Lewis, a lawyer for Los Angeles and three other cities, said that was “a necessary element of this compromise.”
Financial damages could have been a deal breaker, said Smith & Wesson spokesman Ken Jorgensen. “I suspect that would not have been looked upon favorably,” he said.
More important than the money, Lewis said, is recognition by a leader in the industry that its marketing and distribution practices can help stop crime.
“It’s a radical step, a giant step away from the attitude that ‘we can’t stop criminals.’ This fully recognizes that they can have a lot to do with stopping criminals from getting access to guns,” he said.
Cuomo agreed. “We said going into this that we wouldn’t even be party to any litigation that supported [financial] damages. To us, it wasn’t about money, it was about design changes in guns and I didn’t want to taint the process. It’s too easy to say, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to shake down the companies for money,’ ” he said.
In a conference call with Clinton Friday morning, mayors and city attorneys from across the country thanked the president for his administration’s support. Many suggested that they now will favor Smith & Wesson when buying guns for their police forces.
Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn and Councilman Mike Feuer--a longtime backer of gun control legislation--participated in the conference call from Hahn’s office.
“This lawsuit was not about money,” Hahn said later. “We stuck to our word. We said we were trying to fundamentally change the way these companies conduct business. All the other gun manufacturers need to know we will accept nothing less than the agreement we reached with Smith & Wesson today.”
The city attorney added: “If we’d done this 25 years ago, I don’t think we’d be in this mess today. Hopefully, we can look back 25 years from now and say, ‘Hey, that’s what made the difference.’ ”
Los Angeles filed its lawsuit against gun manufacturers, distributors and trade associations last May with Compton, Inglewood and West Hollywood. Hahn suggested that Los Angeles could use its considerable weight to pressure other gun makers into settling.
As successful as the Smith & Wesson negotiations appear to have been, gun control advocates said that they also want to pursue other strategies--including a government boycott of manufacturers that do not agree to similar restrictions on their weapons.
With an estimated 25% of all handguns nationwide purchased by police departments and other law enforcement agencies, the states of New York and Connecticut already have taken steps to launch such a boycott.
Summers said that the Clinton administration is also considering demanding reforms from manufacturers that sell guns to the federal government.
The government wants to explore its options for purchasing guns “with a view to rewarding those such as Smith & Wesson who have acted responsibly in the nation’s interest today, and also to consider those who continue to be unwilling to act in the nation’s interest,” Summers said.
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Times staff writer Bobby Cuza contributed to this story from Los Angeles.
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Firearm Agreement
Gunmaker Smith & Wesson has agreed to a number of changes to begin taking effect over the next two months, including:
* Trigger locks on handguns
* Grips too big and triggers too powerful for young children to fire
* A “hidden” second serial number to deter thefts
* “Smart” technology to allow only authorized users to fire a gun
* Safety warning on packaging
* No gun show sales without background checks on buyers
