I think it is safe to say that our nation is lawsuit happy. While our right to sue for financial and physical responsibility in a wide range of things is a good thing, I think like so many other things in our country, it gets taken to extremes.
An example would be a popular fast- food restaurant chain, which sells coffee in Styrofoam cups with plastic lids. The one I'm looking at has "Caution: HOT" in big red lettering several places on the cup, and it also has a similar warning molded into the plastic lid. This means that while handling this cup, I should know that it has hot liquid in it: DOH! I just bought the darn coffee, didn't I? Well a lady purchased such a cup of coffee and spilled it on her leg, causing some pretty painful burns. She was able to sue the fast-food restaurant for I believe 1.7 million dollars. Now I this is a travesty of justice folks. This woman claims the lid was not on tight, which directly led to the coffee spilling on her leg. I contend that even if the lid was not on tight, she is responsible for checking and insuring that everything is right with her coffee cup when she receives it.
We have become a nation that is obsessed with assigning blame on multi-million dollar corporations simply because:
People sue big business every day all the while complaining that prices keep going up.
Now I don't want people to think I'm some neo-nazi-republican sticking my neck out for the big businesses, because some of them will just as soon fleece you by stealing your grandmother and selling her back to you at a 100% markup, but come on folks! We are a nation that is perfectly willing to trade in our freedoms and responsibility for a few bucks! Make no mistake about it folks, the more mindless and irresponsible we get about how we conduct our lives, the more our lawmakers are thinking they need to "protect us" by passing more regulatory laws "for our own good," which are actually meant to control and take away from the rights and freedoms we hold so dear.
I just heard today that there are two lawsuits pending against gun manufacturers due to children getting their hands on guns with inadequate safety devices such as trigger locks and whatnot. I am disappointed in the parents (and liberal lawyers) who are pushing these two lawsuits. They are basically saying: "It's not my fault that my child(ren) got their hands on my loaded gun, it's the gun manufacturer's fault for not making my gun safer/harder to use." This is the biggest load of crap I've ever heard. A gun is designed for ease of shooting, while it has a built-in safety, it is supposed to be easy to use because the situation in which it would be needed would usually be one where time is of the essence. This means that putting more safety protection devices on a gun would save the user from ever being able to protect his/her home and family from violence in the first place, which means there is no reason to own it at all. If you are going to own a gun, buy a lock box with a quick combination cipher-lock. They make them so you can open them even in the dark just by putting your fingers on the proper buttons in the right order. This will keep children from being able to play with loaded weapons and still keep the gun ready for use. Of course there is also the absolute stupidity of the parents involved in these incidents for not being themselves more aware and responsible in the fact that their children found the guns in the first place. Guns should be respected and kept responsibly by their owners, it is sad and stupid to attempt to assign blame on the manufacturer's doorstep for the ineptitude's of the owners.
We are a society becoming sillier and sillier about greed, ignorance, and irresponsibility. What's going to happen next? Are we going to sue the U.S. Government for failing to provide us with a decent living? (I should keep my mouth shut about this one, because some idiot will get the idea and try it). You and I need to be responsible for our actions and this means when something dumb happens to us, we don't immediately find some big conglomerate to blame and sue the pants off them for our own lack of intelligence. I suppose if I do something idiotic, I'll get caught up in the sue frenzy too so I can retire in style and forget my downtrodden roots.