It would be hard to make an argument that Wal-Mart didn't adequately protect customers, employees, or the public at large in this incident: The only person who got hurt was the one who wanted to die.
That doesn't sound quite right.
Say I had a kid, and say that I am driving the kid someplace, but have failed to buckle him/her into the child safety seat. We get into an accident. The kid is uninjured.
My failure to take the appropriate measure to protect the kid from injury is still a negligence on my part, regardless of what happened next. Physical harm to the kid was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of my failure to act. Kid's lack of injury is just luck; I'm still responsible for having put him/her at risk.
Likewise, the fact that the woman chose to turn her newly bought gun on herself without trying it out on someone else first may be fortunate for the public at large. But the fact of that good fortune does not put paid to the question of whether WalMart was negligent in selling her the gun in the first place.
Would it be reasonable to expect Wal-Mart to make a list of every customer who has ever exhibited erratic behavior in the store, to maintain the list in perpetuity, and keep every person who works at the store aware of all the "undesirable" customers so they can make judgement calls as to whether or not to sell them firearms (or anything else that has potential for abuse)?
Exhibiting "erratic behavior" is one thing; getting hauled out in handcuffs after having attacked someone is another. Why would it be unreasonable to expect WalMart to keep a roster of people who had been arrested for committing violent acts on its property?
WalMart is not really comparable to your neighborhood bar. This is a company that uses high-tech tags to monitor its inventory and automatically put in orders whenever the supply of a given product drops below a certain number on the display shelves. How burdensome could it possibly be for WalMart to devote a tiny bit of its remarkable systematics to protect its workers and customers from the known-dangerous individuals that they have encountered and might encounter again?
The worker who sold the gun cannot be expected to have known any better. The organization that the employee was working for, however, did possess relevant knowledge about the customer, and was -- I argue -- responsible for what it did, or failed to do, with that knowledge.
Gun dealers use objective criteria in determining whether or not to process a sale. Getting into a fight in a Wal-Mart (or having a prescription for Thorazine or lithium) is not grounds for being disqualified from owning a gun. If Wal-Mart had made the necessary mental connections and used its discretion to decline the sale of that weapon, the woman could simply have gone to any other place that sells guns and bought one anyway. IOW she'd probably still be dead.
Fighting (or in this case, being arrested for attacking someone) on store property or having a thorazine prescription may not be reasons for government seizure of a person's weaponry, but they may very well justify a dealer refusing to make a sale. Is there some law that states that a firearms dealer
must sell a weapon to anyone who passes the database check? Rom, I believe, says no.
It's true that the woman, had she been denied a gun at WalMart, might simply have gone somewhere that she was unknown, and bought one there. But had that happened, WalMart would not have exposed itself to liability for negligence in this case. As it turned out, they
did expose themselves to liability, and have been sued as a consequence. Which is too bad for them, I suppose. But I really don't see why they must automatically be let off the hook for their bad judgement just because the woman might ultimately have killed herself anyway, even if the company had exercised good judgement and refused to sell her a gun.
(one typo fixed, others likely remain. :( )