Firearm safety is a 'duty'

INDIANAPOLIS -- Gun owners have a responsibility to the public to exercise "reasonable care" in the safe storage of firearms, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Monday.\nThe 5-0 decision reverses the state appeals court's dismissal of a lawsuit against the owners of a gun used to kill an Allen County police officer.\n"Indiana gun owners are guaranteed the right to bear arms, but this right does not entitle owners to impose on their fellow citizens all the external human and economic costs associated with their ownership," Chief Justice Randall Shepard wrote for the court.\nDeputy Eryk Heck was killed when he exchanged fire with burglary suspect Timothy Stoffer in August 1997. Stoffer, who also died, stole the gun used in the shootout from his parents.\nThe Heck family sued Ray and Patricia Stoffer in 1999, claiming the parents knew Timothy Stoffer had violent tendencies and had a duty to ensure he did not gain access to their gun.\nDuring a nine-year period, Timothy Stoffer had faced charges of resisting arrest, battery, burglary, theft, drug possession, forgery, escape and contempt.\nBoth the trial court and appeals court ruled the Stoffers had no duty to safely store their handgun because gun ownership was a constitutionally protected right.\nThe state Supreme Court, however, ruled that the question of whether the Stoffers were negligent should be decided by a jury.\n"Guns are dangerous instrumentalities that in the wrong hands have the potential to cause serious injuries," the decision said. "It is a responsible gun owner's duty to exercise reasonable care in the safe storage of a firearm."\nThe National Rifle Association, which had opposed the lawsuit, said the ruling was simply procedural.\n"There was no precedent set, there was no law enacted. All the court is saying is that issues of this case are such that at a jury should look at it," said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam.\nTelephone messages were left seeking comment from attornies for the Stoffers.\nJerry Wehner, president of the Indiana State Rifle and Pistol Association, disagreed with the ruling.\n"If I came to your house and stole your car and I used that car in a crime and I killed a police officer in the course of that crime, should that officer's family come back and sue you?" he asked. "The (Stoffers) didn't do anything wrong."\nBut Daniel Vice, an attorney for the Washington-based Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said the ruling confirms what is common sense to most gun owners: they have a responsibility to protect the public.\nThe high courts of two other states -- Kansas and Montana -- have issued similar rulings, but both of those cases involved shootings by children, Vice said.\n"This ruling is most important because it involves an adult who got a gun," he said. "It proves that gun owners have a duty to protect the entire public from anyone who foreseeably could get their hands on a gun"