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Sniper victim family pushes for gun legislation
PETER HARDIN / Media General News Service
Apr 7, 2003
WASHINGTON -- James L. "Sonny" Buchanan Jr., 39, was starting a new chapter of his life. He was phasing out his landscaping business in the Washington area. He planned to get married and had moved to Virginia to help his father build a house in the mountains of Grayson County.
When Buchanan returned to the Washington area to fulfill a contract and mow outside a suburban Maryland car dealership Oct. 3, he became the second victim of the sniper attacks that took 10 lives in the Washington area last year.
Now the Southwest Virginian's murder has surfaced in the heated debate about gun control.
Buchanan's parents and a sister, Vickie Snider, of Rockville, Md., visited Capitol Hill recently to talk about their loss and to urge defeat of a bill to protect gun manufacturers and sellers from some lawsuits.
"I don't want to see this happen again," Snider said about last fall's wave of sniper killings that shook the region.
"If we have laws in place," she said about federal and state laws on gun sales and marketing, "why aren't they abided by?"
She portrayed a lawsuit by her mother and the wife of a second victim over an assault rifle allegedly used in the sniper killings as one way to determine whether the accused gun seller and gun maker broke the law.
But critics in Congress see a spate of similar lawsuits, by individual victims of firearms violence and by state and local governments, as frivolous, dangerous and as potentially bankrupting a legal industry.
Last week, backers pressed the partial-shield bill through the House Judiciary Committee on a 21-11 vote. It had been shelved last fall in the wake of the sniper attacks.
The bill is justified to block and dismiss lawsuits against manufacturers and sellers arising from a criminal's misuse of a lawful product, its backers maintained.
The broad support for the bill has been reflected in bipartisan backing from 247 co-sponsors, including the lawmaker from the district where Buchanan lived and where his parents reside now.
He is Rep. Rick Boucher, D-9th, the lone Democrat voting in favor of the bill in committee. The recent gun lawsuits "are nothing more than attempts to impose gun control, outside of the legislative process," Boucher said.
"I happen to oppose gun control. Even if I were in favor of it, I would be for this bill, because whether or not there is gun control is a policy that should be decided in the legislative arena, not the courts," he said.
Rep. Robert C. Scott, D-3rd, voted against the bill. "We shouldn't have special exemptions based on political influence," he said before the committee vote was taken.
In the Senate, Republican George Allen, of Virginia, is among 51 co-sponsors of a companion bill. Fellow Republican John W. Warner has not taken a stand. Warner has not always voted in support of the National Rifle Association, which is pushing the legislation.
Vickie Snider and her parents from Virginia, who are divorced, visited Warner in his office recently to tell him personally about Sonny Buchanan and to urge that he oppose the partial shield bill.
James Buchanan Sr., a retired Montgomery County, Md., policeman, is building a home in White Top, in Grayson County. He grew up there. Alice Faye Buchanan lives in Abingdon.
The Buchanans' son was an amateur poet who had served on the board of the county Police Boys and Girls Club. He brought Christmas trees from his father's farm to suburban Maryland and sold them seasonally to raise money for the club.
By moving to Virginia in March 2002, "He wanted to make a change -- to get out of the rat race and do some writing," Snider said.
Dennis Henigan, a lawyer with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence who helped bring the lawsuit by Alice Buchanan, said the bill under debate could jeopardize that lawsuit if it became law.
The bill would not block a lawsuit if a gun manufacturer or seller "knowingly and willfully violated" a state or federal law on sales or marketing of a firearm, and thereby helped cause the harm that was sued over.
"That is a very difficult standard" for a lawsuit to meet, Henigan said.
The lawsuit was lodged in Pierce County, Wash., against a Tacoma gun shop and the maker of the Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle allegedly used in the killings. It accused the defendants of negligence.
"We will vigorously defend ourselves against the baseless and frivolous litigation that attempts to inappropriately capitalize on the tragedies of others, used by special interest groups to forward their own political agenda," the gun shop, Bull's Eye Shooter Supply, said in a statement.
Lee Boyd Malvo and alleged accomplice John Allen Muhammad are charged or suspected in shootings that killed 14 people across the country and wounded several others in a protracted shooting rampage.
Vickie Snider, meanwhile, said she hopes nobody else has to endure an experience so violent and frightening that it felt to her like "a nightmare that never ended."
"It leaves such a hole and such immense grief," she said about the gunning down of her "baby" brother.
"Your heart's broken, and your soul aches. It just does."
Peter Hardin is the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Washington Correspondent.
© 2003 Media General
