Bullets Beyond Recall: Defective Guns Outside US Government's Reach

[SecularMotion]

ALBUQUERQUE — The night Judy Price got shot with her own gun she’d been walking the dog on a ridge above the Rio Grande. It was two days before Thanksgiving in 2009 and chilly enough to wear her new mint-green sweat suit as she and Cody, a fluffy Samoyed, set off into her Albuquerque, New Mexico, neighborhood of flat-roofed homes and rock landscaping. Underneath her sweatshirt, Price carried her semiautomatic pistol against her belly.

When she arrived home, Price began to undress in her small walk-in closet. Her husband, Paul, a retired explosives safety engineer, was sitting in the office across the hall. He heard the bang of a gun, and she saw a flame flicker at the muzzle. The gun lay on the floor, where it fell when Price took off her sweatshirt and got caught on her Velcro holster, tearing it loose. Later, she marveled at the groove the hot bullet left on her sweatpants as it traveled up into her stomach, tore through the internal organs along the right side of her body and lodged in her liver, where it rests to this day.

Modern-day guns like Price’s Taurus PT 140 are not supposed to go off when they fall to the ground, but Price says her gun was faulty. Her lawyer, who won a 2009 jury trial involving an unintentional firing from another Taurus-brand pistol, has a broader contention: The handgun Price purchased for protection, which she carried with her on church security patrols, is one of several Taurus models with inherent design flaws.

Those claims were the basis of a lawsuit Price filed against one of the world’s largest gun manufacturers, Brazil-based Forjas Taurus and its U.S. subsidiary, Taurus International Manufacturing Inc. Price endured 12 surgeries over the three years following her injury, and she can still feel the twinge of medical mesh holding her organs in place if she bends in a certain way. She settled her suit out of court. Her only face-to-face meeting with two company representatives came in August 2011. It ended on a hollow note.

http://www.ibtimes.com/bullets-beyond-recall-defective-guns-outside-us-governments-reach-2226935