After every media-hyped shooting, ambulance-chasing lawyers come out of the woodwork to file lawsuits against the manufacturer of whatever gun this month’s eel-brain happened to lay his hands on to do the deed, despite the Protection in Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
This time they’re doing it for the Uvalde shooting, but they’ve evidently been so sloppy in filing their lawsuit that they’re facing contempt charges.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 students and two teachers, California-based attorney Charles Bonner is facing heat over a federal case to sue the gun store and the manufacturer of the rifle used in the massacre, Daniel Defense.
Bonner told media in August 2022 that he had been hired by Uvalde residents, consisting mostly of families of Robb Elementary students, to file civil lawsuits against numerous entities over the shooting.
Now, he and other attorneys involved are facing both sanctions and criminal contempt charges in federal court over the lax handling of the case.
Both Daniel Defense and gun store Oasis Outback, which sold the rifle to the gunman, have been named as defendants in the federal civil lawsuit seeking $6 billion in damages. Prior to filing the lawsuit, Bonner had announced his intent to file a $27 billion class action lawsuit, but it is unclear if he intends to seek additional damages from other parties in separate lawsuits.
The case was initially filed in the Austin division of the Western District of Texas; however, the case was transferred to the Del Rio division, where the court instructed the plaintiffs to serve the defendants before the case could proceed.
This simple process is where the case began to fall apart procedurally.
Numerous documents beginning in June show federal Judge Alia Moses giving multiple orders to the plaintiff attorneys to properly serve the defendants, writing, “The Defendants must be afforded due process instead of plaintiff counsel’s apparent wish to improperly litigate this case ex parte,” accusing the attorneys of using the case to serve their interests alone.
But the lax handling of the case didn’t stop with the first admonishment by the court.
Moses set a hearing to discuss why the plaintiffs failed to properly serve the defendants, a hearing the attorneys did not attend.
“Serving defendants the lawsuit” is hardly a deep, dark secret of the legal profession. Indeed, it’s why process servers exist as a profession.
This prompted Moses to set another hearing, ordering the plaintiffs’ legal counsel to appear in a hearing where the court will consider sanctions for failing to follow its instructions and potentially issue contempt charges for failing to appear.
“The Court will consider additional sanctions for the failure to appear and will consider referring the plaintiff’s counsel for contempt prosecution based on the failure to appear at the sanctions hearing,” Moses’s order states.
Lawyers, even ambulance chasers, are supposed to be smarter than the average bear. But this is a pretty basic, stupid, unforced error on Bonner’s part…
Tags: Charles Bonner, Daniel Defense, Guns, Lawsuit, Oasis Outback, Uvalde
“Lawyers, even ambulance chasers, are supposed to be smarter than the average bear. But this is a pretty basic, stupid, unforced error on Bonner’s part”
Anyone notice this is happening a lot more lately?
@Andy Markcyst,
Ever notice the rising level of general imbecility across the entire range of human endeavor?
Why, it’s almost as if our selection and education system for creating the people doing this is skewed towards the production of actual autistic idiot-savants who can do really well on all the tests, while actually proving to be functional imbeciles out in the real world. And, since the system is run by their like peers, well… They’re able to mask it all, right up until it all blows up.
Care to imagine Sam Bankman-Fried as the working-class kid of some hillbillys? How far would he have gotten, pulling that bullshit off out in Appalachia at any level below that of “college educated-yet-idiot”?
Normal people have highly refined senses of bullshit detection. You want to do like Bankman-Fried did, you’d best cast your net among the “intellectuals”, because anyone else with moderate intellect and any real resources is going to take one look at your prospectus and throw you out of their office. You have to be incredibly arrogant while simultaneously being incredibly credulous, trusting, and outright stupid in practical matters to fall for something like that.
Epitaph for our civilization is going to be “But… They did so well on the tests…”
@Kirk, “actual autistic idiot-savants who can do really well on all the tests, while actually proving to be functional imbeciles out in the real world. And, since the system is run by their like peers, well… They’re able to mask it all, right up until it all blows up.”
Everyone is noticing this now.
It’s like officers and NCOs. Officers are there to lead (and take responsibility for leading), imagine they know everything, and sometimes understand why certain things work the way they do. NCOs are the actual people who know how things work and to make them work. It doesn’t all come from a book. So much of it comes from no other way than being there and doing the thing and doing it for 10 years or more. And until they’re able to mainframe experiential knowledge directly into the cerebral cortex, that’s the way it’s going to be. Everything less than that bridges fall down, planes crash, and people forget how to lawyer.
It’s been my theory for years, having observed these sorts of autistic savants as commissioned officers, that we’re doing all of this wrong.
It started going off the rails back around WWI, when the academic elite headed by Woodrow Wilson started institutionalizing things like “officer commissions require college diplomas”.
Yeah. As if the former president of Princeton didn’t have a certain interest in furthering the primacy of his little brainwashing operation.
I don’t think the current system is stable, and it sure as hell isn’t producing net positive results. What we’ve got going is an entire world of people running things who really have no idea how those things work. Go ask the average officer in the Army, or the senior NCOs they select, how the Army works. They’ll give you a bunch of answers that boil down to “Well, they do what I say when I say it…”, but ain’t none of them gone out and looked at why all their memos and emails don’t actually effect any real change or even motion. They live in a self-referential world that they create in their heads, and never bother to go examine the actual environment that their word-creations are interacting in. And, what’s even better? You can’t communicate with the majority of these assholes why their brilliant ideas will not and cannot work. They aren’t equipped to understand things that the guys who’ve risen up from under it all know instinctively, and those guys can’t express themselves in terms that the officer class can comprehend, no matter how right they are on a given issue.
Anecdote time, to illustrate: Circa 1992-ish, the Army was getting ready to recapitalize the barracks and unit facilities at Fort Lewis, now Joint Base Lewis-McChord. In the course of this, they built models of what the new barracks would look like, and how they intended for them to be lived in. Having done that, they then brought in a bunch of us senior NCOs to “validate” the plans, looking everything over.
There wasn’t one of us who didn’t have issues with the proposed designs. They were all open-plan, and the intent was to treat the barracks as though they were apartments being leased out by apartment managers, with very limited scope for unit involvement in their management. No more Charge-of-Quarters for each company, just one central desk per quad of new buildings, which were accessible from 360 degrees.
We all looked at it and said “Yeah, that ain’t gonna work…”, but trying to articulate to the brass precisely why it was a bad, bad idea to set things up that way? Yeah. Good luck… We abjectively failed at that enterprise.
I later had the misfortune of being assigned to one of the first units to move into those new barracks. It was a f*cking nightmare trying to manage them, because there was no way to really set out unit ownership, and because it was all open-plan, there was no way of controlling access or monitoring what the hell the troops were taking up to their rooms. Young men who are likely to enlist and who’re of the socioeconomic class that will be in the barracks are not notably prone to following rules; we had crap going on that was simply out of control, and no way of regaining it because where there had been one NCO and a runner per company, we now had one NCO and a runner for an entire battalion-plus worth of barracks rooms, with said NCO and runner ensconced in an out-of-the-way little office. The whole thing was such a nightmare within the first six months that they halted construction of all the other new barracks projects to redesign them, doing away with most of the new features.
We’d warned them it was unworkable, but the commissioned “brights” couldn’t wrap their heads around our objections and we couldn’t make ourselves understood. I’m usually pretty good at talking to the commissioned types, but I failed utterly at trying to communicate the concerns we had. It wasn’t at all pretty, either; I got pretty hot under the collar in trying to get the idiots in charge of that project to understand that they were screwing around with things that they a.) did not understand, and more importantly, b.) had no idea even existed.
Probably the biggest “thing” those new barracks brought in was damage to the informal NCO training and conditioning. The new guys coming up that experienced that environment rapidly became entirely apathetic about enforcing anything, because the issue was so big and chaotic after hours that they got used to just throwing up their hands and hiding from it all. It really screwed with NCO development, because where Charge-of-Quarters had been down at the company level, and every junior NCO got used to being “the man” on scene and maintaining control, the new setup was organized so badly that it was impossible to take charge; if you chewed someone’s ass for having their music too loud and keeping people awake, you’d get your ass chewed by that unit’s commander and First Sergeant for “harassing” their soldiers. And, since we had multiple battalions living in those buildings, some of whom had zero control over their people in the first damn place…? Yeah. It really damaged NCO development with the junior guys, and you actually didn’t even recognize that fact until well after it was irrevocably in place.
The “brights” are not as bright as they think they are; this is a truth across everything in the culture. The academically educated tend to despise “tacit knowledge” and “tribal knowledge” because it calls their credibility into question. That’s why they attack it, denigrate it, and seek to academize everything, thinking that their way of learning about the world is superior. Reality? There are a whole host of things you can’t reduce to words and put into a textbook for someone to process in a classroom. You have to live the life, experience it. And, this is why so many of our institutions are failing: It’s down to the academy’s attempt to take everything over, rather than lend any legitimacy or credence to the “learned experience”.