Off target: the biggest challenge to the NRA may not come from trial lawyers, but from demographics.

• Author: Pomper, Stephen
• Position: Book Review

OUTGUNNED: The First Complete Insider Account of the Battle Over Gun Control by Harry Brown and Daniel G. Abel Free Press, $26.00

SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, AT THE HEIGHT of the Washington sniper crisis, conservative New York Times columnist and Maryland suburbanite William Satire wrote an uncharacteristic column calling for the government to do something, for God's sake. "Congress should make it easier to identify ammunition and the weapons of individual destruction that fire it," Safire declared. "Gun registration's time has come." This slightly panicky outburst amused online commentator Mickey Kaus. Recalling the old joke that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, Kaus observed that "a statist is a libertarian who can't walk his dog."

Right--and gun control is what will come to pass when all those anxious dog walkers reach critical mass and head for the voting booth. Meanwhile, Outgunned, by journalist Peter Harry Brown and trial attorney Daniel G. Abel, is about what's happening in the here and now. More specifically, the book is a sympathetic look at the efforts of a nationwide consortium of trial lawyers (including Abel) who called themselves the "Castano Group," and who took on the gun industry in the late 1990s. Why are these lawyers particularly interesting? While it's true that others had already tried to sue the gun industry (including in a well-publicized New York litigation), the Castano lawyers were different. In the world of the plaintiff's bar, they were the A-Team. They had resources, connections, and experience--including the experience of winning a $346 billion settlement from the tobacco companies. They were also ambitious. Beginning in 1998, the Castano lawyers launched anti-gun suits in cities across the country--until more than 30 state and local governments were involved in litigation against the gun industry.

The Castano lawyers knew this would be extremely challenging litigation and were proven correct--most of it has floundered or failed. So why did they do it? Not for the cash, insist the authors, who point out that the gun Companies do not have the same deep pockets as Big tobacco and could never offer the same kind of rich settlement that the tobacco litigation yielded. But even if one accepts that the lawyers' motives were largely pure (maybe they were, maybe they weren't)--and, indeed, even if one discounts their failures in court--Outgunned is not a book that inspires great confidence in the potential of...