I'm not a rightwing person, but

I'm not a rightwing person, I've never owned a gun, and I think the tort liability of gun manufacturers would be a pretty tricky issue based on my understanding of tort law were it not for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act ("PLCAA") that was issued by the federal government in 2005 essentially banning lawsuits like the one in the film, but...

OK, let's say there were not any PLCAA--aside from the all the tricky issues involved in general tort law that would relate to this kind of thing, it would still seem to me somehow unfair, just as a common sense matter, that a gun manufacturer might have to pay for a murder committed with its gun but wouldn't ever get rewarded for a time a gun is used to prevent or stop a crime or shoot a would-be murderer and all that. Because when a good thing is caused by a gun like that, y'know, that's a really, really good thing, like when an innocent life is saved and a murder is prevented, or whatever.

I don't know whether society really benefits from allowing guns to be manufactured--for all I know it might cause society a net loss, or it might not. I don't know and that's beside the point I'm making. The point is that it is an actual fact that sometimes people do successfully defend themselves against would-be crimes by means of firearms, in situations in which they probably wouldn't have been able to defend themselves by any other means, so it's clearly just wrong when you're looking at the costs and benefits to say guns offer society no benefits at all--it may be that the net result gives you more cost than benefit, but there are not no benefits. Therefore, it'd be weird if the legal system were such that the costs had to be compensated for by gun manufacturers but the benefits didn't result in any kind of canceling-out of those costs.