Page 8- The Behrend College Beacon - Thursday, October 8, 1998 Gun-Maker Beretta battles suit by parents of slain boy By Sean Somerville The Baltimore Sun A hit more than four years ago, Michael Soe, 14, replaced the loaded magazine in his father’s Beretta 92 Compact L handgun with an empty one and pointed the gun at his friend, Kenzo Dix, 15. As Kenzo fired a pellet gun at birds out of Michael’s bedroom window in Berkeley, Calif., Michael pulled the trigger, expecting to hear a click. Instead, he heard an explosion that would reverberate more than 3,000 miles to Beretta USA’s headquarters in Accokeek, Md. Kenzo Dix died, the victim of an undetected bullet in the gun’s firing chamber, bn day, a month atter what would have been Kenzo’s 20th birth day, an Oakland, Calif., court will begin deciding, in what could be a landmark case, whether Beretta bears any responsibility for the death. In their suit against Beretta, Kenzo’s parents, Lynn and Griffin Dix, maintain that the gun should have been designed to prevent use by unintended users such as children. Lynn Dix said the suit is an attempt to make something good come out of their tragedy. “When something like this hap pens, the bullet doesn’t stop,” said Kenzo’s mother. “It just keeps go ing.” Beretta USA, the U.S. subsidiary of the Italian company, says the fault lies with the Soe family, not the gun, which has a device that warns users of a bullet in the chamber. “There’s no gun that can’t be locked,” said Jeff Reh, general coun sel for Beretta USA. Reh said Michael Soe’s father had left the gun unlocked and loaded, and that Michael knew he should not DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN A CHILD’S LIFE • Help their Develop a friendship that can last forever. Work with underprivileged children and watch them succeed with your help. If you want to help, please call x6l ll or stop by the Dean of Students Office for an application. point the gun, disengage its safety or touch the trigger. “He knew how to pull back on the slide of the pistol and check to make sure that the chamber was un loaded,” Reh said. “He knew all these things and did not do them. His carelessness and that of his father led to the death of Kenzo Dix, not the design of the pistol.” When something like this happens, the bullet doesn’t stop. It just keeps going Dix vs. Beretta could help shape the way guns are designed and se cured. The case, which Beretta un successfully tried twice to get dis missed, may mark the first jury trial to test gun manufacturers’ account ability for failing to “child-proof’ guns, said Dennis Henigan, legal di rector of the Center to Prevent Hand gun Violence in Washington, D.C. The trial comes as some states are moving toward requiring handguns to be child-proofed or “personalized” so that they can be fired only by the intended user. Such legislation has been introduced in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Just last week, Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening became the first gover nor in the nation to endorse legisla tion that would ban the sale of all but so-called “smart” weapons. “This is an important case,” said David Kairys, a Temple University law professor who has served as an adviser to officials in Philadelphia, which is considering its own lawsuit against gun manufacturers. “It’s hard to figure exactly which young self-esteem. Shooting victim's mother Volunteer JUST one hour a week with our Adopt-A-School Tutoring Program. children develop World and Nation case or what issue is going to move things ahead,” Kairys said. “But there’s no doubt that courts, legisla tures and the population generally is moving toward understanding re sponsibility of gun manufacturers as being a lot like that of tobacco or as bestos manufacturers.” At the time Kenzo Dix was killed, the Center to Prevent Handgun Vio lence was searching for a case to test the notion that gun makers have a responsibility to design guns to pro tect against unintended use. Previous “product liability” law suits against the industry, which mainly cited the use of handguns in crimes as evidence of their defective ness, mostly failed, Henigan said. Now the idea was to equate the re sponsibilities of gun manufacturers to those of car makers. The reason ing: Just as automakers had to install air bags and seat belts to make cars safer, gun makers would have to use locks, magnets, computer chips or other technology to make firearms safer. The center said a person dies ev ery day on average because some one fails to recognize that a bullet is present in a gun’s chamber. “We just saw enormous potential to save lives,” Henigan said. At the same time, the Dixes were trying to make sure that their son’s life had a purpose. “I was thinking that it can’t end here,” said Lynn Dix. She contacted Henigan’s organi zation to volunteer her efforts. Henigan liked her case. California’s “product liability” standard, which calls for courts to weigh the risks of a product’s design against its ben efits, was favorable. In their April 1995 lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Alameda County, the Dixes argued that Beretta’s warn ing device an “extractor” on the handgun barrel that raises slightly at one end if a bullet is in the chamber -- is too subtle for children. “Beretta could easily have de signed its handgun so that this ‘chamber-loaded indicator’ did warn unintended users like Michael Soe of a round in the chamber,” Henigan said. “For example, Beretta could have inscribed a warning on the side of the gun.” Beretta, the suit said, was negli gent in “failing to design the gun so that it could not be fired by a fore seeable, unauthorized user like Michael Soe.” The suit also named the youth’s parents as defendants for allowing him access to the gun. The parents settled those claims tor $lOO,OOO, and Michael Soe was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The Dix family, which is seeking unspecified punitive and compensa tory damages, has received no settle ment offers, and no talks are planned, Henigan said. Beretta said it did not have a duty to make its semiautomatic pistol safe for unintended adolescent users. The company argued in court documents that the gun is “flawlessly con structed, legally sold only to adults and comes with the warning: ‘Store firearms and ammunition separately, beyond the reach of children.’ ” “It defies public policy, logic and common sense to hold a distributor of handguns liable for damages that result when an adult imprudently provides an adolescent unsupervised access to a loaded firearm and the adolescent thereafter uses the firearm in the commission of a felony,” the company said in court records. A judge denied Beretta’s motion for dismissal in May - a decision up held by ah appeals court in August - - clearing the way for trial. Poll shows Americans believe in value of ethnic diversity By Sam Fulwood 111 and Kenneth R. Weiss Los Angeles Times WASHINGTON Americans be lieve strongly in the value of ethnic diversity in the United States, but feel the nation is becoming more di vided along racial lines than less, a new study released Tuesday shows. The study conducted by the DYG Inc., a New York polling firm, for the Ford Foundation avoids any mention of affirmative action, a hot button term that tends to draw strong negative reactions. Instead, research ers asked voters to disclose their feel ings concerning the broader and less sensitive topic of diversity on col lege campuses. Seventy-one percent of respon dents say, for example, that college students should learn more about other ethnic groups as a way of bringing the nation closer together. However, three in five questioned say they believe that the nation is growing apart rather than together. Among selected poll findings: -91 percent agreed that “our soci ety is multicultural and the more we know about each other, the better we get along.” -75 percent said a diverse student body on campus has a positive ef fect on the education of students, compared to 18 percent who said it has a negative effect. -69 percent said courses and cam pus activities that emphasize diver sity and diverse perspectives have more of a positive effect on the edu cation of students, compared to 22 percent who said it has more of nega tive effect. “Despite the heated public debate over diversity, Americans are clear in their views,” said Alison R. Bernstein, a vice president of the foundation, whose Campus Diver sity Initiative sponsored the poll. “They support diversity in higher education. They recognize that diver sity is important to student success and they believe that diversity edu cation can help bring the country to gether.” Daniel Yankelovich, chairman of DYG Inc., said the study took pains to avoid using the emotion-laden term of affirmative action because it would have skewed the findings. “Affirmative action is the code word for a set of practices that are seen as zero-sum, where somebody wins and somebody loses,” he said. “Diversity isn’t seen that way. Diversity is seen as everyone wins, as advancing the goals that everyone embraces.” University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger said it would be wrong to assume that a majority of Americans favor anti-affirmative ac tion programs like Proposition 209 - - approved by California voters in 1996 - that outlawed all state sup port for programs based on race. “Many people thought a poll like this would come out very differ ently,” he said. “This is great news because it’s counter intuitive. We may have misled ourselves about what people really think.” William H. Gray 111, president and chief executive of The College Fund/ United Negro College Fund, agreed that “Americans may be way ahead of the political leaders, social lead ers and economic leaders in under standing this change.” In the poll, 52 percent of voters said that multicultural courses such as women’s studies or African- American studies raise academic standards on campus, while only 16 percent believe it lowered such stan dards. Twenty-one percent thought it did neither. But the results also showed that 59 percent of those interviewed agreed with the statement: “Diversity edu cation always seems to have a lib eral political agenda.”