AP Photo/Michael Conroy

Almost two years later, I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around the carnage of the Las Vegas shooting. The whole thing was awful on so many levels, and yet there’s literally nothing that could have been done to prevent it.

All this time later, my heart still goes out to the wounded and the families of the slain. The scope of the massacre will, hopefully, always be mindboggling. I say hopefully because for it to not be mindboggling means such slaughter on that scale has come to be a common occurrence.

However, despite my sympathy, I can’t support nonsense like this.

The family of a former Bainbridge Island woman killed by a gunman raining down gunfire from a Las Vegas high-rise hotel suite filed a wrongful death lawsuit Tuesday against eight gun makers and three dealers arguing their weapons are designed in a way that could be easily modified to fire like automatic weapons.

The lawsuit, which targets Colt and seven other gun manufacturers, along with gun shops in Nevada and Utah, is the latest case to challenge a federal law shielding gun manufacturers from liability. It charges that gun makers marketed the ability of the AR-15-style weapons to be easily modified to mimic machine guns and fire continuously, violating both a state and federal ban on automatic weapons.

Here’s the problem with this. Nothing any gun manufacturer had advertised was illegal at the time it was advertised. Frankly, I don’t recall seeing any advertising that suggested using bump stocks, anyway.

If we’re going to follow this “logic,” then car manufacturers need to watch out. After all, they market cars capable of quick acceleration and high speeds. Wouldn’t they be responsible for auto accidents that result from activities like racing? Hell, deaths due to speeding in general?

Colt and the other gun manufacturers never said anything that a reasonable person could imply to mean, “Use this to kill dozens and dozens of people, injuring hundreds more.”

I’m sorry, but we have the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act for a reason. It’s to stop nonsense like this from happening.

The attorneys involved in this aren’t trying to get justice. They’re just trying to make it too expensive to be a gun manufacturer in this country. Nothing more, nothing less. This is lawfare, plain and simple.

At the end of the day, there was one person responsible for what happened in Las Vegas, and that bastard is dead. His last bullet fired went into him, which is a pity because I’d have loved to see him held accountable this atrocity. Unfortunately, we’re not going to get the chance to see that. The coward opted to off himself. If only he’d done that as his opening act, he’d have spared a lot of people a lot of grief.

Still, that is the person responsible. No one else. The sooner lawyers quit trying to convince grieving family members to file frivolous and forlorn lawsuits, the better it will be for everyone.