Move to Fire: A Family's Tragedy, a Lone Attorney, and a Teenager's Victory Over a Corrupt Gunmaker - Softcover

Harkins, Michael W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0996567208 ISBN 13: 9780996567206

Publisher: Story and Pictures, 2015

Synopsis

No parents should ever experience the traumatic, lifetime effects of their child being shot, especially when the bullet is from a defective gun made by a company with a history of bystanders and users being maimed and killed by its poorly made products.

When seven year-old son Brandon Maxfield was accidentally shot and seriously wounded by a defectively designed handgun, all his mother Sue prayed for was that he live. Comatose, on a ventilator in intensive care, the top of his spine shattered, she whispered into his tiny ear that If he woke up, she promised to be his arms and legs for the rest of his life.

Brandon not only lived, permanently paralyzed from the neck down, ten years after the shooting he and a lone, determined attorney became the focus of national, then international news when Brandon secured a first of its kind, twenty-five million dollar product liability judgment against the gun maker. When the company and its owner declared bankruptcy to avoid paying the judgment, and schemed to secretly resurrect the company, Brandon and his attorney created a plan to bid for the company’s remaining assets in a bankruptcy auction and destroy its inventory of defective guns so that, as Brandon himself explained, no kid ever had to go through what he went through.

Move To Fire follows Brandon’s and his family’s life before and after the accident, and explores the broader community and societal costs of a tragic accidental shooting. It also details the extent of the gun maker’s efforts to hide millions of dollars made from handguns so poorly manufactured, and of such inferior materials, the guns became known to law enforcement as crime guns, junk guns and, infamously, Saturday night specials.

Move To Fire’s compelling narrative illuminates events that captivated media outlets and people around the world. It is a cautionary tale, to be studied as gun manufacturing surges unregulated and exempt from product safety oversight, ghost guns proliferate, and already fragile firearm regulations are continually weakened even as firearm-related incidents remain the leading cause of children’s deaths.

Edition details

• Publisher: Story and Pictures
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0996567208
• ISBN 13: 9780996567206
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348