Last week the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that a lawsuit filed by the city of Gary against gun manufacturers could move forward.

This just really seems ludicrous to me, but what do I know.

If you apply that logic to all products that can be abused or used illegally, there would - literally - be no products safe from litigation.

How about the infamous Ken Lay of Enron or any of the other notorious bilkers of stock programs?

I'm sure they all used personal computers to do their shady business deals.

Better sue the computer manufacturers. And how about the software they used? Sue those companies, too.

What if somebody bops you on the head with a ball bat? Watch out, Louisville Slugger.

What if they use a tire iron or a monkey wrench? Tool-makers beware.

You get the picture.

And frankly, I was a little surprised by the Indiana ruling. Earlier last year, a court ruled that peer-to-peer software companies couldn't be sued because people were using their software to steal music files over the Internet.

The court rightly reasoned that if a company manufactures a legal product - in this case, file-sharing software - it can't be held liable if somebody decides to use that product illegally.

Whether you like guns or not, the logic is inescapable. Who is responsible when a law is broken? The person breaking the law or the company that manufactured the product the person used to break the law?

But this attitude of deflecting responsibility is become more pervasive in our culture these days.

It's an alarming trend.

The cigarette company lawsuits got the ball rolling.

Since then there have been lawsuits filed against alcohol manufacturers by people who drank too much.

And there was even a lawsuit by an overweight person against a fast food restaurant chain. It was their fault he was fat.

I guess these kinds of lawsuits concern me because they basically penalize the manufacturer of a legal product for someone else's abuse of it.

There is no law against what the manufacturer is doing. It's completely legal. But companies, nonetheless, can be quite literally sued out of existence anyway.

Have you ever looked at all the disclaimer stickers on a new ladder? It's unbelievable.

And ladder manufacturers still get sued dozens of times a year.

Now, this is not to say that manufacturers can never be negligent. If you manufacture a defective product and it hurts somebody, you should be sued.

But if you manufacture a perfectly serviceable, sturdy aluminum ladder and somebody leans it against a power line, whose fault is that?

Of course, bizarre lawsuits are nothing new in the United States. There have been some pretty celebrated cases over the years.

One in particular has inspired a Web site called the Stella Awards.

Stella Liebeck was the woman who spilled McDonald's coffee in her lap in 1992. A New Mexico jury awarded her $2.9 million in damages.

The Web site gives Stella Awards to "any wild, outrageous or ridiculous lawsuit."

Here are some of the top Stella Award winners from 2002, gleaned from their Web site.

• Every time you visit your doctor, you're told the same old things: eat less, exercise more, stop smoking. Do you listen? Neither did Kathleen Ann McCormick. The obese, cigarette-smoking woman from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a family history of coronary artery disease. Yet doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center "did not do enough" to convince her to work to improve her own health. Unsurprisingly, she had a heart attack which, she says in a federal lawsuit, left her a "cardiac invalid." In addition to eight doctors, she's suing their employer - the U.S. government - demanding a minimum of $1 million in compensation.

• Hazel Norton of Rolling Fork, Miss., read there was a class action suit against the drug Propulsid, which her doctor had prescribed to her for a digestive disorder. Despite admitting that "I didn't get hurt by Propulsid," Norton thought, "I might get a couple of thousand dollars" by joining the lawsuit. When her doctor was named in the suit, he quit his Mississippi practice - where he was serving the poor. He left with his wife, a pediatrician and internist. That left only two doctors practicing at the local hospital. So while Norton wasn't harmed by the drug, all her neighbors now get to suffer from drastically reduced access to medical care because of her greed.

And here is the winner of the 2002 Stella Awards:

• Sisters Janice Bird, Dayle Bird Edgmon and Kim Bird Moran sued their mother's doctors and a hospital after Janice accompanied her mother, Nita Bird, to a minor medical procedure. When something went wrong, Janice and Dayle witnessed doctors rushing their mother to emergency surgery. Rather than malpractice, their legal fight centered on the "negligent infliction of emotional distress" - not for causing distress to their mother, but for causing distress to them for having to see the doctors rushing to help their mother. The case was fought all the way to the California Supreme Court, which finally ruled against the women. Which is a good thing, since if they had prevailed, doctors and hospitals would have had no choice but to keep you from being anywhere near your family members during medical procedures just in case something goes wrong. In their greed, the Bird sisters risked everyone's right to have family members with them in emergencies.

You gotta love the U.S. legal system. There is one little piece of legislation that could be passed that would take care of the problem - loser pays.

With that, only lawsuits that have merit would be filed. Attorneys argue that marginal cases might not be filed and that low-income plaintiffs would be harmed by loser pays.

But hey, that falls squarely on the shoulders of attorneys. Don't they do any pro bono? Won't they go out on a limb for a client if they feel the case is legitimate?

I'm not holding my breath for loser pays, but if that was the law of the land, I wonder if the city of Gary would be suing gun manufacturers. [[In-content Ad]]