To call the regular use of a tool built and designed for killing people anything other than that, it rings a bit hollow for me.
Be that as it may for 99% of firearms sold in the United States their “regular use” has nothing to do with killing people. That’s the best case argument too. If we looked at it another way there’s probably 500,000,000 firearms in the United States so the “killing people” part drops to something like .005%. So for between 99% and 99.995% of firearms their “regular uses” are completely and utterly benign.
It can be tough to accept, especially when we’re seguing from firearms, but tools are often used for things other than what they were designed for and the Internet itself is a great example. It wasn’t meant for normal people but today most people have it in their pocket…which has lead directly to the struggles we are having with Social Media.
Should companies like Meta and Reddit be responsible for the comments of their users? Perhaps but a ruling like that would have tremendous impacts, many of them strongly negative, for every Social Media company in the United States and that would almost certainly include Lemmy and its users.
I’m not saying such a ruling would be completely wrong but down this road I see the end of anonymity on the Internet. Companies and website operators will seek to shield themselves from these kinds of lawsuits by doing identity verification so that if a problem users gets them sued they can in turn point the barrel of that legal canon at whomever(s) made the comments.