The 2002 Hunting Show came to Fort Worth last week. Despite the name, it was a different kind of gun show than the ones that draw folks dressed in camouflage with deer rifles slung over their shoulders.

Sponsored by the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers, the annual convention provided an opportunity for manufacturers and wholesalers of hunting and shooting sports equipment to get together to talk about educational and marketing issues important to their industry.

And what many of the impeccably dressed exhibitors in the hall were talking about was the outcome of Tuesday's midterm elections. An undercurrent of controlled exuberance could be detected as they heralded the beginning of the end of the legal harassment that the firearms industry has endured for the past 30 years.

You may not have seen that in the Tuesday night scrolls across the bottom of your TV sets, but citizens who believe in private ownership of firearms sure read it every time a check mark went into the "R" column.

"This may be the most historic election in history," said Robert Morrison, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Miami-based Taurus International Manufacturing. "Now we will see a law that prohibits suing an industry for the actions of an individual."

Such pre-emptive legislation is needed to halt the kind of resource-draining lawsuits that have become a plague on the firearms industry. Many of these cases ultimately get tossed out of court -- a Florida judge dismissed a Miami-Dade County suit that tried to hold handgun manufacturers and distributors responsible for criminal and juvenile misuse of firearms; a Connecticut judge dismissed a similar suit filed by the city of Bridgeport -- but, in the meantime, they take millions of dollars to defend.

The election results signaled more than just a shot across the bow of those American trial lawyers who have made lucrative careers of going after manufacturers of legal products, such as tobacco and firearms.

No, Tuesday was a signal to the anti-gun-rights brigade that Americans just aren't buying what they have to peddle anymore. The sell-by date has expired on blaming objects -- or industries -- for the actions of individuals.

"It's a bad idea to blame innocent people for the things criminals do," said Gary Mehalik, vice president of communications for the National Shooting Sports Foundation. "That fundamentally offends people. It failed as a policy.

"Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's loss, after trying to play the gun card in the Maryland governor's race, speaks volumes about the end of this issue as a gut-reaction answer for politicians who have to deal with crime," Mehalik said. "That is just one of many indicators of a growing universal acceptance in this country that you don't go out of your way to aggravate legitimate firearm owners."

The Republicans' success last week doesn't mean that the country has seen the last of blame-shifting lawsuits. The NAACP still has an active one in the federal courts, thanks to an activist judge who apparently doesn't see the unconstitutionality of using the judicial branch of government to do what is a legislative function -- make laws.

A Republican-controlled Congress and White House may be able to bring about pre-emptive legislation, but don't expect gun control advocates to fall down and play dead. The next onslaught is already under way -- a campaign that treats firearm ownership as a disease.

An anti-gun-rights physicians' group, Doctors Against Handgun Injury, is pushing for doctors to question their patients about firearms in their homes, and it lectures gun owners about the risks associated with gun ownership. Its members use statistical information collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on firearm injuries to bolster their arguments.

But the CDC's classification for "firearm injury" is so broad that someone who seeks medical treatment for dropping his Glock on his toe while cleaning the gun will register as a "firearm injury." Sorta skews the data, don't you think?

And of course DAHI's statistical research never includes data on the number of crimes that are thwarted because people had firearms in their homes.

It can only be hoped that DAHI goes the way of the Million Mom March, whose future as an effective agent of change got a whole lot bleaker on Tuesday when most of its "Dangerous Dozen" list of candidates for Congress and governorships -- people "whose election could make the difference between common-sense gun laws and laws that make it easy for children and criminals to get guns" -- got elected.

That kind of fear-mongering should be the death of a group. Bye-bye, ladies.