Move to Fire

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, “If you wake up, I promise I’ll be your arms and legs for the rest of your 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, $24,000,000 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 goes through what I went through.”

Move To Fire follows Bandon’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.

Described in a Publishers Weekly starred review as "reminiscent of A Civil Action," 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.