In December 2012, Adam Lanza used guns to murder 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Today, after eight years of legal wrangling, Remington, the gun company that manufactured one of the weapons he used, settled a lawsuit by paying $73 million to a group of families of victims and one survivor that claimed the gun company bore legal responsibility for Lanza's criminal misuse of the weapon it made.
The plaintiffs insisted that Remington violated Connecticut's Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA) by stressing its rifles' "militaristic and assaultive qualities" in its marketing. Thus the company should legally bear responsibility for Lanza (unlike nearly every other gun purchaser) using the weapon to kill other people. Various other arguments the plaintiffs tried to use to hold Remington responsible for Lanza's actions were rejected by Connecticut's Supreme Court in 2019, but the one based on CUTPA remained.
