A gunmaker has been held liable for a mass shooting in the United States for the first time after Remington Arms agreed to pay $73m to the families of five adults and four children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.
Twenty students and six adults were killed on 14 December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, by Adam Lanza, who used a Remington Bushmaster AR-15 rifle to shoot his way into the school after killing his mother at home.
Remington Arms will pay $73m to the families and release all the discovery and deposition material to the public, attorneys for the families said on Tuesday. The settlement will be paid through insurance policies.
The nine families sued in 2014 and spent years in the courts trying to hold Remington liable, despite a US law that protects firearm manufacturers and dealers from most civil litigation.
In 2019 the supreme court decided against taking up an appeal by Remington, allowing the lawsuit to move forward.
Last summer, Remington proposed a settlement worth approximately $33m to the families, who refused “because they wanted to ensure they had obtained enough documents and taken enough depositions to prove Remington’s misconduct” and to “ensure the case’s message to the insurance industry was clear”, attorneys said in a statement on Tuesday.
The families have “obtained and can make public thousands of pages of internal company documents that prove Remington’s wrongdoing and carry important lessons for helping to prevent future mass shootings”, the statement said.
“They had the energy, drive and motivation to do one thing,” said Josh Koskoff, an attorney for the families. “That was to do whatever they could so that other families … would not have to go through the pain and loss that they have.”
He added: “This victory should serve as a wake-up call not only to the gun industry, but also the insurance and banking companies that prop it up.”
The Sandy Hook families found a way around the legal protection for gunmakers by claiming that Remington’s marketing of firearms contributed to the massacre.
Attorneys argued that Remington violated Connecticut’s state trade law by irresponsibly targeting its AR-15 Bushmaster rifle at young, high-risk males through militaristic marketing campaigns and first-person shooter video games.
Despite the settlement, the parents of six-year-old Noah Pozner, who was killed in the shooting, said they do not completely feel that justice has been served.
Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa said their loss is “irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative”, according to CNN.
“One moment we had this dazzling, energetic six-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left, were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah’s life stored in a backpack and boxes.
“What is lost remains forever. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this we are grateful,” they said.
Other gun control advocates have since been encouraged to follow the Sandy Hook families’ strategy of looking at gunmaker’s marketing techniques, including New Jersey’s attorney general, who is investigating marketing by Smith & Wesson.
Mexico also filed a US lawsuit last year seeking $10bn from several gunmakers, accusing them of marketing their weapons to the country’s underworld.
New York last year enacted a law that allows firearm sellers, manufacturers and distributors to be sued for creating a “public nuisance” that endangers the public’s safety and health. Gun manufacturers have challenged the law in court.
Gun groups have also been using the courts and state legislatures to expand gun rights, and scored victories at the supreme court in 2008 and 2010 that solidified an individual’s right to keep a gun at home for self-defense.
