Sandy Hook Parents Inflict Serious Damage on Remington Arms

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Although there is clearly no way to ever achieve absolute  justice over the loss of an innocent child's life, or any life for that matter, a group of parents of nine of the children who were killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut in 2012 did receive some justice yesterday when they reached an agreement for a $73 million payout from insurers for the Remington Arms Company.   The parents had been in court for the past seven years trying to attach some legal blame to the company that made the assault weapon that killed their children.

Remington's insurers had previously offered to settle for $33 million, but the parents refused that offer. The settlement which was agreed to yesterday  not only awards that group of parents $73 million, but, almost as importantly, it allows the parents to make public all of the company's documentation that was uncovered during the discovery phase of the court proceedings.  Much of that documentation deals with the gun manufacturer's marketing strategy,  an ad campaign aimed at young, and often unstable, men.  The ads sometimes ran on violent video games, and one, in particular, used the phrase:  "Consider Your Man Card Reissued."

Remington, and surely other gun manufacturers as well, considered their own "Man Cards" to be invincible thanks to federal legislation that protected arms manufacturers from liability over the harm caused by their products.    That protective legislation was, of course, written by lawmakers whose pockets were stuffed with cash from the NRA and other gun lobbyists - and much of which was originally funded by the gun manufacturers themselves.

The lawsuit by the Sandy Hook parents took a different tact.   Instead of going directly after Remington for its manufacture of the deadly weapon that killed their children, the plaintiffs instead used Connecticut consumer protection laws to attack the company over the way that it marketed its weaponry.  They were able to make a case that the troubled young man who killed their children had been exactly the type of individual that Remington was enticing to buy its guns.

According to the lawsuit, Remington violated Connecticut's unfair trade practices act when it "knowingly marketed and promoted the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle for use in assaults against human beings."   Joshua Koskoff, the lead attorney representing the families, told USA Today that "the marketing essentially glorifies violence and the military use of the weapon to young men."

Remington has declared bankruptcy twice in the past two years, and its future as an arms manufacturer looks to be unclear.  A judge still has to approve the settlement before any money will change hands or the damning documents can be released for public viewing, but there seems to be a sense that the tide may have finally begun to turn against the once untouchable American arms industry.

Nicole Hockley, a mother of one of the children who was killed at Sandy Hook and a member of the group that brought the lawsuit against Remington,  noted to the press that the parents "can't wait" to release the thousands of internal documents that they acquired during this prolonged legal battle.    She said they "paint a picture of a company that lost its way choosing more aggressive marketing campaigns for profit, with no thought to the impact."

Joshua Koskoff, the attorney for the families, summed up yesterday's victory this way:  "The immunity protecting the gun industry is not bulletproof."  

Perhaps in the future the gun manufacturers will feel the need to employ more care and diligence in how they peddle their "Man Cards."