Sandy Hook Massacre: Weapons Manufacturers Lose Their Major Decision on Liability

The Connecticut Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to the gun industry on Thursday, paving the way for a lawsuit against the companies that manufactured and sold the semi-automatic rifle used by the gunman during the school massacre Sandy Hook primary.

The ruling authorizes the lawsuit filed by relatives of the victims, which could force the arms companies to return internal communications that they fought fiercely to keep the secret and to give a revealing – and possibly detrimental – insight into the operation. Of the industry.

The court agreed with the decision of the lower court to dismiss the claims directly challenging the federal law protecting the firearms companies from the dispute, but concluded that the case could proceed on the basis of a the State regarding unfair commercial practices.

The judges wrote in the majority opinion that "it is up to a jury to decide whether the promotional ploys alleged in this case reach the level of illicit business practices and whether a fault for the tragedy can be traced to their feet" ".

This decision represents a significant development in the long battle between gun control advocates and the gun lobby.

Relatives of the victims had to face long hardships, claiming that the firearms companies were partly responsible for this horrific attack.

The lawsuit argued that the Bushmaster AR-15 type used in the 2012 attack had been marketed as a weapon of war, invoking the violence of the fight and using slogans such as "Think about your re-released player card" .

According to the trial, such messages reflected a deliberate effort to appeal to troubled young men, such as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who opened fire in a primary school and killed 26 people, including 20 freshmen, in a shooting. The attack traumatized the nation and made Newtown, Connecticut, the small town where it occurred, a rallying point in the larger debate on gun violence.

This decision marks a new stage in the complicated trajectory of the trial by the judicial system, a process that has lasted much longer than many of them, including legal experts and families, had initially hoped for.

The lawsuit, filed by family members of nine people killed and a teacher who had been shot, was originally filed in 2014, then transferred to the Federal Court, where a judge ordered that the case be returned to the state level.

In 2005, Congress passed the Law on the Protection of the Legal Trade in Weapons, which restricts litigation against gun manufacturers and manufacturers by granting immunity to all industry for the responsibility when one of their products is used for criminal purposes. Legislators behind the measure cited the need to thwart what they described as a predatory and political litigation.

The law allows exceptions for sales and marketing practices that violate federal or state laws and cases of so-called recourse for negligence, in which a firearm is given or sold without precaution to a person at high risk d & # 39; abuse.

In the lawsuit, families pushed to expand the scope of application to include the manufacturer, Remington, who was appointed with a wholesaler and a local retailer in the lawsuit.

The prosecution stated that the companies were wrong to give an untrained audience a weapon designed to maximize casualties on the battlefield.

The lawyers emphasized the advertising – with messages of domination in combat and hyper-masculinity – evoking disturbed young men who could be brought to use the weapon to commit acts of violence.

"Remington may have never known Adam Lanza, but they have been courting him for years," said Joshua D. Koskoff, one of the attorneys representing the families, during the judges' argument at the time. The pleading in 2017. The gun used by Mr. Lanza had been legally purchased by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he had also killed.