Explained: The $73 million Remington settlement and what this means

The families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have reached a historic settlement with Remington, the gun-marker whose rifle was used by the gunman. A look at the lawsuit, and gun control in the United States.

State police personnel lead children from the Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Reuters Photo, File)

Twenty-six people, including 20 students, were killed during a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. This week, the families of the victims settled a historic lawsuit with Remington, the gun-maker whose rifle was one of the three that the gunman had used.

The lawsuit settled at $73 million was brought by families of nine of the 26 victims in 2014 in a bid to bring about a change in the gun laws in a country which has one of the most lax gun control laws in the world and also has the highest civilian gun ownership globally.

The settlement is significant considering how rare it is to see a gun manufacturer getting sued over a mass shooting. This case is also the first time that a gun-manufacturer is facing liability.

Interestingly, the lawsuit sued Remington for wrongful marketing of the gun to the public and not simply for selling the guns. Remington, however, has continued to maintain that it did not partake in marketing practices as alleged by the lawsuit.

The settlement will have ramifications on future lawsuits of this nature and the way guns are advertised and marketed in the US.

Five years ago | Sandy Hook families ask court to hear suit against gunmaker

The Remington lawsuit

The Business and Human Rights Centre notes that the lawyer for the victims’ families claimed that the AR-15 rifle used by Adam Lanza on December 14, 2012 was specifically engineered for the US. military to kill in combat and wasn’t designed for home defense or hunting use.

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Nine years before the lawsuit was filed and seven years before the incident took place, then president George W Bush signed into law the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which gave certain protections to gun manufacturers in lawsuits related to injuries resulting from criminal misuse of the product.

But there is one exception to this protection, referred to as “negligent entrustment”. The lawyer for the families maintained that this exception applied to Remington because it took a weapon made for the US military and started marketing it to civilians.

The lawsuit filed by the families made the argument that by marketing a military-grade weapon to the civilian public, Remington partook in “negligent entrustment”.

In an article for the Hartford Courant, Francine Wheeler, mother of one the Sandy Hook victims wrote, “Remington made a decision to market to the general public a product intended only as a military weapon, a deception designed to boost the company’s bottom line. More specifically, it designed its advertising campaigns to target violence-prone, military-obsessed young men, the exact profile of many mass shooters.”

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“…if a Connecticut jury holds Remington responsible for prioritizing its profits over our safety, it lessens the risk that your first grader will die in school or in a movie theater or in a church or anywhere else,” she added.

Gun control in the US

In the US, the right to buy a gun is written in the country’s Constitution and only a few people, such as those with criminal history or mental illness, may find it difficult to own a gun. Even so, while gun ownership is a right throughout the country, laws within different states vary about who can buy a gun.

Gun control in the US is rooted in the Second Amendment of the country’s Constitution. According to information maintained by the Library of Congress, in June 2008, the Supreme Court, for the first time since 1939, issued a decision interpreting the Second Amendment. At the time, the court ruled that the amendment gave the right to US citizens to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes such as self-defence.

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Even so, there is no single law or provision in the Constitution that determines gun control today. In fact, there is little consensus among experts about which kinds of gun laws and policy can have tangible effects on curbing violence.

As per data compiled by the Pew Research Centre, about 30 per cent of American adults said they personally own a gun and an additional 11 per cent said that they live with someone who owns a gun. The results were compiled from a survey conducted between March-April 2017.

Further, as per this survey, about two-thirds of the gun owners said that one of the major reasons for owning a firearm was protection, followed by hunting (38 per cent), sport shooting (30 percent), gun collecting (13 per cent) or their job (8 per cent).

The majority of Americans believed that gun laws should be stricter, according to a survey conducted in September 2019. But Americans were still divided over the idea if strict gun control laws would lead to fewer mass shootings, as per a poll taken in the fall of 2018, also by Pew.

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