Sandy Hook Parents Beat the Gun Merchants

We who abhor gun violence and loathe gun merchants have been dreaming of the day when a few aggrieved parties pull off a miracle and gain a small measure of justice.

So it was sweet this week to learn that nine families devastated by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012 had extracted a $73 million settlement from Remington Arms, the company that had manufactured and hyped the Bushmaster AR-15 that enabled some loser to decimate 20 little kids and six grownups with 154 bullets in a span of 264 seconds.

The settlement, after more than five years of litigation in the Connecticut courts, is downright historic. There are no guarantees that such justice can be replicated in other mass shootings, for reasons I will explain, but a moment of celebration is certainly warranted.

To this day, I can’t bear to look at pictures of those Sandy Hook kids, but that’s just me. The Senate Republicans who stonewalled gun reform after the massacre were apparently less moved. So was Remington Arms, which fought the Sandy Hook lawsuit tooth and nail for years. Their predictable instinct was to defend their Bushmaster ad campaign – the one it featured in civilian catalogues with slogans like these:

The uncompromising choice when you demand a rifle as mission-adaptable as you are…

Military-proven performance…

The ultimate combat weapons system…

Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered…

Consider your man card reissued…

Remington believed the Sandy Hook parents had no power to sue and that they had total immunity from lawsuits thanks to a 2005 federal law, pushed by the NRA, that blessed Big Gun with blanket protection. What a great deal it was and continues to be, courtesy of President Bush (who signed it) and the Republicans in Congress (along with help from some Democrats, like Bernie Sanders). The law is creatively named “The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.”

...continued

swipe to next page