In this case, they initially tried to sue Remington because the shooter used a Remington rifle, The lower courts said, nope you can’t do that because of PLCCA.
However, they found a way around PLCCA by using Conetticuts state laws about ads and trade practices claiming that Remington’s advertising for AR15s was irresponsibly geared directly at young teens and as result should be held at least partially responsible.
Long story short, they found yet another creative way to use our court system to try to financially destroy the gun industry.
Keep in mind, this didn’t mean their argument would win at trial, it just meant they were allowed to try it.
Trials are incredibly expensive for defendants because they have to pay attorneys on the front end where these plaintiffs aren’t paying their attorneys anything until they win or settle the case.
So they can drag this as long as they want and keep in mind Remingtons had already gone bankrupt twice!
People have this idea that the gun industry makes a ton of money, they don’t especially compared to other sectors.
Open Source Defense provides a perfect example of how small the gun industry actually is:
“Ruger is the biggest publicly traded gun company in the world, and their market cap is $1.3 billion. For comparison, Google made $18.5 billion in profit last quarter; i.e. Google’s weekly profit exceeds the entire value of Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. Gunmakers are small companies in a low-margin business. It doesn’t take much to bankrupt them.”
Open Source Defense
If this is about creating change, saving lives, and proving that the gun manufacturers are responsible for these types of shootings, why did they accept the settlement?
Accepting the settlement meant that the gun company didn’t accept any responsibility for what happened.
There are only 9 people in this suit on the plaintiffs side. After these 9 people going to split the settlement with the other families who are affected by this tragic event?
If this was about saving lives the only thing that would matter is getting a verdict in court demonstrating that what Remington did was responsible for the deaths of those children at that school.
Instead, once the number was high enough, they settled. That’s literally what the Attorney just said.
The goal was never to win on the merits of the case.
The goal was to make it harder for gun companies to get liability insurance because they’d be too much of a risk because now they can be sued for just marketing their products and then someone using it in a crime.
There are over 8 -12 thousand gun homicides a year. If you can sue every gun manufacturer for their gun used in one of those homicides, the companies would be bankrupt in less than a year and that’s what they are counting on while getting filthy rich in the process.
