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US gun maker Remington has agreed to pay $73 million in compensation to the families of nine victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. “historical”.
“The plaintiffs in this action advise that an agreement for damages has been reached between the parties,” said in a court document released Tuesday, February 15, the families of nine victims of the shooting in the school of Sandy Hook, in 2012.
According to their lawyers, this is the first time that a firearms manufacturer has been held responsible for a shooting in the United States. “The agreement is for $73 million,” family lawyer Joshua Koskoff told a press conference. “It’s all that was left” after the bankruptcy of the Remington group.
The families had sued the gunsmith and its subsidiary Bushmaster, claiming it had knowingly sold a version of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a military-style weapon “not at all suitable” for use. civil.
“This marks the beginning of the necessary process of holding arms manufacturers responsible for the manufacture of weapons of war” and their “irresponsible marketing”, underlined US President Joe Biden, welcoming “a historic agreement” in a press release on Tuesday evening.
>> To (re) read: Five years after the Sandy Hook massacre, the problem of weapons remains unsolved
Established in 1816 and considered the nation’s oldest gunsmith, Remington denied the charges and did not immediately respond to the announcement.
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza used his Bushmaster XM15-E2S to kill 26 people, including 20 children and six adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The 20-year-old shooter who committed suicide had previously killed his mother at her home.
“A warning to the arms industry”
The massacre had stunned America and provoked yet another debate on the acquisition and possession of personal weapons in a country where the right to possess a weapon is guaranteed by the Constitution.
But AR-15 type rifles have also been used in other shootings, such as in Las Vegas in 2017 (58 dead) or Parkland in Florida (17 dead) in 2018.
In 2021, guns killed nearly 45,000 people in the United States, including about 24,000 suicides, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive.
The Giffords association, which campaigns for tougher laws on individual weapons, also hailed on Twitter “a historic victory” for families, which sounds like “a warning to the arms industry: no company is at risk. above the law”.
“Finally, a gunmaker is being held accountable for the gun violence crisis in this country,” said Newtown Action Alliance, another small arms control group.
Matthew Soto, whose sister Victoria was one of the teachers killed at Sandy Hook, told reporters he made a “horrifying” discovery while studying Remington’s documents. “Weapons manufacturers knew they were advertising a dangerous product and they were exploiting those dangers,” he said.
“Forcing change” the arms manufacturers
“When the military is looking for the best, deadliest, most destructive weapon and one that could be used by our soldiers if they were to kill the enemies of our country and our freedom, they would choose the AR-15,” he said. explained attorney Joshua Koskoff.
This weapon “was not used by a highly trained soldier, but by a very disturbed young person, not on a battlefield but in an elementary school, not to protect freedom but to kill it”, he said. added.
According to the lawyer, the families did not bring these lawsuits to be compensated financially, but “to force a change” from the arms manufacturers.
This agreement “does not mean the end of the personal weapons industry (which) will always be part of our culture”, asserted Joshua Koskoff, but it shows that “the immunity of this industry is not proof. balls”.
Since 2005, a law has protected arms manufacturers from most legal actions seeking to hold them responsible for a violent act committed with one of their weapons. But there are exceptions, in particular for negligence of the seller, on which the families intended to play.
In March 2019, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that Remington could stand trial to determine whether its advertisements on its semi-automatic rifle were responsible for the mass killings.
At the hearing in November 2017, Joshua Koskoff relied in particular on the marketing of Bushmaster, which, according to him, had presented his AR-15 type rifle in an advertisement as an assault weapon.
With AFP