The families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, left devastated when the Senate failed to pass even modest gun control legislation, have now won on two difficult legal fronts. From the New York Times
The image stopped him cold. Josh Koskoff, a Connecticut lawyer, was scanning crime scene photos of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting when he noticed “taped mags” on a classroom floor, two ammunition magazines crudely duct-taped together to speed reloading.
Francine and David Wheeler, whose son was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, at their home in Newtown, Conn., on Feb. 18, 2022. In a Connecticut defamation case the families brought against Jones, the Koskoff lawyers cited the same Connecticut trade practices law used in the Remington case, saying Infowars profited from broadcasting Sandy Hook falsehoods. Two defamation cases in Texas and one in Wisconsin employ a range of strategies. Nearly all the lawyers involved are parents themselves.After the defeat in the Senate, some family members began thinking about how to hold the maker of the Bushmaster to account.
The lawyers learned that sales of the Bushmaster had grown exponentially between 2005 and the 2012 shooting. In 2006, a New York-based private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, bought Bushmaster, a privately held manufacturer in Maine and one of the companies building the AR-15-style rifle. Cerberus acquired other American gun-makers, rolling them into a conglomerate that after several iterations took the name of the best-known company, Remington.
“The gun conglomerate formed by Cerberus blew through two very well established lines by targeting younger users who could not be lawful purchasers, and people who presented an increased risk to public safety,” Koskoff said. “They never asked, ‘How can we market this weapon in a way that reduces the risk of dangerous use?’ It appears from all the evidence that they did the opposite.”
When he saw the image of duct-taped magazines lying on the floor, the leg of a small desk chair at the edge of the frame, “the hair on my arms stood up,” he said. “I knew that without a single document I could make the case that there was a connection between the marketing of the gun in the game, this kid and the shooting.”
As the Remington case crawled along, the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent implicated in the conspiracy theories sued Jones in Texas and Connecticut in four separate lawsuits in 2018. By the end of last year, judges in all four suits ruled that Jones was liable by default because he has refused to turn over documents ordered by the courts, including financial records.
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