The agreement, reached with the families of five children and four adults who were killed, appears to be the largest such settlement involving a gun maker and relatives of mass shooting victims.
It also represents a significant setback to the firearm industry because the lawsuit, by employing a novel strategy, pierced the vast shield enshrined in federal law protecting gun companies from litigation.
The families contended that Remington, the gun maker, violated state consumer law by promoting the weapon in a way that appealed to so-called couch commandoes and troubled young men like the gunman who stormed into the elementary school on Dec. 14, 2012, killing 20 first graders and six adults in a spray of gunfire.
The families contended that Remington, the gun maker, violated state consumer law by promoting the weapon in a way that appealed to so-called couch commandoes and troubled young men like the gunman who stormed into the elementary school on Dec. 14, 2012, killing 20 first graders and six adults in a spray of gunfire.
That sounds like an approach used against cigarette companies, over the way they pandered to children with cartoon characters like “Joe Camel”.
Yup earlier reporting on the case the lawyers did model it off of the cigarette defeat.
In the report on the evening news, some of the Remington ads for their AR-15 knockoff were shown. One of the ads said “consider your man card reissued”.
Why doesn’t the ad show a lot of women and children bleeding out after being shot with that thing? It certainly is no sporting weapon. It was only designed to kill people. Does that make the owner feel “manly”?
The requirement for gun owners to carry insurance needs to go world wide. The rates for insurance should consider $10 million payouts for wrongful deaths, $100k fines if your gun is stolen, $2 million payouts for injuring anyone with a gun (I do not care if it is the but$ of the gun), $5 million as a never to be paid out cost for suicide risks. Add all that up and charge them. Lack of insurance should be a 5 year prison sentence.
Also there should be three taxes on that insurance collected by the state, local and federal governments of any amounts they want to fund anything and everything else.
