After nearly a decade’s worth of pain, nine families of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012 have won a $73 million dollar lawsuit, the largest in history against a gun manufacturer. Remington, the gun company that had created the weapon that the assassin used, recently lost their case. This is a major court victory for victims of school shootings that have not been properly reimbursed by gun manufacturers or other private individuals.
The weapon that was used, a Bushmaster AR-15, was the gun that wreaked utter destruction at Sandy Hook high school. The lone shooter, a distressed teenager by the name of Adam Lanza, killed twenty first graders and six educators before taking his own life as police urgently arrived at the scene. It is statistically the deadliest K-12 school shooting in American history.
A major point that came up for the prosecution was when thousands of images regarding the case came out in 2013. It had already been proven that Lanza had played hours and hours of a widely popular virtual shooting game called Call of Duty, where the Bushmaster AR-15 appeared. While the prosecution initially felt that they had no real target to sue and win, when a photo of a “taped mags” found its way up to the lawyer of the victims’ families. The taped rounds were made to load and fire the gun faster than single mags.
That lawyer, Josh Koskoff, said that this image was a quote-on-quote “checkmate moment” for the case. In other words, this was the difference between a multi-million dollar lawsuit victory or an empty-handed, uncompensated result. His legal team immediately tried to hammer home the point that the gunmakers had illegally advertised the gun to those unable to legally purchase the gun.
Koskoff had played Call of Duty before, the same version as Lanza, when he noticed that while he was wielding the same weapon as Lanza had carried, the ammunition magazines were taped together. This ultimately proved to be the nail in the coffin, as this was the legal team’s main driving point as they finally clutched several much-deserving legal wins.
Despite this, gun violence remains rampant, and this will never take away the fact that twenty six victims would never be able to see their loved ones again after that fateful day. America must be firm and strong on these policies so that incidents such as Sandy Hook will never happen again.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll
Image Credits: AP
