Summary: Families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre received a small legal victory from a Connecticut judge.
A high-profile gun case has been allowed to move forward. On Thursday, Judge Barbara Bellis approved a lawsuit against gun-maker Remington Arms. The plaintiffs claimed the company was responsible for the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012.
ABC News reports Bellis said the 2005 federal law that protects gun-makers from lawsuits does not stop lawyers from arguing that Remington Arms’ semi-automatic rifle should not have been sold to civilians. The lawyers of the Sandy Hook victims’ families say the rifle is a military weapon.
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, then 20, killed his mother at their Newton, Connecticut home before he trespassed onto the Sandy Hook Elementary School grounds and opened fire, killing 20 first grade students and six teachers. At the school, he used a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle that his mother obtained legally. When police arrived on the scene, he killed himself.
Remington Arms is the parent company of Bushmaster Firearms, the maker of Lanza’s rifle.
Lawyers for Remington Arms tried to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shielded them from lawsuits that allegedly abuse the legal system, but Bellis said the 2005 law is not grounds to dismiss this particular lawsuit.
Joshua Koskoff, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said there is an exception in the federal law that allows litigation if companies know their weapons are likely to be used in a way that poses risk of injury.
NPR reports that the two parties are due back in court on Tuesday.
Source: ABC News
Photo courtesy of The Huffington Post.