A settlement means no official legal precedent is set, but holding gun sellers responsible for crimes of gun users could harm Americans’ ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights.
In December 2012, Adam Lanza used guns to murder 26 people,20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Today, after eight years of legal wrangling, Remington, the gun company that manufactured one of the weapons he used, settled a lawsuit by paying $73 million to a group of families of victims and one survivor that claimed the gun company bore legal responsibility for Lanza’s criminal misuse of the weapon it made. The plaintiffs insisted that Remington violated Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA) by stressing its rifles’ “militaristic and assaultive qualities” in its marketing. Thus the company should legally bear responsibility for Lanza (unlike nearly every other gun purchaser) using the weapon to kill other people. Various other arguments the plaintiffs tried to use to hold Remington responsible for Lanza’s actions were rejected by Connecticut’s Supreme Court in 2019, but the one based on CUTPA remained. This reliance on the Connecticut law was important, as Jacob Sullum reported at Reason in November 2019 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal from Remington to stop the suit, since that law in theory allowed them to: get around the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a 2005 federal law that generally protects gun manufacturers and distributors from liability for criminal uses of their products. The CUTPA claim is based on one of the exceptions made by the PLCAA, which allows lawsuits alleging that “a manufacturer or seller of a qualified product knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.
