Hearing set on gun maker’s bid to dismiss Newtown lawsuit

A CT judge is set to hear arguments on whether to dismiss a lawsuit against the maker of the semiautomatic rifle used to kill 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit heard in Bridgeport Monday include family members of nine of the victims in the December 2012 shooting. According to authorities, his mother Nancy who was also killed by Adam, legally bought the rifle.

Vogt asked the judge what case the federal law would prohibit if not this one.

The Orlando killings have reignited debates over AR-15-style rifles, which have been used in several mass killings in recent years, and over whether to reinstate a federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

“It’s not the role of this court or perhaps a jury to decide whether civilians as a broad class of people are not appropriate to own these kinds of firearms”, James Vogts, an attorney for Bushmaster’s parent company, Remington Arms, told a courtroom so packed that more than a dozen spectators were watching the hearing standing in a hallway outside the court. “He said he is sponsoring legislation that would, “…remove the current legal shield that gun manufactures have.

Christopher Renzulli, who represented the distributor, Camfour, echoed Remington’s defense.

Thomas said prior court cases challenging the 2005 law generally focused on acts of negligence in particular sales to individual customers.

A victory for the Sandy Hook families might provide a road map to success in court for victims in other mass shootings, despite a variety of laws in other states, including Florida, that offer even greater immunity to gunmakers.

Mark Barden, father of a 7-year-old boy killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., holds a photo of his three children during his speech at the state’s Democratic Convention, in Melville, N.Y., in 2014.

“It was Remington’s choice to entrust the most notorious American killing machine to the public”, said the families’ attorney Joshua Koskoff, who denied Vogts’ claim that the lawsuit amounted to an attempt to ban assault weapons. The weapon is manufactured by Remington arms. “If they didn’t choose to sell the gun to civilians, we wouldn’t have had a Sandy Hook”.

The plaintiffs in this case are seeking access to the defendants’ marketing materials that they believe will prove that the defendants were highlighting the high powered and military-grade aspects of the AR-15 to sell more guns.

Koskoff said the judge’s rulings support the merit of the families’ claim.

But Remington said that’s not the case.

The plaintiffs argue that the AR-15, a modified version of a gun used by the military in Vietnam, never should have been marketed and sold to civilians.

“By which time – and I saw with Newtown – and it’s an very bad thing to say, but people forget, people move on, another massacre happens and then they dwell on that for a while and then it moves on”.

He added that a change in the law moreover “fuels argument that these are legislative issues”.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke outside the Bridgeport courthouse Monday.