The family of a woman killed during the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against eight gun-makers and three dealers, claiming the guns’ design makes it easy for them to be modified to fire like automatic weapons, The Associated Press reports.
The lawsuit names Colt’s Manufacturing LLC, seven other manufacturers, and gun shops in Nevada and Utah. These places, the suit says, had a “reckless lack of regard for public safety” through their advertisements of the firearms “as military weapons and signaling the weapon’s ability to be simply modified” to fire continuously — a violation of both state and federal law, the AP reports.
{mosads}The suit also claims dozens of online videos teach people how to install bump stocks, which the Trump administration banned this year, on their weapons.
It was filed by the family of 31-year-old Carrie Parsons, who was one of the 58 people killed when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people from the high-rise Mandalay Bay casino and resort before fatally shooting himself.
The family’s attorney, Joshua Koskoff, is also representing relatives of victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in suing gun manufacturers. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in March that a gun-maker was allowed to be sued under state law for its marketing of the AR-15-style rifle used in the shooting, the AP notes.
“It was only a question of when — not if — a gunman would take advantage of the ease of modifying AR-15s to fire automatically in order to substantially increase the body count during a mass shooting,” the lawsuit states, according to the AP. “Having created the conditions that made a mass shooting with a modified AR-15 inevitable, Defendant Manufacturers continued conducting business as usual.”
Paddock fired from his room on the 32nd floor of the building into the crowd of concertgoers, using an array of assault rifles, many of which were fitted with bump stocks. Authorities said the weapons were bought legally.
The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, leaving more than 800 injured in addition to the 58 killed.
Other shooting victims have sued MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay and was in charge of the concert venue. The company then sued hundreds of the victims to try and avoid liability for the incident.