Remington offering $33M in settlement with Sandy Hook families

Gunmaker Remington Arms Co. has offered around $33 million to settle a lawsuit brought by nine families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Remington Arms Co. LLC and Remington Outdoors Co. Inc., collectively referred to as “Remington,” offered $3.66 million to each of the nine plaintiffs in the lawsuit against them over the 2012 Newtown, Conn., mass shooting, which left 20 children and six adults dead.

Adam Lanza, 20, used Remington’s Bushmaster XM-15 rifle to carry out the elementary school massacre before killing himself.

Lawyers for the families said they will “consider their next steps,” in response to this offer.

A federal law protects gun manufacturers from wrongful death lawsuits brought by family members, but in their 2014 lawsuit, the families of the Sandy Hook victims instead sought to hold Remington responsible for marketing practices that praised the militaristic qualities of their rifles, potentially in violation of Connecticut law.

Remington, the oldest gun manufacturer in the U.S., had appealed to the Supreme Court in 2019 to reverse a decision by the Connecticut Supreme Court to allow the case to go to trial, but the court declined to take it up.

“The regulation of advertising that threatens the public’s health, safety, and morals has long been considered a core exercise of the states’ police powers,” Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Richard Palmer wrote in the majority opinion in 2019.

Last year, Remington filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in two years.

Earlier this month, the lawyers representing the nine families said Remington had given them a strange collection of tens of thousands of cartoons, video files and GIFs in documents turned over to them. According to court documents the cartoons depicted “people go-karting riding dirt bikes, and socializing.”