Judge rejects gun maker’s bid to toss Sandy Hook litigation

(CN) — For more than a year, a top gun manufacturer’s motion to strike an amended complaint brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting sat on the docket.

While the Sandy Hook families alleged in their complaint Remington Outdoor Company recklessly marketed the AR-15-style rifle used in the 2012 shooting in Newton, Connecticut, that killed six adults and 20 first-grade students, the gun maker sought to toss the suit on the grounds that the complaint did not assert facts that connected its marketing to the massacre.

The motion filed in June 2020 sat as Remington worked through its second bankruptcy proceedings in a federal court in Alabama, which stayed the Connecticut case for months.

But during a remote hearing Monday afternoon, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis finally weighed in on the gun maker’s request.

The denial came quick.

Explaining little, Bellis said she was rejecting the gun maker’s motion to strike the second amended complaint in the case. Then, almost in the same breath, she moved onto a discovery issue the attorneys had brought up earlier in the status conference: setting compliance deadlines.

It is the latest development in litigation that has been pending for six and a half years. In 2014, some of the families of the Sandy Hook victims filed a lawsuit alleging Bushmaster Firearms International, the maker of the AR-15-styled XM15-E2S rifle that gunman Adam Lanza used in the slaying, unethically marketed a gun designed for combat to civilians. Bushmaster merged with Remington Outdoor Company in 2011.

In the time since it was filed, the case traveled up to the Connecticut Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the matter in November 2019.

Remington’s attorneys said the case squeaked by at the Connecticut Supreme Court because of a narrow claim under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act.

“Plaintiffs’ remaining claim is focused narrowly on the specific content of any advertisement for the rifle that was seen by Lanza and whether any such advertisement in fact caused him to commit his horrific criminal acts,” they wrote last year in a memorandum asking to strike the complaint.

Arguing for the gun manufacturer at Monday’s hearing, Jeff Mueller of the firm Day Pitney said the complaint should be tossed because it didn’t say the gunman would have committed the crimes if he didn’t see the ads. It didn’t even allege the gunman saw the ads, he said.

Bellis jumped in, asking how was it permissible for Remington to even request a second motion to strike.

Mueller responded by saying the complaint the Sandy Hook families filed after the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision was substantially different than the one they had filed before, editing out portions of the complaint to remove sections where they alleged causation.

“Were simply asking them to include the necessary facts to plead their claims under Connecticut law,” Mueller said.

In making the gun maker’s case, Mueller said the Connecticut high court only considered the Sandy Hook families’ standing, not the question of causation.

Josh Koskoff, an attorney with Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder representing the Sandy Hook families, said the judge should dismiss the motion to strike with a one-sentence decision that simply reads that the matter was already decided.

In the time the case has been pending, the attorney said, the gun manufacturer has not yet filed an answer. The motion to strike, he added, was “clearly impermissible.”

Koskoff said the motion to strike was yet another attempt to keep discovery from the Sandy Hook families, further arguing Remington wants the level of causation so high that it’s near impossible to prove.

Furthermore, there will be another time and place down the road, Koskoff said, for Remington to argue about “their draconian version of causation.”

“I’ve never heard these arguments before and they are in the face of a [Connecticut] Supreme Court decision,” Koskoff said.

When the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case, Koskoff said, it left the question of whether Remington was culpable for its marketing decisions to a jury.

In a statement after the hearing, Koskoff relished getting to that moment: “This case is moving forward to trial,” he said. “If Remington did not understand that before today, it should understand it now.”

The hearing was conducted over videoconferencing software and streamed to YouTube, and Mueller had feedback issues as he began to reply to Koskoff’s arguments.

Like in so many other remote hearings during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bellis told the other parties to mute their microphones so Mueller could be heard.

“I want to make sure we have a good appellate record,” the judge said.

Attorneys for Remington didn't respond to a request for comment on Bellis' decision.

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