Yesterday The National Review posted an article about the lawsuit suing Remington for the shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
I love the first line of the article:
Rule No. 1 of tort law: The bad guy is the one with the most money to pay you.
Unfortunately that (and politics) seem to be what is driving this lawsuit.
The article notes:
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them schoolchildren ages six and seven.
Lanza killed himself, too. Can’t sue him.
Lanza had a history of mental illness — a long one. He’d been treated under the New Hampshire “Birth to Three” program and later by the Yale Child Study Center. But it would be hard to make a case against those institutions, which enjoy a great deal more sympathy than gun manufacturers do. The schools couldn’t handle Lanza, either, and he was left to the care of his mother, Nancy, who seems to have been a bit of an oddball herself and an enabler. But he murdered her, too, so she’s not around to sue.
…The lawsuit against Remington alleges that the company’s marketing practices contributed to the Sandy Hook massacre. “Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs said. But it is not clear that Remington courted Lanza at all — and it is quite clear that the company never courted him successfully, inasmuch as he stole the Bushmaster rifle he used in the crimes from his mother, whom he murdered. Connecticut has a law against “unfair trade practices,” which is a very odd way of looking at a mass murder.
The article concludes with some specific comments on the opinion of the state supreme court:
This is another way of saying that Remington’s owners are being sued for failing to concur with the substantive political views of gun-control advocates, i.e. that the weapon in question is “ill-suited for legitimate civilian purposes such as self-defense or recreation,” a claim that, it is worth noting, is false on its face inasmuch as semiautomatic rifles are proven instruments of self-defense and by far the most popular recreational firearms in the United States.
The use of commercial litigation and regulatory law to achieve progressive political goals is by now familiar: If an oil company opposes global-warming initiatives, that isn’t politics but “securities fraud,” as far as Democrats are concerned; if conservative activists want to show a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the lead-up to a presidential election, that isn’t politics but a “campaign-finance violation,” as far as Democrats are concerned.
Our legal system has become politicized. Hopefully there is no way this decision will stand.
