Families zero in on gun marketing
HARTFORD, CONN. >> After agreeing to a $73 million lawsuit settlement with gunmaker Remington, the families of nine Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims say they are shifting their focus to ending firearms advertising with macho, military themes that exploit young men's insecurities, all in the hopes of preventing more mass shootings.
The families say Remington used those kinds of ads to promote its AR-15-style rifles like the one used to kill 20 young children and six educators inside the Newtown, Connecticut, school on Dec. 14, 2012.
Remington's marketing strategies are expected to be unveiled when the families' lawyers publicly release thousands of internal company documents obtained during the lawsuit. Lawyers for Remington and its insurers agreed to the disclosure as part of the settlement announced Tuesday.
“This is a case about creating change,” Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in the shooting, said in an interview after the settlement was announced. “Right now, I'm only waiting really to have access to the documents and to figure out how to use that to help drive safety and better practices for the sales and marketing.”
Hockley, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, has been working with other victims' relatives to stem gun violence through the Sandy Hook Promise organization.
The records could provide one of the most detailed looks yet at the push by firearms manufacturers to popularize AR-15s and similar rifles, gun industry watchers say, especially after a 10-year federal ban on such weapons expired in 2004.
Hockley and outside observers have compared the case to those that led tobacco companies to disclose damaging internal documents and later agree to billions of dollars in settlements over sickened smokers.
It's not clear when the families' lawyers will release the documents. A lawyer for the families, Joshua Koskoff, said the records are being organized for public consumption, a process expected to take weeks.
The documents include emails between employees, internal company presentations and business projections, Koskoff said. He declined to discuss the contents of the records.
“The information that may come out ... there may be features of the way that the gun industry does business that are not either widely known or not widely appreciated,” said Timothy D. Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University. “This is going to shine a spotlight on the industry's role in the issue of the problem of gun violence.”
Lawyers for Remington and its insurers did not return messages seeking comment. Remington, founded in 1816 and based in Madison, North Carolina, went bankrupt a second time in 2020, and its assets were later sold at auction to several other companies. Two new companies were created, Remington Firearms and Remington Ammunition.
A message seeking comment was left for Remington Firearms, which announced in November that it will establish headquarters in LaGrange, Georgia. A spokesperson for Remington Ammunition owner Vista Outdoor, based in Anoka, Minnesota, said the settlement involved the former Remington Outdoor Co., not Vista Outdoor or Remington Ammunition.
At the news conference announcing the settlement, Koskoff showed Remington ads that he said appealed to troubled youths like Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old man who carried out the Sandy Hook shooting. Lanza used a Remington-made Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle that was legally owned by his mother. He killed his mother in their Newtown home before going to the school.
The ads contained messages including “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” and “Clear the Room, Cover the Rooftop, Rescue the Hostage.”
Koskoff said Remington targeted younger, at-risk males in advertising and product placement in violent video games. The lawsuit said the company's advertising played a role in the school shooting, but did not elaborate.
Lanza had severe and deteriorating mental health problems, which combined with his preoccupation with violence and access to his mother's weapons “proved a recipe for mass murder,” a report by Connecticut's child advocate said.