Sunday 14 December, the second anniversary of the killings, also marks the legal deadline for filing a wrongful death lawsuit over the incident in the civil courts. The Hartford Courant reported earlier this week that parents were discussing a legal action against Bushmaster, the North Carolina-based manufacturer of the AR-15 rifle that was used by Lanza.
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The Guardian has confirmed that action is to be announced on Monday involving Michael Koskoff, a partner in the Connecticut law firm Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, who three years ago represented the Jackson family in their unsuccessful lawsuit against AEG Live, the promoter of a planned tour for which Jackson was rehearsing when he died in 2009.
Question: there is a Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. As far as I can tell, the Sandy Hook incident does not fall under any of the exceptions of the act, not even remotely. According to the act, such a suit cannot be brought “in any Federal or State court”.
So - any theories on how the lawyers intend to circumvent this? Or I guess we can wait till tomorrow (which is the last day AFAIU to file such a suit) and find out from the filing.
My general stand on Sandy Hook and its fallout are probably to the left of much of Dope crowd (It was only 50 miles from us and we have a lot of immediate impact in school safety programs etc.)… but this is just effin’ stupid on all levels.
Between private donations and government grants, Newtown got around $2M per affected family, a huge amount of which is still banked because there’s nothing conceivable to spend it on. That should be enough.
I meant that, too, but perhaps wasn’t clear. It’s even dumber on that level.
The person who should be on trial, and headed for stoning or slow burning at the stake, is Nancy Lanza. Her son did her a huge favor by plugging her first. But her unavailability does not open the door to finding someone else to burn.
Yes. And this probably falls into the category “the process is the punishment” - IOW, “we don’t think our case has much legal merit, but we think we may be able to cause you a lot of hassle and expense before we’re obliged to give it up.”
It’s almost certain the defendant would ask for such a case to be dismissed under PLCAA - as the OP notes, it seems not to fit any of the specified exceptions. I have no idea how likely this is to happen.
The obvious difference is that a rifle like the AR15 is designed to kill. So a more on point rhetorical would be “if someone was poisoned, would you sue the rat poison manufacturer?”
*All *firearms are designed to kill, barring a very select subset highly optimized for target shooting only. I’m hardly a rabid 2ndAmmer, but trying to draw a line between a “hunting” 30-06 and a “killing” or “assault” AR-15 gets pretty slippery.
The difference is neither of those is meant only for killing, and that there’s no equivalent for those things of the pro-gun crowd to strike back at. There’s no one going around ranting that everyone should own a knife and stab people for freedom with it, that the solution to all problems is more knives and more stabbings.
This is a stupid lawsuit and should clearly be thrown out. Even if you want to argue that Adam Lanza’s mental illness should have meant his entire household was forbidden to own a gun, that does not mean that Bushmaster has the legal authority to make that decision. Unless the federal government changed the NICS to flag for this contingency, the prospective seller is restricted by law from gathering the necessary information about the buyer’s household and their medical history to identify such a situation.
Besides, I can imagine some people would sue the car or knife maker anyway.
But that aside, yeah, the suit fails due to the aforementioned legal considerations and like **Xema **said the point becomes to make it cost Bushmaster additional time and legal fees.
Ok. Would you sue the rat poison manufacturer because someone used their product to kill a bunch of kids? I mean, you certainly could use rat poison to do that.
That is what I was wondering about. It really doesn’t take much time and legal fees to point out that the suit cannot even be filed under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. In fact, I bet the Sandy Hook parents’ lawyer will spend way more time/effort/money on filing the suit than the Bushmasters’ lawyers on filing the motion to dismiss. So what exactly is the point?
The oddness here is that the deadline to sue an entity like Bushmaster is not up; it’s the deadline to sue Newtown that runs out tomorrow. Families have mentioned, for example, suing over security at the school–which I personally believe is a paraphrase for suing the Newtown Police Department over one or more periods during the response when they were accused of “waiting.” Technically, the families have another year contemplate suing Bushmaster, so I’m confused as to why that issue is being rolled into the issue of suing Newtown itself.
Well, frankly, if my child was murdered, you having sympathy for me would not be the greatest of considerations. But this is not about sympathy, this is about the silliness of spending money on lawyers trying to file a suit when there is a law that explicitly and categorically says you can’t do it.