On Tuesday, just hours after a gunman entered an elementary school classroom in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut (home of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown) , spoke passionately in the Senate. flat: “Why? Why are we here, if not to try to make sure fewer schools and fewer communities go through what happened to Sandy Hook, what’s going on in Uvalde? … I’m here on this floor to beg, literally get on my knees and ask my teammates, “Find a way forward here.”
Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said: “The policies proposed by the Democrats would not have stopped this crime or any other. They are not focused on stopping the crimes. “firearms”.
In 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook shooting, Francine Wheeler, along with her husband David, made a passionate plea: “Please help us do something before our tragedy becomes yours. tragedy. Sometimes I close my eyes and all I remember is that horrible day waiting at Sandy Hook’s volunteer fire station for the boy who would never return home. “
Correspondent Tracy Smith asked the Wheelers, “What were you waiting for at the time?”
“If I could make people empathize with me as a parent, maybe you would vote for background check,” Francine replied. “So if you bought a gun at a gun show and bought a gun on the Internet, you would have a background check. That’s why we were fighting.”
Later that month, these amendments to the gun law were rejected by the Senate, without getting the 60 votes needed to overcome an obstructionism.
The Wheelers began to look for other ways to make changes. “We will never stop being Ben’s parents,” David said. “It’s just that our parenting experience is frozen now.”
His son, Ben, was six years old when he was killed. “In the small classroom where our son was at school, law enforcement recovered 80 pots. Eighty,” David said.
Everything from an AR-15 style rifle. In total: 154 rounds in less than five minutes.
David said, “If I had been told when Ben was born that I would only spend six years with him, would I have done so? Absolutely, absolutely, without a doubt, yes. But what happens after that is part of his legacy, What do we have to do to make sure no other mom or dad ever goes through this? “
What the Wheelers and eight other Sandy Hook families did at first seemed impossible. They sued gun manufacturer Remington Arms, and in February settled the $ 73 million lawsuit. It is the largest payment of a weapons company to the victims of a mass shooting.
Earlier this month, the family of Andre Mackneil, who was killed in the May 14 Buffalo shootout, announced that they would also sue Remington Arms, which manufactured the weapon used at Tops Supermarket.
One of his lawyer’s first calls was to Josh Koskoff, who represented Sandy Hook’s families.
Smith asked Koskoff, “How much did you know about guns in this case?”
“If there was anything like less than zero, I would say so,” he replied. “Nothing about guns, nothing about gun law.”
Koskoff said he approached the case as a jigsaw puzzle. First, he studied everything he could about the AR-15 style rifle. “It’s the weapon that the U.S. military considers the most effective, efficient, and lethal weapon for its soldiers,” he said.
The AR-15 was developed by Armalite as a military rifle in the 1950s. (AR, commonly thought to mean “assault rifle”, in fact means “Armalite rifle”).
In the early 1960s, the Department of Defense tested the weapon in the field. Koskoff showed the results to Smith: “This is not for the faint of heart, but it is important to know that this is not a normal firearm.” A back injury caused the chest cavity to explode. “The wound in the stomach caused the abdominal cavity to explode.” The chest wound, from right to left, destroyed the thoracic cavity. “
A semi-automatic version for civilians was made in the late 1960s. And at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre, Remington Arms and its Bushmaster brand had the most popular AR-15 style rifles on the market.
Koskoff said: “Until 2005, they sold about 100,000 units a year. In 2012, the year of the shooting, there were up to 2.1 million. And the weapon itself did not change. So what changed? “Marketing”.
And there was another change that could have encouraged gun manufacturers, a little-discussed law passed in 2005. Known as the PLCAA (Law on the Protection of the Legal Trade in Arms), it is a way to protect firearms companies responsible for the shootings. “It basically eliminates the common law rights that people would have to file a lawsuit against the auto or tobacco industry or the pharmaceutical industry,” Koskoff said.
But the law contains a few exceptions, including one that allowed Koskoff to track how the weapon was marketed. “Even in our case, I think people thought of it as a perfect immunity that could never be overcome,” he said. “But they were engaged in marketing that anyone would say was beyond the stick: immoral, unethical.”
Remington Arms / Bushmaster
Koskoff said Remington not only targeted ads like these to lonely young men; they highlighted the weapon’s ability to cause mass casualties.
Remington Arms / Bushmaster
Another ad reads, “Opposition forces, bow. You’re outnumbered alone.”
Remington Arms / Bushmaster
Koskoff said: “There is no non-criminal use to make your opposition forces ‘lean’ into our neighborhoods and our cities. This is an assault, period.”
According to Koskoff, the key to the case was to link Remington’s marketing to the 20-year-old shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Smith said, “She didn’t go out to buy the gun; her mother bought the gun and then left it open.”
“Well, that’s the way marketing works,” Koskoff said. “Marketing is not about the buyer, it’s about the end user. There’s no better example of this than Disney. Disney doesn’t sell their products to us. They sell them to our kids.
“They did not aggressively market their combat weapon to a suburban housewife; they aggressively marketed a combat weapon to their troubled son.”
Sandy Hook’s shooter was a frequent caller of the video game “Call of Duty.” Koskoff had played the game with his own son and saw something familiar in a photograph of the crime scene: two 30-round magazines glued together. In “Call of Duty”, Koskoff knew what his purpose was: “When you were playing, you didn’t allow almost zero downtime to quote / discard ‘change magazines’.”
“So, do 30 shots, turn it around?” Smith asked.
“You could kill 60 people with this instead of 30, almost without delay.”
The tape magazines found at the Sandy Hook school shooting scene resembled the tape magazines featured in “Call of Duty,” the video game that had authorized the use of the Remington Bushmaster ACR. CBS News
The simulated weapon in “Call of Duty” was Remington’s Bushmaster ACR (adaptive combat rifle). Koskoff said Remington Arms licensed the AR-15 style pistol for the video game. It was part of the arms company’s marketing plan.
“This allowed kids and teens to experience what it was like to use a combat weapon,” he said. “You can feel the vibrations of the controller. Before that, to really understand how a gun worked or felt, you should go to a gun camp. And no gun dealer will let a child in and try a gun. AR-15 But they don’t have to do it anymore. “
“So a child could be sitting on his couch, feeling like he was shooting an AR-15?” Smith asked.
“Right now there are kids sitting on the couch doing just that.”
Like many parents, David and Francine Wheeler had not seen any Remington marketing until then. “It was like, you must be kidding me,” Francine said.
David said, “I was horrified. Amazing. My first thought was, ‘Do you think this is a game? My son is gone. “
Josh Koskoff said the $ 73 million in the deal will be shared between the nine plaintiff families. And Remington’s internal notes, also delivered in the deal, will be released to the public.
Smith asked, “What will these documents show?
He replied, “It will only teach us a lesson we have all learned, which is that greed kills.”
He said the case was corporate misconduct, not political misconduct: “This company has just crossed a line. And it puts us all at risk. Sandy Hook’s shooter did not line up children of gun owners and children of non-gun owners, or Democrats and Republicans; he shot everyone. “
Representatives from the arms industry argue that Remington’s lawsuit is unusual because it was settled after Remington went bankrupt. In a statement, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for firearms, said: “This agreement orchestrated by insurance companies has no impact on the strength and effectiveness of (PLCAA), which remains “PLCAA law will continue to block unfounded lawsuits that try to blame law firms in third-party criminal acts.”
Francine and David Wheeler have always said they wanted to save other families from going through what they have. The events of the last few weeks show that their demand has not stopped the mass shootings. But, they say, it’s a start.
“We hope this makes changes in the future,” Francine said. “I have hope. I’ve always done it. I’ve never lost hope. Otherwise, I probably never would have gotten out of bed.”
“And do you still have hope?” Smith …