Sandy Hook families settle with gunmaker for $73 mn over school massacre

Graphic on the gun used in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, the United States.

Families of nine victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting have reached a $73 million settlement with US gunmaker Remington, in a landmark deal for a country traumatized by campus massacres.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the settlement marks the first time a gun maker has been held liable for a mass shooting in the United States.

The killings -- the second-deadliest school massacre in US history -- stunned Americans, with many thinking they would mark a watershed moment that would lead lawmakers to tighten gun control.

Calling the move "historic," US President Joe Biden said it begins "the necessary work of holding gun manufacturers accountable."

Lanza's mother, a gun enthusiast, had bought him an AR-15-style Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle more than two years before the shooting. 

The lawsuit alleged that Remington and the other two defendants are culpable because they knowingly marketed a military grade weapon that is "grossly unsuited" for civilian use yet had become the gun most used in mass shootings.

Remington, the oldest gunmaker in the United States and which has since filed for bankruptcy, had denied the allegations.

Marketing, they charged, popularized the AR-15 in combat and mass shooting-type situations through the type of violent video games that Lanza was known to play.

The gun "was used not by a highly trained soldier but by a deeply troubled kid, not on a battlefield abroad but in an elementary school at home, and not to preserve freedom, but to eviscerate them," Joshua Koskoff, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, told a press conference Tuesday.

AFP has sought comment from Remington.

The United States leads the world in mass shootings by civilians, with many schools undergoing live shooter drills as a matter of routine.

Nearly four years later, the shooting was still so visceral that it moved then-president Barack Obama to tears during a speech on gun control. 

Instead, the powerful gun lobby has repeatedly stamped out any efforts to further change the famed Second Amendment to the country's constitution, which allows for the right to bear arms.

The US Congress passed a law in 2005 that explicitly immunized gunmakers when their products are used in crimes.

"The gun manufacturers knew that they were advertising a dangerous product and they exploited these dangers," Matthew Soto, brother of first grade teacher Vicki Soto, who was among the victims, said at Tuesday's press conference.

But that "turned into the American nightmare, where for too many the right to bear arms is a higher priority than the right to life."

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Originally published as Sandy Hook families settle with gunmaker for $73 mn over school massacre