Photo: Twitter
Nine families whose loved ones were among the 26 people killed by a gunman in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting won a key legal battle Tuesday, walking away not just with $73 million from Remington Arms Co., but also a trove of internal documents.
Despite having many guns and the ability to make more, Remington was apparently unable to defend itself and just handed over the money. The company had previously sought protection not from its super-cool, macho-ass death machines, but from Chapter 11, the nerdiest chapter of U.S. bankruptcy law.
News 12 reporter John Craven tweeted that the families argued that Remington knowingly marketed its guns to unstable people. The documents they got will reveal the internal story of that marketing. Remington sold its Bushmaster AR-15 with slogans such as “Consider your man card reissued,” and “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.” One marketing campaign enabled people to “report your friend for not ‘being a man’ because they didn’t own a Bushmaster,” the families’ attorney, Joshua Koskoff, told reporters.
The 2012 shooting came just two days after Remington transferred control to Wall Street investors, including JPMorgan and Franklin Templeton Investments. The gun maker had been in trouble after more than 30 banks reportedly refused to save them. Then Donald Trump was elected, killing paranoid gun sales and hurting Remington even more. Seven Wall Street banks then teamed up to save Remington, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank. The next day, a 17-year-old took a Remington to school in Santa Fe, TX, and killed ten people.
ONLY FROM TYT Video flashback:
On TYT’s The News with Dan Rather back in 2018, Dan analyzed Wall Street’s backing of gunmakers, including political and regulatory pressure from Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) and other Republicans to keep pumping investor money into gun companies.
