FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON. “Tonight Michelle and I will do what every parent in America will do: we will hug our children even tighter and tell them how much we love them.”
It was the evening of December 14, 2012, and President Obama with a broken voice and wiping a tear, had just reminded America glued to the TV and incredulous at the images that always bounced identical from one website to another, the agony. that an automatic rifle can do.
A few hours earlier Adam Lanza, 20, a Bushmaster AR-15 in the hand of his mother legally held a slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Under his blows, 26 people, 20 pupils and six teachers had died. Before exploding his madness against innocent people locked up in classrooms and then taking his own life with the same weapon, Lanza had shot his mother.
A tremendous mass shooting, not the only and not the last in America, but nine years later the events of Sandy Hook could determine a historical turning point.
The company producing the weapon, Remington Arms, one of the oldest in America having been founded in 1816 and in bankruptcy since 2020, has agreed with the families of nine victims, a compensation of 73 million dollars. It is the first time that the responsibility for a massacre falls on the producers. “This sentence represents a breaking point and holds the industry that made such an atrocity possible,” said Veronique De La Rosa, who lost little Noah in the corridors of Sandy Hook.
It is a severe blow to the industry as it sets a precedent and opens up new options to stop the spread of weapons as all legislative avenues attempted have ended up in a dead end. Obama did not succeed despite his efforts and not even today a Congress in the hands of the Democrats has produced results.
Hitting “the wallet” remains the most effective way. What the relatives of the victims objected to the Remington is the marketing strategy, arguing that the Bushmaster AR-15 was promoted in a conscious and negligent way as a weapon of war by courting the most at risk and mentally unstable young people as precisely the author of the massacre.
Among other things – the lawyers remarked – this semi-automatic rifle was initially designed for use in war, then since 2007 when the private equity fund bought the Remington it applied an aggressive marketing technique, launching a faithful reproduction in the videogame enjoying success among the very young. In 2012, 2 million pieces of Ar-15 had been sold, compared to one hundred thousand in 2005.
As a federal law prevents blame and responsibility for the shootings from being passed on to arms manufacturers, the plaintiffs got around the obstacle by denouncing their “marketing techniques” in 2014. This allowed the Supreme Court in 2019 to block Remington’s appeal and the lawsuit was resumed.
The company attempted to settle the dispute by offering $ 33 million which was turned down. So on Monday evening the historic sentence.