Some bad news for the Second Amendment came out today. It’s being reported that Remington Arms has reached a settlement with the Sandy Hook families that have been trying to sue them out of existence for a decade. The gun manufacturer had previously offered the plaintiffs a settlement in 2021, but now it appears that the parties have decided to put an end to the eight-year legal dispute. The potential implications of this decision by Remington for other gun manufacturers and lawful gun owners could be quite serious. But the company was drowning in legal fees from a number of seemingly frivolous lawsuits and they may have simply decided that discretion was the better part of valor at this point. (NY Post)

Families of Sandy Hook victims settled their lawsuit Tuesday with Remington Arms, manufacturer of the AR-15 automatic gun used to kill 20 kids and 6 staff members in the 2012 massacre.

The nine families brought a class-action suit in 2014 against Remington Arms, which made the weapon used in the mass shooting claiming the gun-maker sought to sell the military-grade weapon to the mentally ill.

Remington offered the families a $33 million settlement July 2021, about $3.7 million per family, but the exact terms of the Tuesday settlement have not yet been announced.

While this settlement may represent the end of the lawsuit, it almost certainly will not be the end of the story. Remington Arms has been the target of more attempted takedowns by anti-Second Amendment groups than I would care to have to list here. Because of the left-wing media furor over so-called “assault rifles” or “military-style rifles,” and the fact that Remington produced the Bushmaster AR-15 series, they had a target on their corporate back (if you’ll pardon the phrase). They had been running up massive legal bills for years, but were always protected by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) in the end.

But the Sandy Hook case was different. The anti-gun rights attorneys cooked up a new scheme to try to go after Remington, claiming that their advertising campaigns made them culpable rather than the firearms themselves. And they actually found some judges to go along with the preposterous premise, with the case alternately going in favor of the plaintiffs and then Remington repeatedly.

It’s a shame to see Remington have to fold their hand when they were in no way responsible for what people who purchase their products do with them. But even more so, other anti-gun rights groups will probably now try to use this as a template to go after every other firearms manufacturer and further undermine and weaken the PLCAA. And wasn’t that really the goal from the beginning? If you can’t eliminate the Second Amendment, then either make guns so expensive that no law-abiding citizen can afford them or dry up the supply by putting the manufacturers out of business.

Meanwhile, you still hear nary a word about the number of people being killed by gangs in our major cities at the hands of people who illegally purchase firearms on the black market and never pass a background check. The pursuit of the lawful while ignoring the lawless is the disgusting hallmark of the anti-gun left.