The ruling allows the lawsuit brought by victims’ relatives to go to trial, which could force gun companies to turn over internal communications they fiercely fought to keep private and provide a revealing glimpse into how the industry operates.
The court agreed with the lower court judge’s decision to dismiss claims that directly challenged the federal law shielding the gun companies from litigation but found the case can move forward based on a state law regarding unfair trade practices.
The ruling validates the strategy lawyers for the victims’ families used as they sought to find a route around the protections in federal law that guard gun companies from litigation when their products are used to commit a crime.
The lawsuit argued that the AR-15-style Bushmaster used in the 2012 attack had been marketed as a weapon of war, invoking the violence of combat and using slogans like “Consider your man card reissued.”
Such messages reflected, according to the lawsuit, a deliberate effort to appeal to troubled young men like Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who charged into the elementary school and killed 26 people, including 20 first-graders, in a spray of gunfire.
In the lawsuit, the families pushed to broaden the scope to include the manufacturer, Remington, which was named along with a wholesaler and a local retailer in the suit.
“Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years,” Joshua D. Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing the families, told the panel of judges during oral arguments in the case in 2017.
The weapon used by Lanza had been legally purchased by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also killed.
Lawyers representing the gun companies argued the claims raised in the lawsuit were specifically the kind that law inoculated them against. They said agreeing with the families’ arguments would require amending the law or ignoring how it had been applied in the past.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.