The families of five children and four adults killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut have reached a $73 million settlement with the now-bankrupt gun manufacturer Remington and its four insurers, the plaintiffs' attorneys said Tuesday, according to CNN.
The settlement comes more than seven years after the families filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Remington, the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used in the massacre that left 20 children and six adults dead in Newtown.
The families have also "obtained and can make public thousands of pages of internal company documents that prove Remington's wrongdoing and carry important lessons for helping to prevent future mass shootings," the plaintiffs' attorneys said in a news release.
"We established what was clearly true ... the immunity protecting the gun industry is not bulletproof," plaintiffs' attorney Josh Koskoff said in a news conference in Trumbull, Connecticut. "We hope they realize they have skin in the game, instead of blaming literally everybody else."
The families sued Remington in 2014, alleging it should be held partially responsible for the shooting because of its marketing strategy.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs contended that the company marketed rifles by extolling the militaristic qualities of the rifle and reinforcing the image of a combat weapon -- in violation of a Connecticut law that prevents deceptive marketing practices.
The $73 million settlement is all of the available coverage that Remington's insurance carriers could pay, the plaintiffs' attorneys said. Last summer, Remington approached the families with a nearly $33 million settlement offer. At the time, lawyers for the families said they would consider their next steps.
The families did not accept the earlier proposal "because they wanted to ensure they had obtained enough documents and taken enough depositions to prove Remington's misconduct" and to "to ensure the case's message to the insurance industry was clear," Tuesday's news release reads.
Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting, said in the news release that their loss is "irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative."
"One moment we had this dazzling, energetic 6-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah's life stored in a backpack and boxes."
"What is lost remains lost. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this, we are grateful," Pozner and De La Rosa said.