Nine Sandy Hook Families Collect $73 Million From Remington's Insurers Over the Marketing of the Rifle Used in the School Shooting

Shortly after 9:30 a.m. on December 14, 2012, a 20-year-old man shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 first graders and six adults with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S, a semiautomatic rifle built on the AR-15 pattern and made by Remington. He had taken the rifle from his mother, whom he had also killed that morning.

Federal law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, shields gun makers from most lawsuits when their products are used in crimes. In December 2014 the families of nine of the victims, four children and five adults, filed Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International in Connecticut Superior Court anyway. Their theory did not attack the rifle's design. It attacked the way Remington sold it: advertisements telling buyers to consider their man card reissued, copy about clearing rooms and covering rooftops, and product placement in first-person shooter video games, all of it aimed at the young men most likely to misuse a weapon built for combat. The families said that campaign was an unfair trade practice under Connecticut law, and that the statute's own exception for knowing violations of state sales and marketing laws let the claim through.

The trial court struck the complaint in October 2016. On March 19, 2019, the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed by a 4 to 3 vote and held that the wrongful death claim built on Remington's marketing could go forward. Joshua D. Koskoff argued the appeal for the families, with Alinor C. Sterling and Katherine Mesner-Hage on the brief. Remington asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in, and in November 2019 the Court declined.

Remington filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2018 and again in July 2020, when it was broken up and sold in an Alabama bankruptcy court. Its defense of the Sandy Hook case passed to the insurers that had written its liability coverage. In July 2021 two of them offered the families $33 million. The families turned it down.

On February 15, 2022, the families announced that all four insurers had agreed to pay the full amount available under the five policies in force at the time of the shooting: Ironshore's primary and third-layer excess policies, a James River excess policy, an ACE (now Chubb) excess policy, and a North American Capacity excess policy, for a total of $73 million. The bankruptcy court for the Northern District of Alabama, which was overseeing the Remington estate, approved the insurers' payment. The families also insisted on a second term: Remington had to turn over thousands of pages of internal documents and deposition transcripts about how it marketed the AR-15, and the families were free to make them public.

The settlement was the first time a gun manufacturer had paid the victims of a mass shooting for the way it advertised its product, and it was the largest payment of its kind. Because the $73 million was paid to nine families under one agreement, and no source breaks out what each family received, we list it here as an aggregate figure rather than an individual result. Koskoff described the families' goal as doing whatever they could to prevent the next Sandy Hook, and said the outcome should be a wake-up call not only to the gun industry but to the insurers and banks that underwrite it.