Sandy Hook Parents Fire Shots At Bernie Sanders For ‘Supporting’ Gunmakers
The parents of a child gunned down in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre have argued presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is not doing enough to hold gunmakers to account.
Mark and Jackie Barden lost son Daniel in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting that saw 20 first-graders and six staff members killed by a lone gunman in December 2012.
Three years on, the couple has now joined forces with the families of nine other Sandy Hook victims to file a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle that was used to murder 26 people in less than five minutes.
According to the families and their lawyers, the AR-15 is a military-grade weapon unsuited for civilian use. The action argues the Remington Arms Co. should have known the high risks posed by selling the weapon and subsequently seeks to hold the company to account.
A judge is currently in the process of ruling whether the lawsuit will be allowed to move forward. A decision is anticipated on April 19.
But the Bardens have since been forced to defend their legal action after Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders argued in a televised debate in Flint, Michigan, this month that he didn’t agree with the lawsuit.
During the March 6 debate, host Anderson Cooper quizzed both Democratic candidates on whether they supported the action before pointing out that it may not come to fruition because of a federal law Sanders supported in 2005 that protects gun makers from being held accountable for mass shootings.
Front-runner Hillary Clinton, who voted against a similar bill while serving in the U.S. Senate, said she would stand by the action.
But Bernie Sanders defended his position and said the lawsuit currently being pursued by Sandy Hook families like the Bardens risked tearing apart America’s entire weapons industry.
“If you go to a store and you legally purchase a gun, and three days later you go out and start killing people, is the point to hold the gun shop owner or the manufacturer of that gun liable? If that’s the point, I disagree,” Sanders said. “If they are selling a product to a person who buys it legally, what you’re talking about is ending gun manufacturing in America.”
In response, parents Mark and Jackie penned a heart-wrenching op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday, stating the Vermont Senator’s assessment of their lawsuit was “simplistic and wrong.”
“This case is about a particular weapon, Remington’s Bushmaster AR-15, and its sale to a particular market: civilians,” the couple wrote. “It is not about handguns or hunting rifles, and the success of our lawsuit would not mean the end of firearm manufacturing in this country, as Sanders warned.”
The couple compared the rifle to a military tank and even pointed out that Remington chooses to market the weapon using images of SWAT teams and tactical military units.
“The last thing Daniel’s tender little body would have felt were bullets expelled from that AR-15 traveling at greater than 3,000 feet per second — a speed designed to pierce body armor in the war zones of Fallujah,” they wrote.
That being said, the Bardens did admit they saw merit in the weapon itself. They argued that their lawsuit is not designed to punish Remington for making and selling the gun that killed their son Daniel – they simply contest the company’s decision to sell AR-15s to ordinary civilians.
“We have never suggested that Remington should be held liable simply for manufacturing the AR-15,” they said. “In fact, we believe that Remington and other manufacturers’ production of the AR-15 is essential for our armed forces and law enforcement. But Remington is responsible for its calculated choice to sell that same weapon to the public, and for emphasizing the military and assaultive capacities of the weapon in its marketing to civilians.”
Despite conceding that Bernie Sanders “has spent decades tirelessly advocating for greater corporate responsibility,” the Bardens closed their op-ed by arguing Sanders was now choosing to defend gun manufacturers like Remington rather than families of the 20 first-graders killed at Sandy Hook in 2012.
“We cannot fathom his support of companies that recklessly market and profit from the sale of combat weapons to civilians and then shrug their shoulders when the next tragedy occurs, leaving ordinary families and communities to pick up the pieces,” they said. “Remington and the other defendants’ choices allowed an elementary school to be transformed into a battlefield. Our case seeks nothing more than fair accountability for those choices.”
[Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images]
