The parents of a child killed in the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre slammed Sen. Bernie Sanders Saturday for his defense of a gun manufacturer that marketed the semi-automatic weapon used in the attack.
“Sanders has spent decades tirelessly advocating for greater corporate responsibility, which is why 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,” Mark Barden and Jackie Barden in Washington Post op-ed Saturday.
Their son Daniel, 7, was one of 20 children and six adults killed in the mass shooting.
Sanders said at a Democratic debate in Michigan this month that he opposes a lawsuit brought by the Bardens and nine other families of Newtown victims.
“What people are saying is that if somebody who is crazy or a criminal or a horrible person goes around shooting people, the manufacturer of that gun should be held liable,” the Vermont independent senator said. “If that is the case, your position is that there should not be any guns in America, period.”
The Bardens disputed Sanders’ claim that the point of their lawsuit is to hold Remington Arms liable for making the weapon.
“With all due respect, this is simplistic and wrong,” the Bardens 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 wrote.
The suit challenges a 2005 federal law which gives gunmakers immunity from lawsuits when their products are used in violent crime. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who opposed that law, has regularly faulted Sanders for supporting it. He has since altered his position by backing a Democratic bill to mostly undo the immunity law, but surprised some by arguing against the Newtown families’ suit.
The Bardens said their case not about Remington’s production of the Bushmaster AR-15 that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza used in the attack, but rather about Remington’s marketing and sale of the weapon to civilians.
“This case is about the AR-15 because the AR-15 is not an ordinary weapon; it was designed and manufactured for the military to increase casualties in combat,” they said. “The AR-15 is to guns what a tank is to cars: uniquely deadly and suitable for specialized use only.
They point to advertising copy from Remington’s that touts the gun by stating: “Consider your man card reissued,” and “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.”
The Bardens argue their lawsuit’s success would help stop future mass shootings.
“This is not a theoretical dispute,” they wrote. “The last thing our sweet little Daniel would have seen in his short, beautiful life was the long barrel of a ferocious rifle designed to kill the enemy in war. 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.”
Sanders has not responded.
