[ The gun control movement has won important legislative and legal
victories since the massacre at the Connecticut elementary school a
decade ago. But not significant federal legislation.]
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NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE SANDY HOOK? THAT’S SIMPLY NOT TRUE  
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Matt Valentine
December 14, 2022
The New Republic
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_ The gun control movement has won important legislative and legal
victories since the massacre at the Connecticut elementary school a
decade ago. But not significant federal legislation. _

Twenty first grade students and six teachers were murdered at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.,
photo montage: WPRI 12 / WNAC

 

On December 14, 2012, third grade student Bear Nikitchyuk had been
sent to deliver his class’s attendance roster to the front office at
Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. While he was there, a
gunman shot out the windows behind him and entered the school. Bear
fled and survived the shooting—teacher Abbey Clements pulled him out
of the hallway and into her classroom—but the trauma of that day
still affects him now, at 18 years old. For the Nikitchyuk family,
like so many other Newtown families, that day was just the beginning
of a struggle that has lasted a decade, and may never end.

“We were not politically engaged before this,” explained Erin
Nikitchyuk, Bear’s mother. “After the shooting, we just kind of
cocooned for a while. One day my husband got up and said, ‘You know
what? I’m mad and I’m gonna do something about it.’ And less
than 48 hours later he was at the White House.”

Years of political advocacy for gun violence prevention, though, have
left the family feeling drained. “It can be very demoralizing to go
so many times and speak to so many people, and sometimes speak
to _the same_ people, and to have people say, ‘I’m gonna work
really hard on this,’ and then to have nothing happen,” Erin said.

That sentiment—that little or nothing has changed—was voiced
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May, after a gunman attacked Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas,
in what sounded on news reports almost like a rebroadcast of the Sandy
Hook shooting. The weapons used in Texas and Connecticut were
virtually identical, and the federal laws that regulate them were
virtually unchanged too. It is still legal, under federal law, for a
private individual to sell an AR-15 to a stranger in a parking lot
without knowing anything at all about the buyer (even his name) and
without making any record of the sale. It’s still legal, under
federal law, to buy thousands of rounds of ammunition online and have
them mailed to your doorstep. Gun ownership
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substantially higher now than it was a decade ago, as are gun deaths
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But federal legislation is only one metric by which progress toward
gun violence prevention can be assessed. The legacy of a decade of
activism that Newtown’s tragedy provoked can be best observed in
state legislation and in precedent-shattering civil litigation.

Matt Blumenthal was still a student in law school in 2012 when he
heard the news of the Sandy Hook attack. “I remember where I was,”
he told me. “I remember seeing the TV in one of the common rooms and
just being shocked and aghast.” Now a Connecticut state
representative, Blumenthal has worked to tighten state regulation of
firearms, co-authoring a bill to ban “ghost guns” and 3D printed
guns
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became law in 2019.

“Even without federal legislation, states can make a big difference
on their own,” Blumenthal, whose father is Senator Richard
Blumenthal, said. “Not only by passing laws within their own
borders, to protect their own residents, but also as examples to each
other as laboratories of democracy to show the most effective gun
violence prevention policies. I think it’s fair to say that
Connecticut has been a leader on gun violence prevention
legislation.” Blumenthal listed the various reforms the state has
implemented since Sandy Hook, which include a ban on assault rifles, a
ban on high capacity magazines, new laws requiring the safe storage of
firearms, and updates to the state’s extreme risk protective orders,
also called “red flag” laws.

Compared to previous legislative sessions, the number of gun-related
bills introduced in statehouses nationwide more than doubled
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Sandy Hook. Not all of those bills had the same intention, of
course–while states like Connecticut, New York
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and Oregon
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sweeping new gun regulations, red states simultaneously passed a
succession of bills to expand gun rights, through proposals
for campus carry
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open carry, and so-called “constitutional carry” (the right to
carry guns in public with no license). The divergence has resulted in
a significant disparity in gun violence from state to state
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“It’s made a big difference for Connecticut,” Blumenthal said.
“We’ve seen rates of violent crime and suicide by gun decrease
over the past 10 years. Connecticut is one of the safest states in the
country with one of the lowest violent crime rates, and I think our
strong gun laws play a significant role in that outcome.”

Recently, Blumenthal has come to know several of the Sandy Hook family
members as clients in private practice. Through his work as an
attorney at Koskoff, Koskoff, and Bieder, Blumenthal assisted
colleagues in a lawsuit against gunmaker Remington, and then took a
more prominent role in a later suit against conspiracy theorist Alex
Jones that resulted in a $1.4 billion award
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the plaintiffs.*

For years, the common wisdom has been that gun manufacturers and
retailers simply couldn’t be sued. That’s thanks to the Protection
of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, signed by George W. Bush in 2005,
which gives the industry broad protections from liability when their
products are used in crimes. Blumenthal says the PLCAA “really
incentivizes some of the worst behavior we’ve seen out there by
firearms companies, because they know that they have this
extraordinarily broad immunity. There _was_ this conventional wisdom
that PLCAA was impermeable. But one of the exceptions to the immunity
is for claims related to marketing of firearms. Based on some really
creative and effective lawyering by some of my colleagues, the case
was litigated in such a way as to fit into that exception.”

Remington subsidiary Bushmaster had marketed its XM15E2S rifle (an
AR-15–style weapon) with the phrase “Consider your man card
reissued,” a message that plaintiffs said specifically targeted
insecure and unstable young men like Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook
shooter. That argument won them a $73 million settlement
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That substantial award, and Remington’s concurrent bankruptcy,
reverberated across the industry, and among activist communities. “I
think it shows that the gun industry is not invulnerable—it shows
that they’re very vulnerable,” said Jeremy Stein, executive
director of CT Against Gun Violence. (Under Stein’s predecessor, the
group authored an amicus brief in the trial.) “I’m a firm believer
that a lot of motivation, when you’re trying to change the culture
of America, often times can be influenced by liability. I think
liability is a huge motivator for Americans. What this tells us is
that they can be held responsible.”

The money, significant though it might be, represents at best a
Pyrrhic victory for the families that brought the suit. “There’s
no amount of money that could possibly be paid to these families that
could make them whole again,” Stein said.

Perhaps, though, the most consequential upshot of the tragedy in
Newtown is yet to be realized. Ten years on, the Sandy Hook generation
is only just entering politics. (The victims of Sandy Hook would today
be just about old enough to vote.) Po Kim Murray, who co-founded the
Newtown Action Alliance after she discovered her neighbor had
perpetrated the attack, points to the emergence of gun violence
prevention candidates as hopeful evidence of change still to come. As
an example, she points to Maxwell Frost
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the first Gen Z candidate elected to Congress. “He ran
unapologetically on gun violence prevention,” Murray said. “These
young people who have been impacted by gun violence or influenced by
gun violence will run for Congress or other elected seats, and they
will win.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by Erin Nikitchyuk, who for years mentored
the Junior Newtown Action Alliance. “The kids,” she said,
“they’re ready to go. ‘Oh, you mean we should knock on doors?
Let’s go knock on doors.’”

The Nikitchyuks will soon be moving away from Sandy Hook. Over the
years, many of Erin’s friends and co-workers who were also affected
by the shooting have left town. The school itself has been demolished
and rebuilt in a new location. The headquarters of the National
Shooting Sports Foundation, located coincidentally in Newtown
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has recently closed its doors. A large green banner guards the
entrance to an empty parking lot, “Now Leasing.”

_[Matt Valentine is a writer based in Austin. He co-edited Campus
Carry: Confronting a Loaded Issue in Higher Education
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* Gun Control
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* guns
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* gun violence
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* NRA
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* Sandy Hook
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* Connecticut
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* crime
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* Alex Jones
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* schools
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* children
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* Robb Elementary
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* Uvalde
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