Families of Newtown victims sue rifle manufacturer

[We Keep Receipts 9,238]

Newtown occurred two years ago. James Holmes was 2 1/2 years ago.

I stand corrected. Now if lib can tell me why he is talking about the Rodney King riots when the discussion is about Newton, all will be right in the world.

[lostinblue 1,989]

I stand corrected. Now if lib can tell me why he is talking about the Rodney King riots when the discussion is about Newton, all will be right in the world.

Some poster asked why would a person need an ar 15....Koreans protecting their lives and property from racist blacks .100 stores + were burned down ar 15 helped save the day

[JohnR! 5,495]

So you justify your racism and negrophobia with something that happened 22 years ago in a country half a world away from China?

Some poster asked why would a person need an ar 15....Koreans protecting their lives and property from racist blacks .100 stores + were burned down ar 15 helped save the day

[Karee 4,191]

More American idiocy. Good for the lawyers, bad for everyone else.

[Karmalicious 60]

Welcome it ... Everything that has been suppressed in this shooting will need to come out.

LIB! Your voice sounds just like I thought it would!

[lostinblue 1,989]

So you justify your racism and negrophobia with something that happened 22 years ago in a country half a world away from China?

RIOT IN LOS ANGLES: Pocket of Tension; A Target of Rioters, Koreatown Is Bitter, Armed and Determined

By SETH MYDANS,

Published: May 3, 1992

The nation's largest Korean-American community is grim, armed and determined to repel racial violence in its riot-scarred corner of the city.

A vigilante Korean security force, wearing white scarves, is patrolling the burned and looted shops of Koreatown, the economically vibrant enclave just north of the sad streets of South-Central Los Angeles, where black and Hispanic residents struggle with poverty and crime.

Today, with an uneasy peace settling over the city after hundreds of their businesses were destroyed, the Koreans stood armed inside their shattered store windows.

The shopkeepers voiced outrage at the slow response of the police when their community came under attack Wednesday night and Thursday. And they expressed despair over the sudden destruction of American success stories that had taken lifetimes to build.

• "Why did it happen?" said Carl Rhyu, a member of the community's security force. "That's a good question."

  He was among a group of armed Koreans on the rooftop of Lucky Electronics who, in a sign of the general tension and confusion in the area, held a brief standoff Friday night with crouching National Guardsmen that ended when the two sides figured out who the other was. Lightning Rod for Anger

  "I think the black people are jealous of the Koreans," he said, voicing a gut feeling that many Korean residents express privately but are too careful to state in public. "They're lazy; we are working hard. They're not making money; we are making money."

  In the South-Central area, where Korean shops have become the object of resentment even as they provide what is often the only retail service to residents, some shopkeepers climbed ladders to remove the Korean lettering from their signboards. At the Korean consulate, where National Guardsmen stood watch, an identifying plaque had been covered up by tape.

  Yumi Park, the former director of the Korean American Grocers Association, said about 600 Korean-owned retail outlets had been damaged in the South-Central area and about 200 in Koreatown.

  Lawrence Aubry, a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said Korean merchants had become a lightning rod for the discontent of some black residents. Many blacks in Los Angeles have remained poor as, one after another, immigrant groups have arrived and climbed past them to prosperity.

  "It's illogical, but it's convenient to target the Koreans," he said. "Why were they burning the businesses that serve them? Why has that anger not been vented at the educational system that has failed them? Why weren't the employment offices burned to the ground?"

  In place of the scenes of rioting and burning today, more than 5,000 people, most of them Koreans, gathered in Koreatown for a demonstration and march protesting the violence. On the Defensive

  Defending the armed response of the Koreans, Mr. Rhyu said, "If it was your own business and your own property, would you be willing to trust it to someone else? We are glad the National Guard is here. They're good backup. But when our shops were burning we called the police every five minutes; no response."

  One of the most gripping and, increasingly, controversial television images of the violence was a scene of two Korean merchants firing pistols repeatedly from a military stance. The image seemed to speak of race war, and of vigilantes taking the law into their own hands.

  But this morning, amid the empty shelves of the Western Gun Shop, the two men spoke in anger and despair of the failure of the police to protect them, of the collapse of their American dream, and of a sister and sister-in-law who are now hospitalized with gunshot wounds fired from a crowd of looters.

  "I want to make it clear that we didn't open fire first," said David Joo, manager of the gun shop. "At that time, four police cars were there. Somebody started to shoot at us. The L.A.P.D. ran away in half a second. I never saw such a fast escape. I was pretty disappointed." 'Please Call Ambulance'

  The incident occurred outside Park's Wilshire Jewelry, which is owned by Richard Park, who also owns the gunshop.

  More than 200 people had converged on the mall where the jewelry shop is situated, Mr. Park said, and the shots came just as his sister and sister-in-law were trying to flee. His sister was wounded in the leg and his sister-in-law in the kidney and stomach, he said.

  "I scream: 'Please call ambulance. Please, somebody hurt. Somebody crying. Please call ambulance. Ambulance,' " Mr. Park recalled. "But when a lot of shots were fired, everybody left.

  "I don't know if I am wrong or not. People say I am wrong. What am I going to do? Just sit down and die? I am going to protect my store and my family and myself."

  Mrs. Park, the former director of the Korean American Grocers Association, estimated that there were about 6,000 Korean retail outlets in Los Angeles County, a main source of livelihood for the 300,000 to 400,000 Korean-Americans who live here. There are more than a million Korean-Americans in the nation.

Why should a person have the ability to own an ar 15 ....But when our shops were burning we called the police every five minutes; no response."

[spookyturtle 9,466]

not really

The AR-15 itself has been sold on the U.S. civilian market since the Colt AR-15 Sporter was first advertised as a hunting rifle in 1963.

That same year, the selective-fire cousin of the AR-15, the XM16, began appearing in small quantities for jungle warfare testing in 1963 and a variant was adopted as the M16A1 in 1967. The M16A1 only became the military standard service rifle in Vietnam in 1969, six years after the AR-15 was established on the civilian market as a hunting and utility firearm.

It wasnt until 1970 before the M-16A1 replaced the M-14 for the Army in the continental United States, Europe, and South Korea.

Damn military using civilian weapons.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Families of Newtown victims sue rifle manufacturer

.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — The families of nine of the 26 people killed and a teacher wounded two years ago at the Sandy Hook Elementary School filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer, distributor and seller of the rifle used in the shooting.

The negligence and wrongful death lawsuit, filed in Bridgeport Superior Court and released on Monday, asserts that the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle should not have been sold publicly because it was designed for military use and is unsuited for hunting or home defense.

"In order to continue profiting from the sale of AR-15s, defendants chose to disregard the unreasonable risks the rifle posed outside of specialized, highly regulated institutions like the armed forces and law enforcement," the plaintiffs wrote in the complaint.

In addition to Bushmaster, the defendants are Camfour, a firearm distributor, and Riverview Gun Sales, the now-closed East Windsor store where the gunman's mother purchased the Bushmaster rifle in 2010.

Messages seeking comment from the defendants were not immediately returned.

The so-called AR-15 rifle was first build by Armalite for military use, but the design was later acquired by Colt, which produced the M-16 automatic weapon for the U.S. military. In the early 1960s, Colt began marketing the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle as the civilian version of the fully automatic M-16. Many other companies have since begun manufacturing and selling AR-15-type rifles, including the Bushmaster X-15.

The rifles are extremely popular in shooting competitions due to the light weight of the gun and ammunition and the weapon's accuracy.

View gallery

FILE - In this Dec. 20, 2012 file photo, law enforcement officials stand outside Riverview Gun Sales …

Bill Sherlach, whose wife, Mary, was killed in the shooting, said he believes in the Second Amendment but also that the gun industry needs to be held to "standard business practices" when it comes to assuming the risk for producing, making and selling a product.

"These companies assume no responsibility for marketing and selling a product to the general population who are not trained to use it nor even understand the power of it," he said.

The plaintiffs include Sherlach and the families of Vicki Soto, Dylan Hockley, Noah Pozner, Lauren Rousseau, Benjamin Wheeler, Jesse Lewis, Daniel Barden, Rachel D'Avino and teacher Natalie Hammond, who was injured in the shooting.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Nicole Hockley, the mother of 6-year-old victim Dylan, and Mark Barden, the father of 7-year-old victim Daniel, appeared at a news conference Monday morning with U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy. They declined to comment on the lawsuit and instead pushed for new laws and programs to restrict access to weapons and improve mental health treatment.

"My little Daniel's death was preventable," Barden said. "Dylan Hockley's death was preventable."

The Newtown gunman, Adam Lanza, shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, on the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, before driving to the school and gunning down 20 children and six educators with the semi-automatic rifle. He committed suicide as police arrived.

In 2005, Congress and President George W. Bush approved a federal law that shielded gun makers from lawsuits over criminal use of their products, with some exemptions.

In a lawsuit over the .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the Washington, D.C.-area sniper shootings that killed 10 people in 2002, Bushmaster and a gun dealer agreed to pay $2.5 million to two survivors and six families in a 2004 settlement. It was the first time a gun manufacturer had agreed to pay damages to settle claims of negligent distribution of weapons, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In that settlement, Bushmaster paid $550,000 and the Washington state gun dealer, where the sniper's rifle came from, paid $2 million.

In 2002, a federal judge in California ruled that Bushmaster and other gun manufacturers were not responsible for a 1999 shooting spree that killed a postal worker and injured five people at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles. The judge said a lawsuit by the victims' families did not show a link between the manufacturers and the shooting rampage.

___

Associated Press writer Dave Collins in Hartford contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/families-newtown-victims-sue-gunmaker-seller-141435892.html

I'm sure the NRA will step in with some top notch lawyers and try to smash this to the ground. I feel sorry for these families, I don't think they will win.

Good stuff. They laughed off the lawsuits that were filed against big tobacco, too. That is until big tobacco had to pony up billions of dollars to compensate the victims of its business. And them lawsuits kept on coming and them judgements kept on piling up. As they say, he who laughs last laughs best.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Good stuff. They laughed off the lawsuits that were filed against big tobacco, too. That is until big tobacco had to pony up billions of dollars to compensate the victims of its business. And them lawsuits kept on coming and them judgements kept on piling up. As they say, he who laughs last laughs best.

Big tobacco lied. Any moron knows a gun can kill.

[JohnR! 5,495]

Precisely what I said. Your hang on to a 22-year old story to justify your hatred for blacks.

RIOT IN LOS ANGLES: Pocket of Tension; A Target of Rioters, Koreatown Is Bitter, Armed and Determined

By SETH MYDANS,
Published: May 3, 1992

[...]

edited for size

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Precisely what I said. Your hang on to a 22-year old story to justify your hatred for blacks.

I don't like Koreans. Why should they try to stop rioters from burning their businesses? They should be passive and allow themselves to be victimized like good liberals.

[We Keep Receipts 9,238]

Some poster asked why would a person need an ar 15....Koreans protecting their lives and property from racist blacks .100 stores + were burned down ar 15 helped save the day

So you can't protect yourself with any other weapon? Or is that racist blacks the most important piece of this post? Why do I ask a question I already know the answer to

[lostinblue 1,989]

Senator Kevin de León
This is a “ghost gun.” This right here has ability with a 30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. 30-magazine clip in half a second.

[We Keep Receipts 9,238]

When you look at this video and tell me everyone looting was all black then talk. Until then, please stop.. You are embarrassing yourself.

34, seconds, 1:17 take a good look.

Also, what does black people have to do with this thread?

So an assault rifle is needed???? Are there no other means to kill a deed? This type of rifle is not needed for the average individual.

They don't, but since you asked him and you're black, he can't help himself. He's got racist Tourette's syndrome.

[lostinblue 1,989]

So you can't protect yourself with any other weapon? Or is that racist blacks the most important piece of this post? Why do I ask a question I already know the answer to

Because my number one priority in this world is to provide for and to protect my family. I bought the best tool I could afford for that job.. An ar15 fills that platform today.