The U.S. is known as one of the world's most litigious countries. An ongoing effort seeks to employ lawsuits against the gun violence problem.
Survivors of mass shootings have been launching multimillion-dollar lawsuits against gunmakers, gun dealers, tech companies and the federal government for their failure to protect them.
The increased use of lawsuits is partly due to the rise of large, well-resourced violence-prevention groups backing them as a tool for change to force the gun industry, social media companies and the federal government to shift their practices, The Guardian reports.
“The lawsuits are created because we can’t get anything done at the state, local or federal levels, so we go for the manufacturers,” said Dion Green, who survived a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in 2019. “No one likes when their money gets attacked.”
When a gunman opened fire in Dayton’s arts and entertainment district five years ago, nine people, including Green’s father, Derrick Fudge, were killed and dozens more were injured. Green went on to establish the Fudge Foundation, through which he speaks to youth about the harms caused by gun violence, supports crime victims and travels to communities that have been similarly rocked by mass shootings.
Green has helped reform the way victim compensation is doled out and has railed against lax gun policies like permitless carry. He said that he never wanted to be involved in a lawsuit, but he began to see it as a way to get high-capacity drum magazines off the streets – like the 100-round drum the shooter used to kill his father.
Green and five other victims’ families connected with Ben Cooper, an attorney based in Columbus, Ohio, who specializes in wrongful-death cases.
“They were trying to figure out so many things: ‘What can we do? Who can we hold accountable? How can we get compensation for the harm that’s been caused? And how can we make a broader impact from this horrible tragedy?’” Cooper recalled.
In 2021, Cooper filed a lawsuit against Kyung Chang Industry USA Inc, the parent company of the Nevada-based gun-magazine maker and retailer the shooter used. The suit alleges the company knew that large-capacity magazines were attractive to people who were planning mass shootings and sold them online anyway, “without any reasonable safeguards, screening, or limits”.
For the past 30 years, attorney Jonathan Lowy has represented people affected by shootings, including the 2002 sniper shootings in Washington, D.C., and dozens of families and law enforcement officers who were shot in lesser-known incidents.
“What they really want out of a lawsuit is change,” said Lowy, founder of Global Action on Gun Violence, a non-profit that helps countries take legal action against gun manufacturers. “Every single one of them wants to do something to make it less likely that other families suffer the way they suffered.”
Critics in the gun industry say lawsuits are more likely to raise insurance premiums, bankrupt businesses and put other industries at risk than to stop the next mass shooting because they don’t address the “root causes” of violence.
Two mass-shooting lawsuits against tech companies are working their way through the legal system. One was filed by families who lost loved ones during the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., against Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, and against Activision, the video game-maker that produces Call of Duty, a game that featured guns from Daniel Defense, the company from which the shooter bought his rifle.
Another suit came from a survivor and families of those shot and killed at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. The suit was filed against the parents of the convicted shooter, 10 tech companies including Meta; Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube; Discord; 4chan; Reddit; and Amazon; and firearm and gun-accessory retailers RMA Armament, Mean LLC and Vintage Firearms, where the shooter bought his gun.