Last Thursday’s ruling from the Connecticut Supreme Court, allowing relatives of those killed in the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School to proceed with their suit against the manufacturer of the gun used in the killings, garnered national attention for the suit’s potential to assign some responsibility for the shooting to the gun company.
Twenty-six people were killed in the shooting, including 20 first graders, by a gunman wielding an “AR-15 Bushmaster” type of weapon.
The suit is also noteworthy due to the participation of 10 emergency physicians and trauma surgeons from around the U.S. who filed a friend of the court brief in support of the suit. Some of the doctors treated the victims of infamous mass shootings, including those in Sandy Hook, Aurora, and Columbine. They detailed their experiences treating the victims, discussed how such shootings have caused healthcare facilities to craft “active shooter” strategies, and how, as one doctor wrote, “being shot by a military assault rifle is carnage in the truest sense of the word.”
The doctors wrote that they “believe that with the freedom to make and sell these intrinsically dangerous military weapons to a civilian population should come the responsibility to bear the heavy costs of the foreseeable harm they cause.”