The lawsuit seeks to avoid the usual chain of causation by arguing that the messages used in the promotion of the Bushmaster as a military weapon would appeal to a troubled individual like Lanza, which may have influenced him to choose the XM15 from among his mother's guns when he attacked the elementary school, and that the attack would have been less deadly had he used a different gun.
Of course, even if a jury could buy the first part of that argument, can its conclusion be supported? What weapons did his mother own? Apparently two semi-automatic handguns, several traditional hunting rifles including a .45 Henry rifle, a .30 Enfield rifle, and a .22 Marlin rifle, a Savage Mark II .22-caliber rifle as well as the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle. Lanza brought with him a 10 mm Glock 20SF, a 9 mm SIG Sauer P226, an Izhmash Saiga-12 shotgun rifle and the .223 caliber Bushmaster XM15-E2S. He left the Izhmash in the car. As with the Bushmaster, the handguns were also equipped with high-capacity 30-round magazines.
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On March 28, 2013, court documents released from the investigation showed that the school shooting had occurred in the space of less than five minutes with 156 shots fired. This comprised 154 shots from the rifle and two shots from the 10mm pistol. Lanza fired one shot from the Glock in the hallway and killed himself with another shot from the pistol to the head".
So the job of Class Counsel would be to somehow prove that Lanza could not have killed as many with the semi-automatic handguns. How is the XM15-E2S any more lethal than the handguns? Perhaps this argument will be advanced:
"According to radiologist Heather Sher in a piece for The Atlantic, who treated several students injured in the recent shooting at a South Florida high school, a regular handgun leaves linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of a bullet. The weapons are low velocity and often leave non-fatal wounds.
On the other hand, bullets from an AR-15 and weapons similar to it travel almost three times faster than those of a routine handgun. The shooter can cause more damage while being less accurate, and the wounds are often far more lethal."
https://globalnews.ca/news/4043345/a...ds-difference/