WKTV:

Ilion Mayor Terry Leonard tells us he received word Wednesday from the plant manager that Remington will enact involuntary furloughs due to market conditions and high inventory levels. Leonard says days will be taken out of the production schedule.

It’s hard to see how Remington pulls out of this slump.  Many manufacturers are hurting at the moment, but Remington is dealing with (a) declining quality [so I am told, I have no Remington firearms], (b) the Walker Fire Control System, and (c) union labor.

The best thing I could recommend is to close up shop in New York, move the entirety of their operations South, and focus on quality.

Oh, and as for that ridiculous Sandy Hook lawsuit that just won’t go away, fight it, but rather than expend legal fees, stay out of the state and never sell another product in Connecticut, which is what they want anyway.  Hell, I wish every firearms manufacturer would refuse to sell in Connecticut, starting with the police.

By the way, we’ve yet to see even a single death certificate for any alleged Sandy Hook shooting victims.  Remember that.

Hartford Courant:

If a police officer stops and asks a person to show their pistol permit, most gun owners comply.

But that is not the law in Connecticut, where police must have suspicion of a crime in order to force the gun owner to display the permit. If the gun owner refuses, police say there is nothing they can do.

That’s why more than 35 police chiefs joined key legislators Tuesday in Hartford to call for changing the law.

The issue has prompted controversy in West Haven and Bridgeport, where gun owners refused to show their permits when requested. The issue arose in June 2013 when two men were walking on the boardwalk in West Haven with their guns obvious to public view in hip holsters.

When stopped by police, one of them agreed to show his permit. The other did not and was charged with interfering with police. A judge dismissed the case, and a prosecutor said the arrested man, Scott Lazurek of Derby, had a permit but simply did not want to show it to police. Lazurek told police that he did not need to display the permit under the law – and the prosecutor and the judge agreed.

Rep. William Tong, a Stamford Democrat and co-chairman of the judiciary committee, said the bill is “a very simple, but important, initiative” that is necessary at a time of increased concern about gun violence and mass killings in Connecticut and beyond.

“It’s because of Newtown,” Tong said. “It’s because of Aurora and Columbine and other places across the country. We know that reality far better than other states and other communities. We feel that acutely.”

Tong rejected arguments that the issue was a violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful searches and seizures.

“It’s not an infringement on your liberty,” said Tong, an attorney who has studied constitutional law. “It is not even considered a Fourth Amendment stop.”

Tong said he is concerned about Second Amendment activists “staging confrontations with police officers … to make a point.”

Uh huh.  To make a point.  Except in the case cited, the carriers were doing nothing whatsoever to justify being detained, much less arrested.  It’s the LEOs who staged the confrontation.

Let’s finish this thing about Newtown and Sandy Hook once and for all.  From the comments in this article, one commenter linked this video.  Watch it in its entirety.

Newstimes:

NEWTOWN – The 10 families whose lawsuit against the world’s largest dealer of AR-15 rifles was dismissed last year say their case should be reinstated, arguing that the Sandy Hook massacre was no accident.

“The notion that what happened at Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012, was unimaginable is a lie,” argues the families’ lawyer, Josh Koskoff, in 50-page brief submitted to state Supreme Court this week. “Sandy Hook was simply gratuitous, senseless proof of what was already known: preparation is no match for an AR-15.”

The families’ argument that Remington is liable for the massacre of 26 first-graders and educators by an AR-15-wielding 20-year-old named Adam Lanza was thrown out of Superior Court in October. The judge ruled that Remington is protected by federal law against claims when people misuse firearms.

The families are sticking to their argument that Remington was liable, saying the company ssly marketed the semi-automatic rifle to civilians.

Remington has until May 1 to respond to the brief. A court date to hear both sides of the appeal has not been set.

The families argue that the Remington rifle used by Lanza was developed “as a weapon of war so powerful, so accurate and so destructive to the human body, it vanquished the need for skilled hands or forgiving terrain.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know you were that good at close quarters battle just because you own an AR-15, did you?  Your purchase of an AR-15 has literally “vanquished the need for skilled hands.”  There is no need to go to the range and practice.  Your gun is magic.

Okay, let’s play this game one more time.  Here’s a note to attorney Koskoff.  Let’s start the discovery process by you producing all of the death certificates resulting from the Sandy Hook event.

I’m waiting.

News from Connecticut:

BRIDGEPORT – The maker of the type of gun used at Sandy Hook and several other mass shootings won a partial victory in a Bridgeport courtroom Thursday.

The hearing is part of a lawsuit that several Sandy Hook families brought against Remington Arms.

Remington Arms is fighting to keep certain company documents related to the marketing of the AR-15 rifle secret.

The judge in the case said Thursday that she is willing to seal at least some of the documents from the public to protect the company’s business interests.

Sandy Hook family members believe certain internal marketing strategies will prove AR-15 makers are negligently selling military-style weapons to civilians.

If they win, it could open gunmakers up to hundreds of wrongful-deaths all over the country.

You’re “willing,” are you?  Thy will be done, Barbara?  Here’s what else you should be willing to do.  Go to your supervising judge, turn in your robe, go before the media, and tell the world that because you are a loathsome political hack and a toad who cares nothing about the law, you are resigning your position and beg mercy from the people you abused in your station.

Can we count on your being “willing” to do that, Barbara?

Prior:

Sandy Hook Families Call Remington Repugnant In Court Documents

Judge Barbara Bellis Says Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Against Remington Goes Forward

Update On Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Of Remington

Discovery In The Sandy Hook Families Versus Remington Case

Remington filed a motion to withhold certain information concerning its Bushmaster brand of AR-15s, based mainly on the proprietary nature of said information.  For those of us who deal with technical information or trade secrets, this is routine and customary.  It is certainly not out of the ordinary, and the motion could have to do with information Remington wants to keep from being disclosed.  What if they have studied the rifling twist rate to  tweak it to produce a little more stable bullet flight, or studied barrel length to make it effective at longer distances, or whatever.  I don’t know, I’m just making this up as I go because I don’t know what they know after having invested their time and wealth in making a better rifle.  That’s the point, and that’s why Remington wants its information withheld from public disclosure.

Enter the Sandy Hook families again.

The families suing the maker of the AR-15 rifle used by gunman Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook massacre called a request by Remington Arms to keep company materials secret so that the company keeps its competitive advantage “repugnant,” according to a new filing in the case.

“Remington did not become the country’s leading seller of military weaponry to civilians by accident. It ascended to that position through its calculated marketing and pursuit of profit above all else,” lawyers for the Sandy Hook families wrote in a response objecting to a protective order filed by Remington.

As part of their lawsuit, families of victims have asked Remington to turn over its marketing materials in the belief that they will show that company intentionally marketed its high-powered rifles as “weapons of war” to civilians who had no business owning such guns.

“Plaintiffs lost family members, including children, in the service of that bottom line. Now Remington wants them to do more to protect its profitability,” the motion reads.

So let me translate.  We, the Sandy Hook families, don’t care about your God-given rights to defend yourself and your families the best way you see fit, nor do we care about the fact that in the court of public opinion, we lost and these weapons are entirely legal.

Furthermore, we don’t care that we don’t know what we’re talking about, and that virtually every gun in civilian use has a military application, from shotguns used for room clearing in Now Zad, Afghanistan by the Marines, to Remington 700 bolt action rifles used by Marine snipers in Iraq, nor that virtually every military weapon has a civilian application.

We don’t care about the fact that there isn’t the distinction between the two that we’re claiming, and we don’t care about the fact that weapons truly get tested by the civilian community, who has to spend their own money for the guns and reviews them on blogs and YouTube, rather than the military who has to use what the Pentagon buys for them, nor that vast improvements have been made to military weapon systems by applying civilian-based gun modifications or tactics developed in 3-gun competitions or the gaming community.

Hell, we don’t even care about the fact that there is a federal law against what we’re doing, called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and that we’re basically relying on a raving-bitch SJW judge named Barbara Bellis to help us through what would otherwise be dismissed with prejudice.  We don’t care that the weapon used in Sandy Hook was stolen.  No, we don’t care about anything but us.

The real morally reprehensible actions are being taken by the Sandy Hook families, not Remington.  How utterly despicable.

Prior:

Judge Barbara Bellis Says Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Against Remington Goes Forward

Update On Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Of Remington

Discovery In The Sandy Hook Families Versus Remington Case

Raw Story:

Connecticut judge has ruled that the families of the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting can gather facts to develop a civil action against Remington, the parent company for the Bushmaster AR-15 used by shooter Adam Lanza. If their case goes to trial, it would be a landmark challenge to the 2005 legislation that shields the gun industry from civil liability.

The plaintiffs are arguing that Remington bears some culpability for the shooting because their marketing deliberately targeted teenage males. The plaintiffs hope to gain access to Remington’s highly proprietary marketing plans to instantiate their claims. They may or may not succeed. But for the early 1900s, those marketing plans are hidden in plain view, in the historical archive. And they spell out how consciously and energetically the gun industry worked to cultivate the young male consumer in modern times.

The Winchester Repeating Arms Company, for example, developed what they shorthanded as a “boy plan” to encourage gun sales and love in young men.

In 1917, saddled by massive wartime expansion and debt, Winchester wrote a confidential letter to its jobbers and retailers about its postwar ambitions. “You are going to sell more guns this year than you ever sold before!” the company promised. “The need today is for more gun business.” Likewise, “the best way to make…ammunition business is to put more guns into hands of shooters.”

To support sales Winchester embarked on what it characterized as the “greatest commercial venture in the history of this country, probably in the history of the world.” They never lacked for ambition. In 1920 alone, they spent close to a million dollars on advertising.

A centerpiece of this effort was the company’s boy plan. Winchester prepared a letter about the .22 caliber rifle to send to boys between the ages of ten and sixteen. They asked retailers to send a list of the names of boys in their towns, so the company could send the letter to them under the retailer’s name.  The company intended to reach precisely 3,363,537 boys this way.

“Read this letter. Put yourself in the place of a boy of 14. Would you let another day go by before calling on your dealer?” The retailer’s task was to “Put a Winchester into the Hands of Every Youth in Your Town. When the boys and girls of your town arrive at the age of twelve years, they become your prospects.”

The company supported the campaign nationally with extensive advertisement in American Boy, Boys’ Life, Youth’s Companion, and others, as well as magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post.

Some of the boy plan selling points emphasized military readiness, and the idea that boys should know basic marksmanship, and how to handle a rifle safely. Capt. E. Crossman, something of a gun gossip columnist in the early 1900s, praised Winchester for trying to popularize preparedness through marksmanship, “even though it be from a purely business standpoint” and motivation. Other strands of Winchester’s boy marketing sold the gun on more mystical and deeply emotional terms.

In their internal sales publications, newsletters, correspondence, and bulletins to introduce the campaign, Winchester drew on the modern language of psychology. The company emphasized “a boy’s natural interest in a gun,” his “yearning for a gun” as a “natural instinct,” and the “inborn trait of human nature” that aroused a male’s interest in a display of guns and ammunition. This naturalized a boy’s desire to own a gun in a more urban, post-frontier America in which a gun was less necessary to his daily life. The Winchester Record, a company magazine, summarized it as the “the shooting instinct, which is present in most boys and girls.”

The company explicitly tied guns to powerful feelings about masculinity and authenticity at a time when Americans had anxiety about the softening effects of modern life and shifting gender roles. One group of ads claimed that every “real boy” wanted a gun—and that “every real American mother and father” knew that he should have one. Nothing was closer to a “real boy’s heart than shooting.” A lot of self-conscious effort reinforced the ostensibly obvious and irrefutable link between the gun and the “sturdy manliness that every real boy wants to have.”

But Winchester also invited its sales force to imagine a boy’s natural gun love as a by-product of the yeastily proliferating world of matinees, westerns, and the “countless boys’ adventure stories” that complemented the gun industry’s advertising. “Picture a red-headed boy in the front row of the movies. He’s on the edge of his seat, eyes still popping out of his head as the end is written across a … film where Winchester rifles were the star speakers. Up flashes your ‘ad’—boys earning Winchester sharpshooter medals …. What’s he going to save up his quarters for? A Winchester of course.”

It is strange to contemporary ears, but Winchester advised retailers to appeal directly to their “boy customers” and their allowance quarters, not to their parents.

I’ve lifted enough text out of the Raw Story article that hopefully you won’t have to visit the site to get the gist of the report.

So what the hell difference does any of this make?  How is this any different than marketing a car to a teen and that teen driving in an unsafe manner and harming someone?

Answer.  It isn’t any different.  The breathless report at Raw Story is just another reminder that the law only means something when it benefits the progressives, and can safely be ignored if it hinders their social planning.

America Is About To See How Guns Used In Mass Shootings Are Marketed:

When family members and survivors of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School filed suit against Bushmaster in December 2014, it seemed a lot like a lost cause. After all, a 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was designed to prevent people from holding gun manufacturers accountable for wrongful deaths. Even last week, when a Connecticut judge shot down a motion to dismiss the suit, experts said she was just delaying an inevitable dismissal later down the line.

But then last Tuesday, that same judge, Barbara Bellis, of Connecticut’s Superior Court, issued another ruling that determined the suit would be more than symbolic. Specifically, she said the discovery process could begin immediately and set a tentative trial date for April 3, 2018. A jury hearing the case would be historic, but Katherine Mesner-Hage, an attorney for the plaintiffs, says that getting the gun company to open its books for discovery is arguably just as huge.

That’s because she and her co-council have constructed a creative PLCAA exemption, claiming, in essence, that the gun Adam Lanza used in the Sandy Hook massacre was specifically marketed as a killing machine. As part of discovery, they’ll dig through the gunmaker’s internal company memos and try to prove that the company was negligent.

I spoke to Mesner-Hage about how the gun industry became so protected from civil suits, what she and the other lawyers for the Sandy Hook survivors hope to find in discovery, and how their legal strategy is similar to the one used against Big Tobacco in the 90s.

VICE: What are you hoping to find in discovery that will be such a big deal?
Katherine Mesner-Hage: We’re looking for documents, and we’re looking to depose key people at Remington especially, but also at the distributor and the retail level. We’re asking for internal memos about how to market the AR-15 and how to market specifically the patrolman’s carbine, which is the one that Adam Lanza used.

We want to depose the head of marketing. We want to talk to the people at the company who are making the decisions about marketing. That’s how we build our case, although the marketing speaks for itself on one level. This is our chance to kind of peel back the curtain and see what’s really going on. One of the things about discovery in general is that you don’t know what you’re looking for before you start.

Has any other case against a gun company gotten to the discovery stage since PLCAA was passed? What are the broader implications of this recent decision?
I can’t think of any case that’s gotten to the point in which discovery was open in the post-PLCAA era.

Nothing good can come from this.  As I have said before, the Sandy Hook Families aren’t entitled to that information and the case has no merit.

I know what they’re after.  As I have documented before, the law protects firearms manufacturers, but excepts cases where there is “negligent entrustment.”  I recall thinking as I read this, “this is an oddball exception.”  The reason that it is odd is that firearms manufacturers don’t sell to customers.  They sell to distributors who then sell to stores (some manufacturers sell directly online, but go through a local FFL, e.g., Rock River Arms, LaRue Tactical, etc.).

They are thinking that this exception, the negligent entrustment clause, has not been tested in court and still need fleshing out as to its real definition.  But I don’t agree with lawsuits against gun manufacturers any more than I agree with Tobacco companies being sued over lung cancer.  Evil actions such as was perpetrated that day redound to federal headship in Adam, original sin, and the volitional decision to commit wicked acts.  Marketing has nothing to do with it.

Back in 2005 when I was headed for a professional conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I left Charlotte, N.C. that day and headed towards Western North Carolina.  Instead of driving one of those put-put-put cars companies like to put you in, the car rental agency apologized and told me that the only car left on the lot for me that day was a brand new 2005 Ford Mustang GT.  I recalled laughing out loud to the puzzlement of the sales clerk.  Little did she know, I thought.

I drove towards Murphy, N.C., and past the NOC (Nantahala Outdoor Center), and on the curvy roads past all of those TVA dams, curve after curve after curve, in a brand new Ford Mustang GT.  It was a great day, that Sunday, and I exceeded the posted speed limit by a wide margin.  A wide margin.  But I didn’t do anything unsafe, and I didn’t cause additional risk for anyone else on the road.

Or perhaps I’m lying or simply a bad judge of risk.  If I had harmed anything or anyone that day, it wouldn’t have been a great day, and I would have been responsible for it.  Ford’s marketing of its 2005 Mustang GT had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision to exceed the posted speed limit.

And Adam Lanza is in hell for what he did since he didn’t know Jesus Christ as his savior and advocate before the Father.  I’m certain that the parents have bitterness and heartache over what happened.  But they’re taking it out on the wrong person, the wrong company, the wrong workers, the wrong objects.  They are poorly trained, theologically and philosophically, and besides that badly mistaken that marketing carbines to young males is somehow responsible for the deaths of their loved ones (witness Charles Whitman who used a bolt action rifle, the best option for his choice of locations).

These parents are in danger of harm to their own souls with this continued blame of the wrong people.  The lawyers are going to get rich, and the judge is a wicked woman and will receive her just recompense eventually, and perhaps sooner.

Prior:

Judge Barbara Bellis Says Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Against Remington Goes Forward

Judge Barbara Bellis: Update On The Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Of Remington

In Judge Barbara Bellis Says Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Of Remington Goes Forward, we discussed the traitorous actions of Judge Barbara Bellis by blatant, intentional flouting of a federal law that forbids lawsuits against gun manufacturers based on potential criminal actions by users of those guns.  Barbara knows better than the U.S. House and Senate.  CNN has an update of this case.