From devastation to legislation

A 14-year-old student opened fire on teachers and students at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Two students and two teachers were killed. 

The Sept. 4 shooting marks the 46th school shooting in 2024. Research shows school shootings have risen in frequency in the last 25 years and, now at their highest recorded levels, have become more deadly. 

The second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on Dec. 12, 2012, when Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children, 2 teachers, 2 teachers’ aides, the principal and the school psychiatrist. 

Josh Koskoff, a lawyer at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, specializes in medical malpractice and personal injury and represented the plaintiffs in the case of Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International. 

Koskoff helped nine families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting amass a $73 million settlement against Remington Arms Co., the company that made and marketed the firearm used in the shooting. 

The Brown and White staff spoke with Koskoff over the phone in February 2024 about his work in Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International alongside Lehigh journalism professor Jennifer Midberry’s study of the detriments of gun violence reporting and the future of gun legislation in the U.S. 

Jennifer Midberry conducted a study alongside Dr. Jessica Beard and Chris Morrison. The team interviewed 26 adult survivors of gun violence in a trauma center at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. According to the study, several interviewees felt as though they were reliving their trauma from the news published about their stories. Do you feel this was the same for your clients in Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International? 

Each time there’s a mass shooting that captures national attention, which is frequent, you’re going to expect breaking news that there’s a lone gunman who shot a bunch of people with an AR-15 and it’s typically a young kid. I think there is, for some more than others, a feeling of being re-traumatized (and being) brought back to that day for the Sandy Hook families on Dec. 14, 2012. 

Now, I can’t really speak to what happens inside the mind of somebody who’s in that situation, but, there is tension there. How do you report on these events without glorifying or making the shooter into a martyr who inspires others? So, that gets complicated too. A lot of these shooters have carried out these mass shootings, a lot of the public can name what they know, but don’t know the name of the victims. So, the short answer is yes. 

Midberry said her research advocates for news organizations to cover shootings as a public health issue, not just a crime issue, and I thought that was particularly interesting. Do you perceive mass shootings as a public health issue, a crime issue or something else entirely?

Well, I think (mass shootings) are absolutely a public health crisis. I don’t think you can sort of lump it into crime in general. There’s a strong part of it as a cultural issue as well. I think it’s an indictment of corporate America, and it’s an indictment of social media. The mainstreaming of the way guns of all kinds are treated as toys and promoted as an answer to people’s problems. I mean, I think it’s so applicable (to) every facet of our lives.

Can you speak to the impact of Bushmaster having ads come up during Call of Duty video games?

Remington was the parent company of Bushmaster, and they had a deal with Activision, (an American video game publisher), to place their simulated AR-15 in the game; it was actually called an Adaptive Combat Rifle.

This was the dawn of this alliance between the gun industry and first-person shooter games. So yes, (Remington)  got their weapon in the game and the shooter at Sandy Hook (Elementary School), I know for a fact, was exposed to this marketing through Call of Duty. 

Daniel Defense (American arms manufacturer), which made the weapon that was used at the Uvalde shooting, used Instagram to promote its weapons. The shooter at Uvalde did use that, not surprisingly. (On) Instagram there’s just this acceptance of mainstreaming these weapons.

To what extent is The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act and Child Safety Lock Act of 2005 defending gun companies?

It was always difficult to sue a gun company even before PLCAA, and the reason is that typically lawsuits are between two people and most often when there is somebody who’s injured by a gun. There’s a third person — the shooter. 

There’s a series of events that happened in the mid 2000s that have resulted in mass shootings today. Something that I put together through my experience and learning all about this and from getting documents that a lot of people haven’t seen, basically, in 2004, the assault weapons ban expired. It had been passed in 1994 by President Clinton, with some help from President Reagan, who also was against the proliferation of AR-15s and similar military rifles, because police were getting outgunned. So, there was a lot of concern. 

You’re gonna hear people say, well, ‘there’s no evidence that it was effective,’ The banning or restrictions of firearms is a technical fact. Many congressmen don’t know what makes a gun dangerous. If you’re trying to ban or restrict a weapon, you have to describe in words what’s banned. The assault weapons ban, which was well intended (by) Congress, really kind of banned assault weapons that looked scary or sounded scary, but really weren’t in effect. 

In a sense, it basically was still an AR-15 (but) was just limited. I should go back and look at how it may have limited the magazine size of an AR-15. You could still sell an AR-15 for anything, but it was still a lethal weapon that could be sold legally. 

I don’t know if you’ve heard that expression, ‘It’s hard to prove a negative.’ 

We know that there were shootings, but we just don’t know how many shootings might have occurred had there not (been) a ban.

The Parkland shooting was the first time my peers and I realized what was going on. Can you speak to the fact that school shootings have become so frequent?

For every 100 threats, there might be one or two people who act. It’s just become very much a quick way to solve all your problems for an adolescent going through a terrible time. Since the advent of the internet and social media, the ability of parents to protect children and adolescents from commercial predators has been obliterated. Gun companies can now reach youth directly online, and establish a relationship with a future consumer at an early age. They do this by targeting adolescents with promotions that appeal to their insecurities. Children and adolescents not only learn about AR-15s online, they get trained on how to use them on Call of Duty, which is as much a killing simulator as it is a game. When I was growing up, AR-15s were on the market, but I had no idea what they were. Now nearly every teenage boy not only knows what they are, (but) how to use them and how they can solve their problems.

There was a famous case in New York called the Beretta Case (City of New York v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp). New York City sued Beretta (an Italian arms manufacturer). New York City was saying, ‘We’re paying tens of millions of dollars a year for gun violence, and you’re making all the money off the sale of guns and your conduct is wrongful. It’s negligent. You should pay for all our costs.’ 

The gun industry freaked out. 

So, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. It was a very unique protection for the gun industry that other types of industries don’t have. We can bring lawsuits against the automobile industry, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the agricultural industry, the insurance industry, etc. It’s only that we can’t sue the gun industry for things that we might be able to sue the auto industry for. 

The NRA is very powerful in Washington, and they can buy special protections against lawsuits. Until our Sandy Hook case, it basically felt (like) you couldn’t sue a manufacturer or marketer under this statute. The gun industry acted like they couldn’t be sued. So that’s why you get the type of marketing that Bushmaster did through Call of Duty and elsewhere, where they were really starting to push AR-15s on a younger and younger demographic. 

What role do you think conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones play when it comes to misinformation regarding gun violence and shootings?

I think he promotes this type of aggrievement that sometimes leads to mass shootings. I think there’s a pretty direct relationship between the type of fear mongering that he does and the conspiracies that he promotes about the government coming after your guns and your women and children. His whole articulated philosophy about the world is that the government is trying to depopulate us and take our guns and put us into camps. And therefore, you have to take up arms against the government. So that’s a very violent, fear mongering message and the vast majority of people in America are not going to give him the time of day.But for that small percentage of people, he’s the messenger of truth. 

I can’t link a particular mass shooting to Alex Jones, but you can link the mentality and the anger toward people like Alex Jones, or toward other people or shooters. We know that a lot of the shooters who are motivated by race are activated online. They’re effectively brainwashed online and this is where social media has (the) culpability because they’re going to keep feeding somebody what they want to see and it creates an alternative reality. 

I think it’s really important to try to make this pretty clear to people that Alex Jones is a symptom of a problem. He isn’t the only person who’s causing a problem. He’s a symptom of something larger. 

You started this interview by talking about retraumatization. I think that there’s culpability in the media as well. At the end of the day, what the gun industry does is provide an outlet for these feelings of hate. In the sense of an adolescent, feelings of isolation or sadness turn (into) a “quick fix.” They really prey on that mentality and when people like Alex Jones) do that, it’s truly horrific.