Family of Las Vegas Shooting Victim Sues Gun Makers

In the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting massacre, several lawsuits have been filed. However, the family of Carrie Parsons, a 31-year-old victim from Seattle,  filed a wrongful death lawsuit against eight gun manufacturers and three weapons dealers, including Colt.

Gun Manufacturers vs the Family of the Victim of the Las Vegas Shooting

The family of Carrie Parsons, a woman killed by a gunman who rained down bullets from a Las Vegas high-rise hotel suite, filed a wrongful death lawsuit last Tuesday. She argued that their weapons are designed in a way that could be easily modified to fire like automatic weapons.

James and Ann-Marie Parsons, the parents of the 31-year-old victim, are arguing that the firearms manufacturers have both acknowledged and promoted that their guns could be converted from a semi-automatic weapon to a fully automatic one.

The family also argues that the firearms are “thinly disguised” machine guns that the manufacturers knew could easily be transformed, even without the use of a bump stock.

That bump stock attachment, however, was used by the Las Vegas gunman himself, allowing for a rapid-fire succession of bullets, killing 58 people and injuring more than 800 others in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.

According to their lawsuit, the companies showed a “reckless lack of regard for public safety” when they chose to advertise their weapons as “military weapons and signaling the weapon’s ability to be simply modified.”

The lawsuit reads:

“It was only a question of when — not if — a gunman would take advantage of the ease of modifying AR-15s to fire automatically in order to substantially increase the body count during a mass shooting. Having created the conditions that made a mass shooting with a modified AR-15 inevitable, Defendant Manufacturers continued conducting business as usual.”

The lawsuit targets eight gun manufacturers, including Colt along with several gun shops in Nevada and Utah. This is the latest case to challenge a federal law shielding gun manufacturers for liability.

Neither Colt nor any of the other manufacturers have responded to the requests for comment.