April 14, 2023
A group of victims and families of victims of the April 15, 2021, mass shooting at an Indianapolis FedEx facility on Thursday sued the distributor of the 60-round magazine used in the attack, saying it recklessly advertised the magazine in a way that encouraged such a shooting.
In the 54-page complaint in New York federal court, the estate of Jaswinder Singh, who was killed in the attack, represented by his son, Gurinder Singh Bains, as well as surviving victims Harpreet Singh and Lakhwinder Kaur and Harpreet’s spouse, Dilpreet Kaur, allege that despite knowing that its products would be attractive to mass shooters, distributor American Tactical Inc. still sold and advertised them while hyping up the number of rounds they carried and their use in battlefield scenarios.
The suit names American Tactical’s president and marketing director, along with Schmeisser GmbH, the German company that made the magazine used in the attack, as defendants.
The complaint opens with quotes from gun manufacturer and designer William B. Ruger Sr. saying, “No honest man needs more than 10 rounds,” and “I never meant for simple civilians to have my 20- or 30-round magazines.”
According to the complaint, American Tactical used imagery reminiscent of combat-based video games and movies, with actors wearing tactical gear similar to what the shooter used when he attacked the FedEx facility, and those advertisements recklessly promoted the magazines to impressionable youths, like the 19-year-old shooter.
. . .
“American Tactical, Inc.’s high capacity magazine used in the FedEx mass shooting had 60 rounds, two to three times the killing capacity of standard magazines,” Leslie Mitchell Kroeger of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement Thursday. “It is clear that the defendants put profits from high capacity magazines ahead of people, which came at the grave expense of the victims and victims’ families of the FedEx mass shooting.”
. . .
The plaintiffs are represented by Hadley E. Lundback and Kathryn Lee Bruns of Faraci Lange, Leslie Mitchell Kroeger, Poorad Razavi, Rachael Flanagan and Michael B. Eisenkraft of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and Douglas N. Letter and Philip H. Bangle of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Read the story on Law360.