  Remington Arms has agreed to settle liability claims from nine families whose loved ones were killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The settlement agreement, announced Tuesday in a court filing, is the first time in the U.S. that a gun manufacturer has been held liable for a mass shooting.
The family members of five children and four adults killed in the shooting won $73 million in the settlement, attorneys for the families told HuffPost in a statement. Last July, Remington offered to pay $33 million to settle the lawsuit, which the families declined.
Remington created the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle that Adam Lanza used in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 children and six adults dead.
“These nine families have shared a single goal from the very beginning: to do whatever they could to help prevent the next Sandy Hook. It is hard to imagine an outcome that better accomplishes that goal,” Josh Koskoff, the lead attorney representing the families, said in a statement.
In 2019, the Connecticut Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit filed by relatives of nine victims killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School to move forward. The lawsuit argued that Remington should not have sold such a dangerous weapon to the public, and that the gunmaker specifically targeted younger, at-risk males in its marketing and product placement.
“For the gun industry, it’s time to stop recklessly marketing all guns to all people for all uses and instead ask how marketing can lower risk rather than court it,” Koskoff said in a statement. “For the insurance and banking industries, it’s time to recognize the financial cost of underwriting companies that elevate profit by escalating risk. Our hope is that this victory will be the first boulder in the avalanche that forces that change.”
 President Joe Biden on Tuesday welcomed Russian overtures toward ending a crisis in Ukraine, but reiterated that he was ready to respond with overwhelming economic sanctions if an invasion occurs. “We should give diplomacy every chance to succeed,” Biden said in brief remarks from the East Room of the White House. “We will not sacrifice basic principles, though.” Those principles, he said, include Ukraine’s sovereignty and its right to territorial integrity. After a HuffPost investigation last year brought to light a vast, decades-old chemical dumping ground in the Gulf of Mexico, the Environmental Protection Agency has officially declared that the site is nothing to worry about ― without reviewing any recent scientific data or visiting the site. Last year, HuffPost reported that tens of thousands of 55-gallon drums containing decades-old toxic waste are scattered across a 200-square-mile stretch of ocean floor off the coast of Louisiana, in an area known as Mississippi Canyon. Fossil fuel companies now operate a network of drilling rigs and pipelines within the barrel field — a development that has the potential to disturb drums on the seafloor. The EPA acknowledged at the time it has done little to no oversight since permitting chemical companies to jettison waste there in the 1970s, nor does it know if this offshore dumping has had lingering environmental or human health impacts. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday that his office has recently learned that the city’s police force has been using DNA taken from sexual assault victims to link them to crimes, potentially discouraging people who’ve been raped from coming forward. Boudin, who revealed details of his findings in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, said his office became aware of the practice last week when the San Francisco Police Department used DNA it had collected from a woman years ago as part of a rape exam in order to connect her to a recent felony property crime. 
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