...While the Sandy Hook families alleged in their complaint Remington Outdoor Company recklessly marketed the AR-15-style rifle used in the 2012 shooting in Newton, Connecticut, that killed six adults and 20 first-grade students, the gun maker sought to toss the suit on the grounds that the complaint did not assert facts that connected its marketing to the massacre.

The motion filed in June 2020 sat as Remington worked through its second bankruptcy proceedings in a federal court in Alabama, which stayed the Connecticut case for months.

But during a remote hearing Monday afternoon, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis finally weighed in on the gun maker’s request.

The denial came quick.

Explaining little, Bellis said she was rejecting the gun maker’s motion to strike the second amended complaint in the case. Then, almost in the same breath, she moved onto a discovery issue the attorneys had brought up earlier in the status conference: setting compliance deadlines.

It is the latest development in litigation that has been pending for six and a half years. In 2014, some of the families of the Sandy Hook victims filed a lawsuit alleging Bushmaster Firearms International, the maker of the AR-15-styled XM15-E2S rifle that gunman Adam Lanza used in the slaying, unethically marketed a gun designed for combat to civilians. Bushmaster merged with Remington Outdoor Company in 2011...