A woman who was injured in the Brooklyn subway shooting attack in April filed a lawsuit this week against gun manufacturer Glock and its parent company, accusing them of endangering public health and safety with their marketing practices and distribution strategy.
The plaintiff, Ilene Steur, was on her way to work on April 12 when Frank James allegedly opened fire on a busy subway train with a 9mm Glock handgun, injuring ten people. James has pleaded not guilty to terrorism and weapons charges.
Steur, 49, suffered “serious and permanent personal injuries,” leaving her unable to perform normal activities, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York.
“I always see on the news about people — innocent people — getting shot, and my heart goes out to the victims and their families. I never thought I would be one of those victims,” Steur said in a statement to NPR. “There has got to be better control of who gets their hands on these guns.”
James reportedly purchased the Glock pistol he used in the subway shooting from a pawn shop in Columbus, Ohio, in 2011, according to Fox News.
Steur is accusing Glock Inc. and its Austrian parent company, Glock Ges.m.b.H, of marketing products in ways that highlight “firearm characteristics such as their high capacity and ease of concealment, that appeal to prospective purchasers with criminal intent,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit alleges that Glock is “purposely supplying more firearms than the legitimate market could bear in order to induce sales in the secondary market” and failing to train dealers to avoid illegal transactions. It accuses the company of refusing to end contracts with distributors who have sold to dealers “with disproportionately high volumes of guns traced to crime scenes.”
For those reasons, the suit claims Glock has “endangered the public health and safety” of New York residents by marketing, distributing, promoting and selling firearms “with reckless disregard for human life and for the peace, tranquility and economic well-being of the public.”
The lawsuit comes after New York passed a law last year allowing victims of gun violence to sue manufacturers and dealers over their injuries.
Now U.S. lawmakers are weighing various methods of gun reform after a recent string of mass shootings have left the nation on edge, including a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students and two teachers dead. Just ten days before the Uvalde shooting, a gunman opened fire in a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store, killing ten people.