When Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert crowd in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, he left 58 people dead and 546 injured. One of those wounded was Jasara Requejo.

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Stanford Law School professor Nora Freeman Engstrom says the U.S. actually did have the chance to create a national fund for victims of mass shootings that might have streamlined this process.

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“In some ways, we had our shot to create a compensation program, and it would have been at the same time we gave this very broad immunity to gun manufacturers,” Engstrom said. “But in the case of PLCCA, instead of taking with one hand and giving with the other, we just took.”

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There is new hope for victims who want to hold gun companies accountable for the carnage. A new legal argument from families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims in Connecticut holds that Remington, the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15, may be liable for deaths and injuries on the grounds that it made a military-grade weapon available to a civilian population. Engstrom, along with other prominent tort law professors across the country, wrote an amicus brief on behalf of these families.

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There are also other avenues of litigation, with the most obvious target being the estate of the shooter. But, even though he was a millionaire, there’s no way Paddock’s estate could cover the costs of all the survivors, said David Studdert, a tort law professor at Stanford.

She was struck by bullets three times. One became lodged in her right arm. Another grazed her elbow, splitting it open. The third bullet hit her on the right side of her torso, narrowly missing major organs.

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