The record $73 million settlement the gun maker Remington must pay to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting isn’t justice.

Justice would have prevented the disturbed young man who did the killing from ever getting his hands on a gun. If that had happened, 20 children and six dedicated educators still might be alive, along with the shooter and his mother.

But even if this settlement isn’t justice, it is a start.

Among other things, it’s a signal to gun makers, gun sellers and their insurance providers that they no longer are the only industry in the world with a get-out-of-jail card. When they do wrong, when they behave irresponsibly, when they cause great harm through negligence or careless indifference to public safety, they can be held accountable.

They can face consequences.

Costly ones.

That matters.

One of the most frustrating things about dealing with the gun lobby and their zombie-like water carriers in elective office is the callous arrogance with which they conducted themselves. They acted as if they were not only above the law but as if showing compassion or sympathy for people who had endured horrible tragedies and loss was a sign of weakness, a game for losers.

They thought nothing of laughing at the suffering of people who had lost loved ones to gun violence.

They did touchdown dances when one of their hired guns or march-in-lockstep legislators berated a mother or father who had buried a child or children after another senseless shooting.

They acted as if it were a game.

Well, if it is a game, they now have skin in it, too.

The gun lobby will try to spin this settlement as just another business decision. The flacks for the National Rifle Association likely will say that the settlement carries no acknowledgment of liability and therefore changes nothing.

They will be wrong about that.

In the first place, no business—or its insurance carriers — would agree to pay $73 million unless they feared going to court probably would cost them much, much more.

Their fear was justified. Both courts and jurors have grown weary and unsympathetic to the gun industry’s argument that it was okay if record numbers of Americans died as long as the gun merchants were allowed to continue to sell whatever tools of death and destruction they wanted.

When six-year-olds must die to keep the cash registers of the firearms merchants ringing, most people begin to think the cost of commerce is too high.

But the other reason the gun lobby flacks should worry is that this settlement didn’t just cost Remington money. It also required that the gun manufacturer cough up internal documents and communications about how the company and the firearms industry market their deadly products.

In short, the settlement lifts the rock.

Expect a lot of nasty things to crawl out from under it.

Among other things, the documentation will show that gun makers and gun sellers try to sell an image almost as much as they do a product. They market their products by suggesting to men who are insecure about both their masculinity and their place in the world that having a gun — particularly a military-style weapon — will make them feel more manly and will give them a greater feeling of belonging.

This means that, often, the gun sellers speak directly to the sorts of men who are most likely to be mass shooters.

An ethical business and industry would have realized that and altered course long ago.

Too often, the gun merchants instead doubled down.

As a result, the United States now leads the industrialized world in both mass shootings and deaths from gun violence by a wide, wide margin. Americans are 20 times more likely to die from gun violence than citizens in other parts of the industrialized world.

The Remington-Sandy Hook settlement won’t erase that sad fact.

Nor will it bring back the hundreds of thousands of victims of gun violence we’ve lost in the nearly 10 years since Sandy Hook.

That means it isn’t justice.

But it is a start.

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John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism in Franklin, Ind., and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.