The families of victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, have sued Activision, Meta, and gun manufacturer Daniel Defense.
The families filing the suit are represented by attorney Josh Koskoff, who previously received settlements from Remington for the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims. “Over the past 15 years, two of America’s largest technology companies have collaborated with the firearms industry in a scheme to make the Joe Camel campaign seem comically innocuous and even strange,” the lawsuit against the tech companies alleges.
Specifically, the lawsuit points to Activision's popular “Call of Duty” video game franchise, describing it as “a clever form of marketing that helps build a new, younger consumer base for the AR-15 assault rifle.” Instagram, the photography app owned by Meta, “is knowingly promulgating clumsy and easily circumventable rules that ostensibly ban gun advertising. In effect, these rules serve as a playbook for the firearms industry.”
Activision expressed condolences to the families in a statement, but said “millions of people around the world enjoy playing video games without committing horrible acts.” We have reached out to Activision and Meta for further comment.
According to the lawsuit, Yuvalde's shooter was a 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare' player and was also the target of Daniel Defense's Instagram ad. (Meta bans gun sales on its platform, but the Washington Post previously reported that the company issued 10 warnings before booting gun sellers.)
“Defendants are suffocating alienated teenage boys and spitting out shooters,” the lawsuit alleges.
Politicians continue to debate whether video games promote gun violence. A recent review by the Stanford Brainstorm Lab looked at 82 medical research articles on the topic and concluded that “current medical research and scholarship has not found a causal relationship between video game play and gun violence in real life.”
