The households of victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas are suing Activision and Meta, in addition to gun producer Daniel Defense.
The households bringing the lawsuits are represented by lawyer Josh Koskoff, who beforehand gained a settlement from Remington for the households of Sandy Hook shooting victims. The swimsuit towards the expertise firms claims, “Over the last 15 years, two of America’s largest technology companies … have collaborated with the firearms industry in a scheme that makes the Joe Camel campaign look laughably harmless, even quaint.”
Specifically, the swimsuit factors to Activision’s widespread “Call of Duty” online game franchise, which it describes as a “cunning form of marketing [that] has helped cultivate a new, youthful consumer base for the AR-15 assault rifle,” and to Instagram, the picture app owned by Meta, which the swimsuit claims “knowingly promulgates flimsy, easily circumvented rules that ostensibly prohibit firearm advertising; in fact, these rules function as a playbook for the gun industry.”
In an announcement, Activision expressed sympathy for the households however mentioned, “Millions of people around the world enjoy video games without turning to horrific acts.” We’ve reached out to Activision and Meta for extra remark.
In the lawsuit’s telling, the Uvalde shooter was a “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” participant, and he was additionally focused by Daniel Defense’s promoting on Instagram. (Meta bans gun gross sales on its platforms, however The Washington Post beforehand reported that the corporate provides gun sellers 10 strikes earlier than booting them.)
“Defendants are chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters,” the lawsuit argues.
Politicians proceed to debate whether or not video video games promote gun violence. A current evaluation by the Stanford Brainstorm Lab checked out 82 medical analysis articles on the subject and concluded, “current medical research and scholarship have not found any causal link between playing video games and gun violence in real life.”