By Jozef Ax
(Reuters) – Families of the victims of the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting filed two lawsuits on Friday against Instagram’s parent company Meta (NASDAQ:), Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:) and its parent company Microsoft (NASDAQ:) and the gun maker Daniel Defense, claiming they helped market dangerous weapons to impressionable teenagers like the Uvalde shooter.
Together, the wrongful death complaints allege that Daniel Defense – a Georgia-based gun manufacturer – used Instagram and Activision’s video game Call of Duty to market its assault rifles to teenage boys, while Meta and Microsoft facilitated the strategy with lax oversight and disregard with the consequences.
Meta, Microsoft and Daniel Defense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Entertainment Software Association, a lobbying group representing the video game industry, said many other countries have similar levels of video game play but have less gun violence than the United States.
“We are saddened and outraged by senseless acts of violence,” the group said in a statement. “At the same time, we discourage unfounded accusations linking these tragedies to video gaming, which undermines efforts to focus on the core issues at hand and protect against future tragedies.”
One of the deadliest school shootings in history left 19 children and two teachers dead on May 24, 2022, when an 18-year-old gunman armed with a Daniel Defense rifle entered Robb Elementary School and barricaded himself in adjacent classrooms with dozens of students. students.
The complaints were filed on the two-year anniversary of the massacre by Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, the same law firm that reached a $73 million settlement with gun manufacturer Remington in 2022 on behalf of families of children killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. School year 2012.
The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Meta’s Instagram of giving gun manufacturers “an unsupervised channel to talk directly to minors at home, at school, even in the middle of the night,” with only a token check.
The complaint also alleges that Activision’s popular war game Call of Duty “creates a vividly realistic and addictive theater of violence in which teenage boys learn to kill with terrifying skill and ease,” using real weapons as models for the game’s firearms.
The Uvalde shooter played Call of Duty — which, according to the lawsuit, included an assault rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense — and obsessively visited Instagram, where Daniel Defense often advertised.
As a result, the complaint alleges, he became fixated on acquiring the same gun and using it to commit the murders, even though he had never fired a gun in real life.
The second lawsuit, filed in Uvalde County District Court, accuses Daniel Defense of deliberately targeting its ads to adolescent boys in an attempt to acquire lifelong customers.
“There is a direct line between the conduct of these companies and the Uvalde shooting,” Josh Koskoff, one of the families’ attorneys, said in a statement. “This three-headed monster knowingly exposed him to the weapon, conditioned him to see it as a tool to solve his problems and trained him to use it.”
Daniel Defense is already facing other lawsuits filed by families of some victims. In a 2022 statement, CEO Marty Daniel called such lawsuits “frivolous” and “politically motivated.”
Earlier this week, families of the victims announced a separate lawsuit against nearly a hundred state police officers who took part in what the U.S. Department of Justice said was a botched emergency response. The families also reached a $2 million settlement with the city of Uvalde.
Several other lawsuits against various government agencies are still pending.
