Uvalde parents and school shooting victims sue Activision
Families of victims killed and injured in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are suing Meta Call of Duty: Modern Warfare publisher Activision Blizzard for promoting guns to children. “(Activision is) eating alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters,” attorney Katherine Mesner-Hage wrote in the complaint filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Activision is seen as an alleged “training camp for mass shooters,” while lawyers call Meta and Instagram “the firearms industry’s best advertiser.” The Uvalde victims and their families are also suing Daniel Defense, whose AR-15-style rifle was used by 17-year-old Salvador Ramos to kill 21 people and injure 17 others on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School. in a separate lawsuit also filed Friday. Daniel Defense’s DDM4v7 rifle, which the Uvalde victims’ attorney called “a deluxe version of the AR-15,” was highlighted on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare‘s opening title page while also being promoted on Instagram by Daniel Defense. Ramos bought that gun minutes after his 18th birthday, eight days before the shooting at Robb Elementary School.
The lawyer wrote that Ramos was not a regular Call of Duty player, saying he “played obsessively, developed skill as a marksman and got rewards” in the game that required him to “grind for hours.” Before you download Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in 2021 he played several other versions of the game including Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 And Call of Duty: Mobile. Mesner-Hage claims that Ramos was introduced to the DDM4v7 rifle through Call of Duty and on Instagram at the same time. Ramos is also said to have sought out other accessories inspired by video games: “a Red Dot Sight, a smoke grenade, an AR-15 weapon skin and a holographic EOTech combat sight.”
The lawsuit also included several gruesome details of the attack, including that Ramos approached a teacher and said “goodnight” before shooting her in the head — something Mesner-Hage said. is something Captain Price an old Call of Duty character says Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and other games.
“There is a direct line between the behavior of these companies and the shooting in Uvalde. Just 23 minutes after midnight on his 18th birthday, the Uvalde shooter purchased an AR-15 made by a company with less than one percent market share,” attorney Josh Koskoff wrote in a news release. “Why? Because long before he was old enough to buy it, he was targeted and cultivated online by Instagram, Activision, and Daniel Defense. This three-headed monster knowingly exposed him to the weapon, conditioning him to see it as a tool to solve his problems and trained him to use it.
An Activision spokesperson told Polygon that academic and scientific research shows “no causal link” between video games and violence. “The shooting in Uvalde was horrific and heartbreaking in every way, and we extend our deepest condolences to the families and communities who continue to be affected by this senseless act of violence,” the spokesperson said. “Academic and scientific research continues to demonstrate that there is no causal link between video games and gun violence.”
But attorneys for Uvalde’s victims disagree, pointing to the evolving realism of Call of Duty’s weapons as a marketing tool for gun manufacturers. They also referenced at least five other mass shootings in which Call of Duty was reportedly linked to gunmen, including a shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. After that shooting, Walmart instructed its employees to remove signs referencing violent video games and hunting from the store, but did not stop selling guns.
Indeed, researchers have found no causal link between video game playing and gun violence; the Stanford Brainstorm Lab spent months reviewing all scientific knowledge on this subject, according to Fortune. There was an association with vaguely defined ‘aggression’, which included a range of actions. These studies still found no causal link between games and violence, the researchers wrote. Certain video game communities to haveHowever, associated with right-wing extremism in the United States.
It is also true that video games have licensed video game weapon likenesses; Electronic Arts, for example, dropped the practice in 2013, but still uses the same types of weapons – just without the names. “It’s difficult to qualify the extent to which gun sales have increased as a result of gaming,” said Ralph Vaughn of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, whose M82 sniper rifle has appeared in Call of Duty games. told Eurogamer in 2013. “But video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered potential future owners.”