Joseph Ax
(Reuters) – Families of victims of the 2022 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, filed two lawsuits on Friday against Instagram parent company Meta (NASDAQ:), Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:) and its parent company Microsoft (NASDAQ:) and gun maker Daniel Defense claims they collaborated to sell dangerous weapons like the Uvalde shooter to impressionable teens.
The wrongful death complaints allege that Daniel Defense, a Georgia-based gun maker, used Instagram and Activision’s Call of Duty video game to market its assault rifles to teenage boys, while Meta and Microsoft facilitated the strategy without taking into account strict supervision and allowing no action. attention to consequences.
Meta, Microsoft and Daniel Defense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On May 24, 2022, in one of the deadliest school shootings in history, 19 children and two teachers were killed 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.
The complaints were filed on the two-year anniversary of the Koskoff massacre by Koskoff & Bieder, the same law firm that reached a $73 million settlement in 2022 with rifle maker Remington on behalf of the families of children killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. School in 2012.
The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Meta’s Instagram of providing gun makers with “an unmonitored channel to communicate directly with minors, in their homes, at school, even in the middle of the night” with only token oversight.
The complaint also alleges that Activision’s popular war game Call of Duty “creates a vividly realistic and immersive theater of violence in which teenage boys learn to kill with frightening skill and ease” by using real weapons as models of the game’s firearms.
The Uvalde shooter played Call of Duty, which features, among other weapons, an assault rifle made by Daniel Defense, according to the lawsuit, and obsessively visited Instagram, where Daniel Defense frequently advertised.
As a result, the complaint alleges, he became fixated on acquiring the same guns and using them to commit murders, even though he had never fired a gun in real life before.
The second lawsuit, filed in Uvalde County Circuit Court, accuses Daniel Defense of intentionally targeting its advertising to teenage boys in an attempt to secure lifelong customers.
“There is a direct connection between the actions of these companies and the Uvalde shooting,” Josh Koskoff, one of the families’ attorneys, said in a statement. “This three-headed monster deliberately exposed him to weapons, taught him to see them as a tool to solve his problems, and taught him to use them.”
Daniel Defense is already facing other lawsuits filed by the families of some of the victims. In a 2022 statement, CEO Marty Daniel called such litigation “frivolous” and “politically motivated.”
Earlier this week, victims’ families announced a separate lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who participated in what the U.S. Justice Department 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 remain pending.