Lawyers allege Activision is ‘chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters’

Families of victims killed and injured in an Uvalde, Texas school shooting are suing Meta and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare publisher Activision Blizzard for promoting guns to kids. “[Activision is] chewing up 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 being targeted as an alleged “training camp for mass shooters,” while attorneys call out Meta and Instagram as “the firearm 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 at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, in a separate lawsuit also filed Friday. Daniel Defense’s DDM4v7 rifle, which the Uvalde victims’ lawyer called “an upscale 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 purchased that weapon minutes after his 18th birthday, which was eight days before the shooting at Robb Elementary School.

The lawyer wrote that Ramos was not a casual Call of Duty player, saying he “played obsessively, developed skill as a marksman, and obtained rewards” in the game that required him to “grind for hours on end.” Before downloading 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 alleges that Ramos was introduced to the DDM4v7 rifle simultaneously through Call of Duty and on Instagram. Ramos also allegedly searched for other accessories inspired by video games — “a Red Dot Sight, a smoke grenade, an AR-15 weapon skin, and an EOTech holographic battle sight.”

The lawsuit also included several gruesome details of the attack, including that Ramos approached a teacher and said “good night,” before shooting her in the head — something Mesner-Hage said is something longtime Call of Duty character Captain Price is known to say in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and other games.

“There is a direct line between the conduct of these companies and the Uvalde shooting. Just 23 minutes after midnight on his 18th birthday, the Uvalde shooter bought an AR-15 made by a company with a market share of less than one percent,” attorney Josh Koskoff wrote in a news release. “Why? Because, well before he was old enough to purchase it, he was targeted and cultivated online by Instagram, Activision and Daniel Defense. 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.”

An Activision spokesperson told Polygon that academic and scientific research shows “no causal link” between video games and violence. “The Uvalde shooting was horrendous and heartbreaking in every way, and we express our deepest sympathies to the families and communities who remain impacted by this senseless act of violence,” the spokesperson said. “Academic and scientific research continues to show that there is no causal link between video games and gun violence.”

But the Uvalde victims’ lawyers 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 allegedly linked to shooters, one of which was a shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. After that shooting, Walmart instructed its employees to remove signage referencing violent video games and hunting from its store, but did not stop selling guns.

Indeed, researchers haven’t found a causal link between playing video games and gun violence; the Stanford Brainstorm Lab spent months reviewing all scholarship related to the topic, according to Fortune. There was some link to vaguely described “aggression,” which encompassed a range of actions. These studies still didn’t find a causal link between games and violence, the researchers wrote. Certain video game communities have, however, been linked to right-wing extremism in the United States.

It’s true, too, that video games have licensed weapon likenesses for video games; Electronic Arts dropped the practice in 2013, for instance, but still uses the same types of guns — just without the names. “It is hard to qualify to what extent rifle sales have increased as a result of being in games,” 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 possible future owners.”

Be interesting how this turns out.