On Friday, families of the victims of the 2022 Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooting filed two lawsuits against Instagram’s parent company Meta, Activision Blizzard and its parent Microsoft, and the gunmaker Daniel Defense. They claim these companies cooperated to market dangerous weapons to impressionable teens, including the Uvalde shooter.
The wrongful death complaints argue that Daniel Defense, a Georgia-based gun manufacturer, used Instagram and Activision’s video game Call of Duty to market its assault-style rifles to teenage boys. Meta and Microsoft facilitated this strategy with lax oversight and disregard for the consequences.
Meta, Microsoft, and Daniel Defense did not immediately comment on the lawsuits. A spokesperson for the Entertainment Software Association, which represents the video game industry, stated that many other countries have similar levels of video game playing but less gun violence than the United States. The group expressed sadness and outrage over the violence but discouraged baseless accusations linking these tragedies to video gameplay, arguing that such claims detract from efforts to address the root issues.
On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old gunman armed with a Daniel Defense rifle killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in one of the deadliest school shootings in history. The shooter barricaded himself inside adjoining classrooms with dozens of students.
Complaints filed by Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder
The complaints were filed by Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, the same law firm that reached a $73 million settlement with rifle manufacturer Remington in 2022 on behalf of families of children killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Meta’s Instagram of providing gun manufacturers “an unsupervised channel to speak directly to 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 warfare game Call of Duty “creates a vividly realistic and addicting theater of violence in which teenage boys learn to kill with frightening skill and ease,” using real-life weapons as models for the game’s firearms.
According to the lawsuit, the Uvalde shooter played Call of Duty, which features an assault-style rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense, and obsessively visited Instagram, where Daniel Defense frequently advertised. The complaint alleges that the shooter became fixated on acquiring the same weapon and using it to commit the killings, despite never having fired a gun before.
Second lawsuit
The second lawsuit, filed in Uvalde County District Court, accuses Daniel Defense of deliberately targeting its ads at adolescent boys to secure lifelong customers. Josh Koskoff, one of the families’ lawyers, stated, “There is a direct line between the conduct of these companies and the Uvalde shooting. 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 from some victims’ families. In a 2022 statement, CEO Marty Daniel called such litigation “frivolous” and “politically motivated.”
Earlier this week, families of the victims announced a separate lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers involved in what the U.S. Justice Department concluded was a botched emergency response. The families also reached a $2 million settlement with the city of Uvalde. Several other suits against various public agencies remain pending
