The families of the victims of the Uvalde school massacre filed numerous state lawsuits in California and Texas on Friday, exactly two years after the shooting took place.
The lawsuits were directed at Activision, the company that makes the popular video game “Call of Duty,” Daniel Defence, the maker of the AR-15 that the teen gunman used in the shooting, and social media giant, Meta.
The Robb Elementary School attack claimed the lives of two instructors and nineteen students.
The businesses are charged with “grooming” a generation of youth who carry out their violent video game fantasies with readily available weapons of mass destruction in real life.
Salvador Ramos, the shooter, carried out the assault using a rifle akin to an AR-15.
The lawsuits claim that he was “knowingly exposed” to the gun he used at Uvalde by Meta and Activision, who also trained him to believe it was the answer to all of his issues.
One of the two cases was brought against Activision and Meta, the parent company of Instagram, in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The Uvalde District Court received the second lawsuit brought against Daniel Defence.
Attorney Josh Koskoff, who also represents the 19 families included in the $2 million settlement on Wednesday, filed the claims.
Activision, Instagram, and Daniel Defence are accused in Friday’s complaints of “partnering…in a scheme that preys upon insecure, adolescent boys,” according to a news release from the attorneys.
The statements claimed that the gunman from Uvalde downloaded “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” in November 2021 and that he had been playing previous versions of the game since he was 15 years old.
Additionally, it claims that the gunman watched pro-gun advertisements on Instagram, which bolstered the graphic content he encountered in the video game.
The families released a statement saying, “Concurrently, the gunman was being courted through explicit, aggressive marketing on Instagram.”
We earlier reported that tech giant, Microsoft, has announced plans to make available on its subscription service the upcoming “Call of Duty” videogame.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft plans to reveal the arrival of Call of Duty on Game Pass on June 9th during the company’s Xbox presentation.
