Families of Uvalde School Shooting Victims Sue Meta, Call of Duty
By Movieguide® Contributor
Families of the victims of the tragic Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are suing both Meta and Call of Duty creator Activision after the discovery that the shooter played the game and was exposed to gun ads on Instagram.
The lawsuit states that Instagram gives “an unsupervised channel to speak directly to minors, in their homes, at school, even in the middle of the night.”
“The plaintiffs also accused the companies of ‘chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters,'” Engadget reported.
“How, then, did the Uvalde Shooter—a poor and isolated teenager in a small town in Texas—set his sights on the DDM4V7 as his weapon of choice?” the complaint says, referencing the gun by its model number. “How, for that matter, did he learn what an AR-15 is and what it excels at? The answer lies in the conduct of Defendants, who knowingly exposed the Shooter to the weapon, conditioned him to see it as the solution to his problems, and trained him to use it.”
In a statement, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Josh Koskoff, added, “The truth is that the gun industry and [gunmaker] Daniel Defense didn’t act alone. They couldn’t have reached this kid but for Instagram. They couldn’t expose him to the dopamine loop of virtually killing a person. That’s what Call of Duty does.”
A spokesperson from Activision sympathized with the families but stated that many people play video games and don’t turn to real-life violence.
The “Uvalde shooting was horrendous and heartbreaking in every way,” the spokesperson said, adding that the company expresses its deepest sympathies to the families, but “millions of people around the world enjoy video games without turning to horrific acts.”
However, as Movieguide® has previously explained, violence in media often leads to violence in real life.
“Decades worth of media research reveals, however, how violence in the mass media product influences mental health and actions…additional research shows that when children and teens consume violence in mass media, they are more likely to misbehave and seek out violence,” Movieguide® said.
Movieguide® previously reported on comedian Bill Maher’s perspective on how violent entertainment breeds actual violent acts:
Comedian Bill Maher delivered a stinging rebuke to Hollywood last week on his show REAL TIME for the entertainment industry’s influence on gun violence despite frequent cries to “do something.”
“When liberals scream, ‘Do something!’ after a mass shooting, why aren’t we also dealing with the fact that the average American kid sees 200,000 acts of violence on screens before the age of 18 and that, according to the FBI, one of the warning signs of a potential school shooter is ‘a fascination with violence-filled entertainment?’” questioned Maher.
Movieguide® frequently discusses the detrimental effects entertainment violence has on children. “The power of modeling, practice and reinforcement in human learning predict that media violence increases the likelihood of real-life violence,” Dr. Baehr writes in The Media-Wise Family.
Maher notes Hollywood’s woke agenda, citing intimacy coordinators, sensitivity readers and Disney’s stance against the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida as examples. “But when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence, crickets,” Maher states. “Weird. The only thing we don’t call a trigger is the one that actually has a trigger.”
