Call of Duty accused of spurring Uvalde school massacre in lawsuit
Call of Duty ends up among the main accused of having spurred the massacre at Uvalde elementary school, in a lawsuit.
The question of violence in video games and its possible effects on the psyche of young people resurfaces in a new legal case which also sees Call of Duty among the accused , as a possible element that would have led to the terrible massacre at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde , in Texas.
On May 24, 2022, eighteen-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos killed nineteen students and two teachers and injured seventeen other people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States. Having entered the school armed with an AR-15 rifle, the young man started the massacre inside the school only to be killed by a tactical unit of the United States Border Patrol.
A group of families of the victims has started a lawsuit, led by lawyer Josh Koskoff, who apparently also cites Call of Duty and Activision Blizzard as causes of the school massacre, as there would be “a line that directly connects the conduct of these companies and the Uvalde shooting,” according to the lawyer.
Call of Duty accused of spurring Uvalde school massacre in lawsuit
Activision Blizzard and Meta as contributory causes of the massacre
The lawsuit points above all towards a specific arms manufacturer, Daniel Defense, but also cites Activision Blizzard as a contributory cause of the crime, as publisher of Call of Duty, the game that allegedly pushed the boy to carry out the school massacre.
This also together with social media, for which Meta and Instagram in particular are cited as another vehicle through which knowledge of weapons would have been instilled in Ramos.
“The truth is that the arms industry and Daniel Defense did not act alone,” Koskoff’s law firm reports in an official statement. “They couldn’t have reached this kid except through Instagram. They couldn’t have exposed him to the dopamine rush that follows virtually killing a person. That’s what Call of Duty does .”
In essence, according to the accusation, Meta and Activision Blizzard “knowingly put the murderer in contact with the weapon, conditioning him to see it as the solution to his problems, and trained him to use it”.
A recurring question
It is not the first time that Call of Duty ends up in such a situation: even following the Sandy Hook shooting it was cited among the possible causes of the massacre, having initially brought the murderer closer to weapons for fun.
Activision Blizzard published an official response to the accusations in the lawsuit, expressing its support for the victims of the massacre and also adding that “millions of people around the world use video games without necessarily resorting to acts of terrorism”.
On the other hand, Call of Duty is only a particularly frequent subject in a dispute that has been going on for decades, on the violence present in video games and the alleged effects that this could have on the psyche of young users.
The issue is obviously very complex and has also been studied in various places, without ever reaching evidence on the actual connection between the use of video games and violent behavior in reality.
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