Families Of Uvalde Shooting Victims File Silly Lawsuit Against Meta & Activision, Which Had Nothing To Do With The Shootings

You have to feel tremendous sympathy for the families of the victims in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As has been well documented, there was a series of cascading failures by law enforcement that made that situation way worse and way more devastating than it should have been.

So who should be blamed? Apparently, Meta and Activision!

Yes, the families also went after the city of Uvalde and recently came to a settlement. That seems like a perfectly righteous lawsuit. However, this new one just seems like utter nonsense and is embarrassing.

The families are suing Meta and Activision for the shooting. It's making a mockery of the very tragic and traumatic experience they went through for no reason other than to puff up the ego of a lawyer.

It's reminiscent of moral panics around video games, Dungeons & Dragons, and comic books.

For what it's worth, they're also suing Daniel Defense, the company that made the assault rifle used by the shooter in Uvalde. And while that's not my area of expertise, so I won't dig deep on that part of the lawsuit, I can pretty much guarantee that has no chance either.

This lawsuit is performative nonsense for the lawyer representing the families. I'm not going to question the families for going along with this, but the lawyer is doing this to get his name more famous and we won't oblige by talking about him here. He's taking the families for a ride. This is a ridiculous lawsuit, and the lawyer should be ashamed of giving the families false hope in bringing such a nuisance lawsuit for his own ego and fame.

The lawsuit is 115 pages, and I'm not going through the whole thing. It has 19 different claims, though nearly all of them are variations on the negligence" concept. Despite this being on behalf of families in Uvalde, Texas, it was filed in the Superior Court of Los Angeles. This is almost certainly because this silly negligence" theory has actually been given life in this very court by some very silly judges.

I still think those other cases will eventually fail, but because judges in the Superior Court in LA seem willing to entertain the idea that any random connection you can find to a harm can have to go through a full lengthy litigation process, we're going to see a lot more bullshit lawsuits like this, as lawyers keep bringing them, hoping for a settlement fee to go away, or maybe an even dumber judge who actually finds this ridiculous legal theory to be legitimate.

Section 230 was designed to get these frivolous cases tossed out, but the success of the negligence" theory means that we're getting a glimpse of how stupid the world looks without Section 230. Just claim negligence" because someone who did something bad uses Instagram or plays Call of Duty, and you get to drag out the case. But, really, this is obviously frivolous nonsense:

To put a finer point on it: Defendants are chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters. Before the Uvalde school shooter, there was the Parkland school shooter, and before him, the Sandy Hook school shooter. These were the three most deadly K-12 school shootings in American history. In each one, the shooter was between the ages of 18 and 21 years old; in each one, the shooter was a devoted player of Call of Duty; and in each one, the shooter committed their attack in tactical gear, wielding an assault rifle.

Multiple studies have debunked this nonsense. Millions of people play Call of Duty. The fact that a few teenage boys later shoot up schools cannot, in any way, be pinned to Call of Duty.

And why Meta? Well, that's even dumber:

Simultaneously, on Instagram, the Shooter was being courted through explicit, aggressive marketing. In addition to hundreds of images depicting and glorifying the thrill of combat, Daniel Defense used Instagram to extol the illegal, murderous use of its weapons.

In one image of soldiers on patrol, with no animal in sight, the caption reads: Hunters Hunt." Another advertisement shows a Daniel Defense rifle equipped with a holographic battle sight-the same brand used by the Shooter-and dubs the configuration totally murdered out." Yet another depicts the view through a rifle's scope, looking down from a rooftop; the setting looks like an urban American street and the windshield of a parked car is in the crosshairs.

That's it.

Literally. They're suing Meta because the shooter saw some perfectly legal images on Instagram from a gun manufacturer. And somehow that should make Meta liable for the shooting? How the fuck is Meta supposed to prevent that? This is a nonsense connection cooked up by an ambulance chasing plaintiff's lawyer who should be embarrassed for dragging the families of the victims through such a charade.

This is nothing but another Steve Dallas lawsuit, as we've dubbed such ridiculous lawsuits. This is based on the classic Bloom County comic strip, where Steve Dallas explains that the American Way" is not to sue those actually responsible, but some tangentially related company with deep pockets.

It's been nearly 40 years since that strip was published, and we still see those kinds of lawsuits, now with increasing frequency thanks to very silly judges in very silly courts allowing obnoxious lawyers to try to make a name for themselves.