Call Of Duty on trial: Activision's remarkably detailed defense to a school shooting lawsuit

Families say a shooter picked his gun based on Call of Duty and made a pre-massacre video based on a CoD level. Activision, casting doubt on those claims, says it isn't liable for a player's violence.

The title screen from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) has become a key element of a lawsuit against Activision, but in a new filing, the game company suggests a CoD player and killer who bought a weapon similar to the one featured here, was unlikely to have seen this screen.

A searing lawsuit filed in May 2024 alleges that Activison’s Call of Duty games inspired and “trained” the 2022 murderer of 19 students and 2 adults at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. But the Microsoft-owned game company is now pushing back and asking courts in California for the lawsuit’s rapid dismissal.

The game-maker’s initial defense is articulated in nearly 150 pages of legal filings issued to both courts on December 23 and that Game File is the first to report on.

Activision and its lawyers seek to short circuit the Uvalde families’ suit via a free speech defense strategy—specifically, an anti-SLAPP claim—the likes of which the company successfully deployed in 2014 to win the quick dismissal of a lawsuit over Call of Duty brought by then-imprisoned Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

In defending against the Uvalde claims, Activision asserts that Call of Duty is Constitutionally protected speech, no more liable for a mass shooting than would be a movie or book about warfare.

The company, its lawyers argue, cannot be held responsible for a massacre committed by one of the game’s players.

Any trial, if it were to happen, is a long ways away. To make its case, even in these early stages, the company’s December 23 submissions argue for the value and respectability of the Call of Duty franchise as a work of entertainment, art, and even political speech.

With unprecedented specificity, the documents discuss CoD design elements and development goals. Call of Duty’s programming discourages the killing of virtual civilians, they say. The games include thematically resonant in-game quotes from world leaders, they observe. And the head of the franchise says the games’ developers strive to give players a “cathartic” experience.

Activision even brought in an outside expert who argues that Call of Duty and games like it are, in the expert’s words, “political stories that express and explore why nations fight.”

Activision’s December defense, its first extended response to the Uvalde suit, also begins to address a previously unreported addition to the families’ chronicle of events leading to the shooting.

In November, the families and their lawyers amended their lawsuit, adding, among other things, an image of a first-person home video that they say the Uvalde killer made a month before the massacre. They allege it was inspired by a level from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019).

For its defense, Activision is using the same law firm from the Noriega case, though this time has not also retained legal support former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani for presumably obvious reasons (time capsule: watch Giuliani slam Noriega and defend Activision in this clip from 2014).

Activision's defense against Noriega, who sued over how he was depicted in 2012’s Call of Duty Black Ops II, had been uniformly aggressive, scorching the convicted murderer for having the audacity to sue.

The company’s response to the Uvalde families’ suit, by contrast, includes a note of empathy.

Plaintiffs have suffered terrible losses at the hands of a mass murderer, Salvador Ramos, who terrorized and stole the lives of children and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. The Activision Defendants deeply sympathize with the families and communities impacted by this senseless violence. While the Activision Defendants understand Plaintiffs’ desire to find justice, this action mistakenly seeks to pin the blame for the perpetrator’s crime on Activision’s military-combat video game, Call of Duty. The law cannot be stretched to make Activision’s creative expression legally liable for the perpetrator’s criminal conduct.

Activision’s December 23rd filings are nevertheless a thorough defense of Call of Duty and an initial attempt to dismantle any links the family’s lawsuit tries to establish between the killer and the first-person shooter series.