May 24 (Reuters) - Families of the victims of the 2022

elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, filed two lawsuits

on Friday against Instagram's parent company Meta,

Activision Blizzard and its parent Microsoft ( MSFT ) and the

gunmaker Daniel Defense, claiming they cooperated to market

dangerous weapons to impressionable teens such as the Uvalde

shooter.

Together, the wrongful death complaints argue that Daniel

Defense - a Georgia-based gun manufacturer - used Instagram and

Activision's video game Call of Duty to market its assault-style

rifles to teenage boys, while Meta and Microsoft ( MSFT ) facilitated the

strategy with lax oversight and no regard for the consequences.

Meta, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Daniel Defense did not immediately

respond to requests for comment.

In one of the deadliest school shootings in history, 19

children and two teachers were killed on May 24, 2022, when an

18-year-old gunman armed with a Daniel Defense rifle entered

Robb Elementary School and barricaded himself inside adjoining

classrooms with dozens of students.

The complaints were filed on the two-year anniversary of the

massacre by Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, the same law firm that

reached a $73 million settlement with rifle manufacturer

Remington in 2022 on behalf of families of children killed in

the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court,

accuses Meta's Instagram of giving gun manufacturers "an

unsupervised channel to speak directly to minors, in their

homes, at school, even in the middle of the night," with only

token oversight.

The complaint also alleges that Activision's popular warfare

game Call of Duty "creates a vividly realistic and addicting

theater of violence in which teenage boys learn to kill with

frightening skill and ease," using real-life weapons as models

for the game's firearms.

The Uvalde shooter played Call of Duty - which features,

among other weapons, an assault-style rifle manufactured by

Daniel Defense, according to the lawsuit - and visited Instagram

obsessively, where Daniel Defense often advertised.

As a result, the complaint alleges, he became fixated on

acquiring the same weapon and using it to commit the killings,

even though he had never fired a gun in real life before.

The second lawsuit, filed in Uvalde County District Court,

accuses Daniel Defense of deliberately aiming its ads at

adolescent boys in an effort to secure lifelong customers.

"There is a direct line between the conduct of these

companies and the Uvalde shooting," Josh Koskoff, one of the

families' lawyers, said in a statement. "This three-headed

monster knowingly exposed him to the weapon, conditioned him to

see it as a tool to solve his problems and trained him to use

it."

Daniel Defense is already facing other lawsuits filed by

families of some victims. In a 2022 statement, CEO Marty Daniel

called such litigation "frivolous" and "politically motivated."

Earlier this week, families of the victims announced a

separate lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who

participated in what the U.S. Justice Department has concluded

was a botched emergency response. The families also reached a $2

million settlement with the city of Uvalde.

Several other suits against various public agencies remain

pending.