Members of the ‘Crosses for Losses’ group arrive at the scene with crosses for each victim, after the shooting that left 21 people dead at the Cielo Vista Mall WalMart in El Paso, Texas, on August 5, 2019.
MARK RALSTON Mark Ralston | AFP | Getty Images
Shares of major video game companies fell sharply on Monday following President Donald Trump‘s speech addressing mass shootings in Texas and Ohio in which he implicated violent games as a reason for the attacks.
Electronic Arts and Take Two Interactive declined about 4%, while Zynga dropped 5%. The stock of Activision Blizzard, which publishes the Call of Duty series, fell by more than 6%.
Speaking on Monday following two major shootings over the weekend that killed 31 people, Trump spoke against “racism, bigotry and white supremacy” but also placed some blame on violent entertainment.
“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace,” Trump said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, also implicated video games in the tragedies during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday.
The drops for video game companies were part of a broader market pullback amid heightened trade tensions between the U.S. and China, but the gaming companies’ losses outpaced those of the wider tech sector.
