A mother who founded one of the UK’s first free schools is campaigning to get Tesco to remove posters which ‘trivialise gun culture’.
Emily Phillips, of Becklow Road, Shepherd’s Bush, was infuriated when she walked into her local Tesco Express in Askew Road to buy a pint of milk on Monday (November 3) and was met with a 5ft cardboard poster of a man brandishing a large machine gun with multiple bullets and weapon paraphernalia on him.
The advert, which is in most Tesco stores in the UK, is for the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare video game released on Monday which has an 18 age rating and features Kevin Spacey as a main character.
Critic Edward Smith, from the International Business Times, completed it in seven hours and ‘killed' 1,289 people but said he found it hard to take the storyline seriously ‘where killing is this banal’.
The mother-of-two young children asked the manager of the Tesco store to remove the poster as she felt it is not an image which children should be affronted with in a supermarket.
She said: “I, and many of my neighbours and friends, feel very strongly about this and don’t think we should have a poster of a man with a huge machine gun on our high streets. Tesco is a massive corporation and has a responsibility to not promote gun violence. We have enough trouble keeping our kids away from it in the news without Tesco trivialising gun culture.
“The manager in Askew Road agreed it is totally inappropriate, then I made an official complaint to Tesco head office and they said they’d remove the poster but I went back and they’d just moved it. They also had one in the Uxbridge Road Tesco but that manager told me it was a part of a UK-wide promotion for Tesco so he could not remove it.
“Tesco has a deal with Activision and Sledgehammer Games to display their products, but seem to be totally unaware of the impact this sort of image has on our environment. Are we allowing ourselves to sleepwalk further into total acceptance of this kind of mindless violence?”
The campaigner is very much embedded in the community as she is responsible for launching the UK’s first outstanding free school, Ark Conway Primary Academy, in Shepherd’s Bush and also campaigned to raise £70,000 for improvements to Askew Road, where the first offending Tesco is.
A spokeswoman from Tesco said: “We cater for a range of customers in our stores and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is one of the biggest game releases this year.”
She added Tesco has a strict think 25 policy where people who look 25 or under buying the game will have to show ID, and also said their posters are in line with other competitors and follow the game’s theme.
