Despite NRA blaming video games for #Newtown, video game makers have close financial ties with firearms makers nyti.ms/ZBVpGM

— lawhawk (@lawhawk) December 27, 2012

As Barry Meier and Andrew Martin reported in The Times this week, the gun industry works in partnership with the makers of games like Medal of Honor Warfighter and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 to publicize their brands to potential customers.

In the case of Medal of Honor, its maker, Electronic Arts, proudly and prominently promoted its ties to the gun industry by listing on its Web sites partners that included the McMillan Group, a gun and ammunition producer, and Magpul Industries, which makes gun magazines and other firearm equipment. The company’s Web site proudly declares the bona fides of its game with the motto “Authentic Game. Authentic Brands.” and, for a time, even offered a direct link to the Web sites of the companies where its young customers could peruse catalogs of real weapons. While those links have been removed, the Web site still encourages visitors to “Check out the McMillan Website and shoot to win!”

These troubling relationships expose the N.R.A.’s disingenuous strategy of blaming the media, songwriters, filmmakers and anybody else it can think of for mass shootings while denying that the association, which is the most influential opponent of sensible gun-control policies, bears any responsibility for the growing number of massacres like Newtown and Columbine.

On Friday, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the association, excoriated games like Bulletstorm, another game made by Electronic Arts. Will he and his association now speak just as harshly about the firearms producers that support and try to generate sales of their weapons by agreeing to have their likeness used in such games?