America's Mass Shooting Epidemic

 Emily Baron 

eb113717@ohio.edu

                                                                Image courtesy of NBC 

As COVID-19 continues to sweep across nations another pressing issue has been responsible for taking lives pre-pandemic and post-pandemic: mass shootings. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as, "if four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not involving the shooter." Mass shootings are not a new issue but the alarming accelerating rate of occurrence is. According to Forbes, in 2021, there has been more than one mass shooting a day. 

It is important for journalists to be aware of the way that mass shootings are covered in media. Proper and thorough coverage is imperative in order to accurately spread information, but is there a time when the content of the coverage becomes too much? Some think so. Adam Lankford, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Alabama, says that sometimes coverage of mass shootings is “facilitating and fueling subcultures with people who are disturbed and troubled." 

The possibility of excessive coverage inciting mass shootings is not so unfathomable as it is true that mass shootings naturally garner lots of attention in the news. And attention is the specific issue some choose to pin as the reason for why so many mass shootings are incited in the United States. The issue is not covering the shooting itself, but the coverage on the perpetrators of the shootings, according to the National Center of Health Research, which uses the term "the media contagion effect" to explain why people imitate certain behaviors solely for attention. 

Careful consideration is a must for media stories on mass shootings in order to ensure that the coverage is centered on the victims and the incident's impact versus the perpetrator and his or her motivations. An example of a perpetrator whose backstory received  massive amounts of media coverage is mass murderer, neo-Nazi and white supremacist Dylan Roof. The high rates of coverage potentially leads to normalization of mass shootings, and high rates of information focused on the perpetrator can lead to unnecessary glorification for mentally ill people who want their name to be remembered, even at the expense of lives. 

Minimizing harm in media coverage is the journalist's duty. Education on mass shootings and how to prevent them is one way to potentially reduce the number of mass shootings in the country. Raising social consciousness on the issue at hand can very well be the first step towards a solution.