Mass School Shootings

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March for Our Lives and the Media In the wake of the mass school shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, students across the nation organized March for Our Lives rallies to protest gun violence. Some took to the streets to demand stricter gun control laws, while others marched in remembrance of the lives lost to gun violence; not just the lives lost to guns in schools, but any life lost to a gun. In the United States, this averages to be roughly 35,000-gun deaths per year- meaning that an average of 96 Americans are killed by guns each day (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2018). March for Our Lives took place on March 24, 2018 in over 800 cities across the nation, including St. …show more content…
An article by Park, Holody, & Zhang (2012) investigated news media coverage of both the Columbine shootings of 1999 and the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007. They found that news coverage of the Columbine shooters- both white- did not mention race, whereas over one-third of the coverage on the Virginia Tech shooter- a U.S. citizen of South Korean origin- contained racial information (Park et al., 2012).
Furthermore, we could compare news coverage of the Virginia Tech shooter and the Parkland shooter. The Parkland shooter, a while male, was initially presented in the media as being an outcast who was bullied in school, while the Virginia Tech shooter was said to be mentally ill. The way the media frames these events and their perpetrators seems to depend largely on race; the white perpetrator is given the victim card to urge sympathy and the racial minority is deemed mentally ill or a terrorist, further spurring the racial divide in this …show more content…
School shootings have happened throughout history, but it seems as if their occurrence spiked and has been on the rise since the 1990’s. Now, during a time when most people in the U.S. have access to the news at their fingertips, gun-related incidents in schools are higher than ever. An article by Towers, Gomez-Lievano, Khan, Mubayi, & Castillo-Chavez (2015) stated that “media reports of suicides and homicides appear to subsequently increase the incidence of similar events in the community, apparently due to the coverage planting the seeds of ideation in at-risk individuals to commit similar acts” (p. 1). Furthermore, they found that an incident of a school shooting is contagious for roughly 13 days, but this only applies to shootings that involve four or more people, which classifies the shooting as a mass murder. This could be because mass murders from shootings are less common than shootings involving three or fewer people, “increasing the sensationalism and contagiousness” (Towers, 2015,
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