The Media and School Shootings
Mentor: Logan Zinman Gerber
Currently I am studying how the media's coverage of school shootings has changed over time, and what aspects of school shootings the media covers. School shootings and gun violence as a whole, is a tragic epidemic that the United States has been facing for decades. While school shootings are not even one percent of gun violence in this country, they make-up a lot of the gun violence that is in the media, and this means that they are an aspect of gun violence that gets a lot of attention. Although many people think that school shootings and mass shootings make up the majority of gun violence this is not true, they just attract the most media attention, and most school shootings still get very little coverage, but the ones that do get coverage are now covered differently than the way that UT Austin and Columbine were covered. In the first 46 weeks of 2019 there were 45 school shootings averaging almost one a week. School shootings are something that has the ability to affect all students, not only the victims and survivors, but everyone who has to go to school.