School Shooting Research Paper

Ramzi Doudar
Daniel Ante-Contreras
English 1B
18 May 2014
You Have the Potential to Shoot Up a School! In the eyes of news media, whenever a travesty such as a school shooting occurs all other forms of news cease to exist. News stations spend days reporting on the same exact story regardless of any updates. Every time a school shooting occurs the media attempts to establish that the shooter is psychologically ill. Media outlets bend the truth, exaggerate quantitative data, and appeal to unqualified “experts” for information. The utilization of these tools is meant to convince the viewer that the shooter is an outcast of society. The media typically portrays school shooters and other terrorists as socially incompetent, autistic individuals that are psychologically incapable of emotions. This is meant to differentiate a school shooter from what society deems to be normal person; this differentiation is to reassure the public that any normal member of society would not even
consider shooting up a school. The causes that the media attributes to school shootings are meant to pacify the general public, and offer no actual reasons as to why people make the conscious decision to kill a group of individuals. When in actuality, school shootings are caused by a the sense of control and power felt by the shooter as well as the iconic nature that the media views school shooters. Given the option to be an anonymous nobody or a well identified societal icon is an easy decision. It is the exact decision that terrorist along with school shooters decide upon. When faced with the trade off of being a bag boy at your local grocery store or a nationally feared terrorist, these individuals often resort to grabbing the populations attention by injuring large groups of people. Author Octavio Ramos Jr. addresses why people become terrorists from a political point of view in his article “Modeling Pathways Towards Radicalization”. Ramos discusses that a, “condition that can lead to the making of a terrorist is the lack of political means to have complaints heard and addressed,” (Ramos). The article implies that individuals turn to terrorism because they do not have any means to make their political desires and suggestions heard. School shooters are analogous to terrorists in the sense that they turn to violence in order to grab public attention. Most school shootings are caused by individuals that seem to be ignored or marginalized; for example Luke Woodham, an American teenager that attended Pearl High school. On October 1st , 1997 Woodham opened fire on his school; prior to shooting Woodham said “I kill because people like me are mistreated everyday. I did this to show society, push us and we 'll push back,” (“Luke Woodham”). The marginalized Woodham had enough of being secondary to everyone else and resorted to violence. Woodham 's motives for firing upon his classmates are similar to the discussed motives of terrorism. In both cases, the aggressors turn to violence to direct public attention to some specific cause. Unlike the causes the media provides, the marginalization of individuals is a more probable cause because it accurately captures the culprit motives. Furthermore, the media neglects to highlight that they themselves are a factor that instigate school shootings. Nearly every major school shooting has had extensive media coverage. Sensational news coverage of school shootings has a negative impact on the actual news being reported because media outlets tend to over-extrapolate on the story using methods such as appealing to an “expert” or heavily speculating given the limited information that is known. Media outlets utilize sensational reporting to their advantage in order to increase viewership. Jeff Stone 's article in the International Business Times stressed the, “need to consider the implications of excessive media coverage,” and that, “Ratings and advertising dollars are dictating news judgment,” (Stone). Unfortunately, when the media sensationalizes school shootings, the shooter is also sensationalized. For weeks, and in some cases months, after a school shooting takes place the face of the shooter is found plastered on nearly every news media and social media entity imaginable. When a majority of the articles on the topic of shootings explicitly focus on the shooter, it 's no coincidence that the media can be a cause of shootings. John Luciew 's article in Pennlive attempts to discuss the events of a seventh grade boy that killed a teacher and injured two students, but quickly derails and begins talking about how the shooter, “also owned violent video games, used the family 's laptop to search for things including bullying and to look up 'Top 10 evil children, '” (Luciew). Whether or not violent video games actually played a role in this shooting is an entirely different debate. What 's worth stating is that the entire content of the article is Luciew disecting minute and irrelevant details about the shooters life. The emphasis that the media places on the shooter publicizes, and in some cases, celebritizes the shooter. An individual could easily become entranced with all the attention the media affords them. The media has a tendency to sensationalize the shootings as well as the shooters, which sparks more shootings to occur. Certain individuals may argue that the causes provided by the media sufficiently justify the reasons for why school shootings take place. At a first glace, the reasons the media provides may seem to answer all the necessary questions as to why shooters attack schools. A crucial part of part of seeing through the media 's faulty reasons is acknowledging that the medias main goal is to achieve acceptable ratings and viewership. Since the reputation of news relies on viewership, the media outlets carefully tailor the stories to ensure that viewership does not decline. This is why the media believes that school shooters are exclusively socially retarded, emotionless individuals; by assuring their viewers that an event such as a school shooting is extremely rare, the viewer feels safe and continues to watch. If the media was not so reliant on ratings it could report on the actual causes for school shootings, and not just highly altered stories. The media and news networks have the wrong idea about what exactly causes school shootings.
Since they are too preoccupied with ratings and statistics they cannot accurately address the cause. It is crucial to see how the media is incorrect in its assumptions. Once an individual comes to the conclusion that school shooters are not exclusively autistic, ostracized individuals, but rather normal everyday people that feel left out or want their demands to be taken seriously, it is reasonable to assume that school shootings have the possibility to occur a lot more frequently. This is because the number of potential shooters would be much greater if any normal individual could be considered a potential shooter. The causes that the media attributes to school shootings are inadequate because they assume only a very small population of people have the potential to commit school shootings. The false sense of security that the media gives the viewer is very misleading and should be
reprimanded

Works Cited
Luciew, John. "School Shooter, 12, Was Obsessed with Columbine, Violent Video Games: Pattern?" PennLive. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.
"Luke Woodham." Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.
"Modeling Pathways toward Radicalization." Los Alamos National Laboratory. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.
Stone, Jeff. "Media Coverage Of School Shootings: Does It Encourage Potential Copycats?" International Business Times. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.