The quote of the day is presented by Guns.com
In their effort to further the narrative that “gun violence” in America is increasing and out of control, media coverage of mass shootings is 24/7, wall-to-wall. Well, some mass shootings.
The fact that crime of all kinds, including gun violence, is actually at historic lows — even in America’s large urban centers — is merely an unhelpful data point. So it never gets mentioned in all of the air time and column inches. For some reason.
But in their effort to convince Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that the solution to this non-existent problem is ever-more gun control laws, the media’s own coverage may actually be perpetuating the problem.
Polls show that just 12 percent of Americans believe gun violence has declined in the U.S., a reality they likely missed because of extended media coverage of mass shootings. This coverage is problematic for multiple reasons.
For starters, a 2018 working paper suggested that intense media coverage of mass shootings is actually perpetuating them. Economists Jay Walker and Michael Jetter wanted to better understand the motives of mass shootings. They explored a three-year data set (Jan. 1, 2013 to June 23, 2016), and their findings suggest “a positive and statistically significant effect of media coverage dedicated to shootings on the number of shootings in the subsequent week.”
In other words, coverage of mass shootings appears to be encouraging them. But even if one doesn’t accept the premise that exhaustive media coverage is causing more mass shootings, it’s clearly distorting our perception of gun violence in America. This is a problem.
– Jon Miltimore in Mass Shootings Are a Horrible Way to Understand Gun Violence
