The Story of Gun Violence in America

A young black man was shot and killed in America last night. He was poor and you won’t read about it in the newspaper or see it on the news. Another victim of the violence epidemic infecting our cities. But I don’t know his name.

I don’t need to know his name to know it happened. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) for the years 2008-2017, an average of more than 2600 black men and boys between the ages of 15 and 24 were murdered with firearms every year. It’s true every night in America.

But knowing something is not the same as feeling it. If you get your news from the traditional news media - newspapers, evening or cable news television - you probably have a skewed view of gun violence in America. It’s not really anyone’s fault. It’s a natural result of the way people perceive the world and the dangers around them. But if you’re someone who wants to fix America’s gun violence problem, you have to see the problem clearly. There are many facets to gun violence that don’t get a lot of media attention - suicide, domestic violence, injury, and the fear gun violence causes across the country - that I hope to bring to light.

I’m a journalism student. So I understand the time pressures reporters face, and how, in that rush to meet a deadline, the human mind can take shortcuts that produce a distorted view of reality. I also have a degree in science. So I’m good with numbers, and I can help people make sense of all the statistics that get thrown around when we talk about guns in America. And I know people who have lost loved ones to gun violence. I know how a tragedy affects families, and how gun violence can have consequences for survivors that you don’t see in the news.

I’m talking a lot about myself right now. Some people might think that journalists should keep themselves out of it and be objective. But no one is really objective. I could sit back, present everything I say as fact, and hope you believe me. But that would hide the ways in which my bias formed the story you are reading. Trust is important in any kind of communication, but it’s especially important when talking about risks. And I can’t ask you to trust me if you don’t know me.

*

On June 3, 1980, a 14-year-old boy named David was shot and killed in a gun accident at a family member’s home. His oldest brother told me, “He was a really good, fun kid.” He had a sense of humor. He liked fiddling with electronics and playing guitar. His favorite band was Kiss. His brother and his sister-in-law were expecting their first child. He would miss meeting his nephew by three months.

I was born on September 4, 1980. My middle name is David.

According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2017, 44% of Americans know someone who has been shot. That includes every member of my father’s extended family over the age of 40. People react in different ways to tragedy. My father owned guns. The first time I held a(n unloaded) gun, I was a child, I’m not sure how old. The only time I ever saw my father’s guns were when he was cleaning them. I never thought to look, but I had no idea where he even kept them so I assume they were well-hidden and out of my reach.

My family has a complicated history with guns. I’ve lived with someone who lost a family member to gun violence, and I’ve lived with someone who was a responsible gun owner. They were the same man. So I’ve always understood that gun violence in America is a complex issue. I know it isn’t as simple as a lot of mainstream news coverage would lead you to believe.

I want to tell you what gun violence really looks like in America.

*

On February 14, 2018, seventeen people were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. I don’t really need to tell you more than that. You’ve heard the story.

You’ve heard the story because the national news media is obsessed with mass shootings. It’s understandable. Events like Parkland are newsworthy. They drive readership and viewership for news businesses. People want to know more about events like this, and news organizations are happy to comply.

However, experts say that this extensive coverage skews people’s views of gun violence. According to a 2016 study of gun-violence coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, researchers from the University of Georgia and Brigham Young University found that about 59% of all gun-violence stories in 2013 were about mass shootings. David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me recently, while it’s difficult to measure, only about 1% of all homicides are the result of mass shootings. This wide discrepancy might lead some people to believe that mass shootings are more common than they really are. Gary Kleck, Professor Emeritus of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, said in our interview, “Americans have an overstated notion of how relevant these events are to them.”

The term “mass shooting” itself is part of the problem. It has no legal or agreed-upon definition. Depending on your source, you can get wildly differing estimates of how many there even are. You may have seen a statistic claiming that there is a mass shooting every day in the United States. It’s been quoted in Newsweek, the Guardian, Vox, CBS News, and the New York Times among many others. The statistic comes from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a non-profit data-collection and research group, that defines a mass shooting as “4 or more shot or killed, not including the shooter.”

It sounds like a reasonable definition, but it doesn’t actually match the public’s conception of a mass shooting. Before I began researching for this story, if you had asked me what a mass shooting was, I would have named public mass shootings like Columbine, Newtown, Orlando, and Las Vegas. Over the course of writing this article, I asked about twenty people I knew (not gun experts) if they could name three mass shootings. Every one of them could, and they all named major public shootings like the ones I’ve mentioned.

However, most mass shootings, by the GVA definition, are actually domestic violence incidents where a man kills his family and shoots himself or gang and drug-related violence. So a lot of experts I spoke with found this broader definition misleading. Kennedy said that’s “not what people think of or mean when they say mass shootings.” 

I also asked people I knew with how they would define a mass shooting. Some just mentioned numbers, but many of them had other criteria. One said, “The targets are multiple persons but indiscriminately chosen.” Another said, “A shooting involving a many rounds of ammunition that target a crowd; not specific individuals.” Or, “Targets are strangers or based on demographic.” A lot of the other answers I got were along similar lines. So many people do think of mass shootings as more than just a number of victims.

The magazine Mother Jones has put together a database of all mass shootings in the United States since 1982. They define a mass shooting as a single incident in a public place where at least four people were killed, and they excluded armed robbery, gang violence, or domestic violence in a home. By their definition, there are only about six mass shootings per year in the United States.

While each of these events is a tragedy, it is only a tiny fraction of the gun violence every year in the United States. The media’s focus on them draws attention away from other far more common forms of gun violence in the country.

*

At some point today, a middle-aged white man is going to shoot himself. He was probably suffering from chronic pain, but you won’t read about it in the newspaper or see it on the news. But this is what gun violence in America really looks like. According to WISQARS, more than 6,000 white men between the ages of 45 and 64 kill themselves with a firearm every year.

I’m about to throw a lot of numbers at you. I know most people don’t like a lot of numbers, but they’re important. As a journalist, it’s essential that I have the evidence to back up what I write. When we ignore the numbers, we wind up with a lot of misconceptions. That’s why most people don’t know suicide is more common than murder.

According to WISQARS, from 2008 to 2017, more than 34,000 people each year were killed by guns. About 21,000 were suicides, about 12,000 were homicides, and the other 1,000 were a mix of accidents, legal interventions (police shootings), or from undetermined causes.

You might be surprised that over 60% of gun deaths are suicides, and a vast majority (80%) of those are committed by white men. The study that found that most news coverage was focused on mass shootings also found that only 10% of stories were about suicides. However, that was just three major newspapers. A 2018 study by the Berkeley Media Studies Group found that, in 41 local California newspapers, suicide featured in only 22% of stories about guns from October 2016 to October 2017.

This lack of coverage has real consequences on public perception. A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Washington and Harvard showed that only 26% of people knew suicide by firearm was more common than homicide by firearm. 

But like I said, most people don’t like numbers. For many of us, they go in one eye and out the other. And simply seeing the numbers is not enough. Statistics don’t make us feel.

*

On February 17, 2019, a man was bitten by a shark while surfing off the coast of Australia. The man made it to shore and was taken to the hospital in serious but stable condition. It was the third shark attack in Australia this year. There were 27 shark attacks in Australia last year, but only one fatality.

That’s a summary of an article by Susannah Cullinane and Samantha Beech that I just read on CNN’s website. It took me 30 seconds to find it. 

I also found a story in the Boston Globe from March by Michael Levenson. Last year a man was killed by a shark off the coast of Cape Cod, the first person killed by a shark in Massachusetts since 1936. People in the community are upset that more action hasn’t been taken to prevent another attack.

People are afraid of and fascinated by sharks. It shows in the news coverage. But it has nothing to do with the actual danger they represent. Each of those stories reveals how rare shark attacks really are. If you go for a swim in the ocean, there’s almost no risk. The same story said that Cape Cod had 4 million visitors every year. I don’t know how many visitors the Cape had in 1936, but assume it’s the same. Taking those two deaths into account, from 1936 to 2018, a stretch of 82 years, the odds of being killed by a shark off the coast of Massachusetts was 1 in 164 million. But people are still afraid of sharks.

When I was younger, I was afraid of the dark. Now I have social anxiety. I’m afraid of talking to people I don’t know. I want to be a journalist, and my anxiety makes it harder for me to get the interviews I need for my stories. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling the way I do. If someone is afraid of sharks, you can’t just tell them that the odds are astronomically low and expect them to suddenly be not afraid.

Fear has almost nothing to do with numbers. Fear is all about how something makes you feel. Fear is irrational. Fear is about the stories we tell ourselves. And these stories are almost always about people. If you hear about a tragedy happening to someone, and you can identify with that person, put yourself in their shoes, then you can see the same thing happening to you. And that might scare you. It becomes more real than seeing some numbers in the news. 

When I interviewed Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, he said, “The statistics of mass atrocities don’t move us. We care a lot about individuals, but we don’t scale up.” Slovic called it psychic numbing. One person dying is a tragedy. Thousands of people dying is a statistic.

People are afraid of and fascinated by mass shootings. According to two Gallup polls conducted in 2015 and 2017, about 4 in 10 Americans are very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family will be a victim of a mass shooting. There are almost 330 million people in America. Less than 1% of homicides are mass shootings. This isn’t very precise, but that means the odds every year that you will be the victim of a mass shooting is about 1 in 3 million. If you’re one of those people that’s worried, knowing that isn’t likely to make you feel better. But it does help explain why the news media covers gun violence the way they do.

I’ve met dozens of aspiring journalists in my classes. When given the chance to write about something important to them, their passion was palpable. They get excited about the things they like or think are important. They’re people. So there’s no reason to believe that 4 in 10 reporters aren’t also worried about mass shootings.

When people are concerned about something, they let the people around them know. They might talk with their friends or post about it on Facebook. When you’re a journalist and you’re concerned about something, you can let the whole world know. A mass shooting happens. You are concerned. You write about it or film a TV news segment. At no point is an editor or reporter sitting down and thinking to themselves: is the amount of coverage we’re giving mass shootings proportionate to their actual risk?

Unless you’re a numbers person like me, it wouldn’t occur to you. That’s why news coverage ends up so skewed towards covering mass shootings compared to other gun violence. But I went to MIT. I’m biased towards the numbers. I look at the relatively small number of mass shooting fatalities and assume it’s not nearly as big a deal as the media makes it out to be. But as David Kennedy told me, “The numbers matter, but looking at this as a numerical phenomenon does not get to the heart of what’s going on.”

*

On February 14, 2018, over 3,000 students were not shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Many of them were traumatized by that day’s events and some of them became gun control advocates and stayed in the news.

If you focus on just the number of people killed, you would miss seeing a large part of the harm this shooting caused. Gun violence leaves many survivors in its wake. The injured. The family and friends of the dead and injured. Those who witnessed the event.

The Washington Post reports that since Columbine 143 people have been killed in school shootings. While any number is too many, that’s only 7 people per year. In a nation of 55 million students, that’s an incredibly low risk. Another 294 were injured. Still not that many. But 226,000 students have attended school during a shooting. Those students would have several hundreds of thousands of loved ones worried about them. While fewer in number, the same goes for school employees and their loved ones.

It’s difficult to measure exactly how much mental harm is caused to those exposed to mass shootings. In 2017, Sarah R. Lowe and Sandro Galea, epidemiologists at Columbia and Boston University respectively, reviewed dozens of studies on the subject. They concluded that mass shootings lead to increases in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and other psychological problems, but more research was needed. 

But while I’m a numbers guy, I don’t need a study to tell me that gun violence can cause mental trauma. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one suddenly or seen someone they cared about in critical condition already knows this. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bullet or a heart attack or cancer, almost everyone knows that pain. And sometimes people take extreme measures to avoid that pain in the future.

*

In January, at Meadowlawn Elementary in Monticello, Indiana, “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style,” according to the Indiana State Teachers Association’s Twitter account. By the police. With pellet guns. During an active shooter drill. In December, a Florida high school held an active shooter drill that was unannounced. The students were told it was not a drill. Students in the cafeteria were injured in the chaos that ensued.

I graduated high school in Haverhill, MA, in 1998, a year before Columbine. Security was not a concern. During the school day all the doors were unlocked. Anyone could have wandered in from the street. I’m not even sure there was a security guard.

Recently I visited the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a high school in Cambridge, MA. There was only one open door. I had to sign in at the front desk and get a visitor badge. I spoke with Chris Colbath-Hess, who was a teacher with Cambridge Public Schools for 15 years and is now their Professional Learning and Educational Development Manager. When she started teaching third-graders in 1993, “The level of security I had to think about for my kids was playground safety,” she said. “Kids now have in their vocabulary the term ‘shelter in place.”

Colbath-Hess told me that school security gradually ramped up in the wake of Columbine and September 11th. First the doors to the schools were locked during the day, then sometime in the early 2000s, they conducted their first lockdown drills. Cambridge was not alone.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017, 95% of schools conducted some form of lockdown drill. Most lockdown drills involve teachers instructing their students to be quiet while the doors are locked and the students line up against a wall of their classroom. But over the last few years, some schools have been conducting drills that have grown more and more realistic. Jay Corzine, a professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, told me that he believes active shooter drills have “a reasonably good chance of decreasing the body count, and the number of people wounded.”

But after reading about the events in Indiana and Florida, I wondered if these drills were worth the cost. Many of the experts I spoke with shared my concerns. 

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and prominent critic of active shooter drills, told me there was “no evidence” that active shooter drills were effective. “There’s certainly at least anecdotal evidence that lots of kids are traumatized by it.”

Deborah Azrael, the Director of Research at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said, “It’s really important that children not be frightened, and I think the evidence that’s accruing about the damage that these live shooter drills do points to that.”

And Gary Kleck, criminology professor at Florida State University, called active shooter drills “silly.”

Part of the problem is that there is no good way to test if they work. Each school shooting is unique and there is no way to know how events would have played out if the school had a different response plan. And many school shooters are students or former students. Fox said, “The shooters can gain intelligence by having participated in the drills. They know what the drill is and they can try to circumvent it.” Fox believes drills should involve only teachers, school administrators, and local law enforcement - no students. “Don’t constantly remind kids that they’ve got a bullseye on their back because the bad guy’s out to get them.”

It’s understandable that schools and parents would want to do everything possible to protect their children, but sometimes the most obvious threat isn’t the most serious one. Only 7 kids are killed each year in school shootings. According to WISQARS, about 2200 children and teenagers commit suicide every year (900 of them with guns). Currently, there’s no way to know if overly-aggressive active shooter drills contribute to this. I certainly have no evidence. But that’s the point. In an effort to prevent a small number of deaths, we subject millions of children to drills with little understanding of the long-term consequences to their mental health.

*

In the next 15 minutes, someone will be shot in America. The wound will probably be to an arm or leg, and the victim will survive. But unlike a movie hero, they won’t be back on their feet the next day chasing down the villain.

Gun injuries are more difficult to measure than gun deaths, but a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine estimated that about 78,000 people were admitted to hospitals with gunshot wounds each year from 2006 to 2014, and each year there were about 71,000 survivors. (Most killed by gun violence never make it to the hospital.) Their hospital bills amounted to $2.8 billion each year.

But that’s just a fraction of the cost of gun injuries. Bindu Kalesan, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Boston University, told me that gun injuries often affect the rest of a person’s life. “It’s not just the physical trauma alone,” she said, “they change emotionally and mentally and their mental health deteriorates. There’s a lot that happens to a person which we don’t see.” Survivors might suffer from chronic injuries or mental health issues like PTSD. Their relationships with their family and friends might change, and they often run into financial trouble.

The Johns Hopkins study estimated that each gun-shot survivor lost an average of $85,000 in potential lifetime income. But that’s distributed very unevenly as one person might have only a superficial injury and someone else might never be able to work again. For someone struggling to get by that can be devastating, and gun violence is already an epidemic that disproportionately targets those living in poverty. A 2017 study by researchers at the University of Iowa estimated that one quarter of people hospitalized for gunshot wounds were uninsured.

Once again, this is a problem you will rarely see covered in a major newspaper or in the news. It’s not reasonable to expect any news organization to cover all of the hundreds of shootings that happen every day in the United States. But they could be asked to do a little more.

*

“I come from a totally rural county in Illinois and probably five years ago, there was a mass murder,” Jay Corzine, professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, told me recently. “Four people killed, the shooter then purposefully drove into the county seat, parked on the square, and waited for the police to come and kill him, which they did. That story, which was a family annihilation, got about two days of coverage in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was not covered in any other major newspaper.”

The most common kind of mass murder in the United States is domestic violence. A man, almost always a man, kills a woman and her children and then often kills himself. Even when they are focused on mass shootings, Corzine notes, the news often overlooks the most common types of mass shootings.

Earlier this year, Joel R. Silva and Joel A. Capellan published a study of the New York Times coverage of mass public shootings (their definition: “an incident of targeted violence where an offender had killed or attempted to kill four or more victims on a public stage”) from 1966 to 2016. They found that that the most common characteristics of mass public shooters are that they are male, white, middle-aged, and not ideologically motivated. But the media coverage of mass public shootings did not represent this. The New York Times was more likely to cover a shooting if the shooter was young, Middle-Eastern, and ideologically motivated. For instance, shootings by white people were covered 74% of the time and shootings by Middle-Eastern people were covered 90% of the time. That might not sound like a large difference, but shootings by white people generated an average of 11 articles per incident while shootings by Middle-Eastern people generated an average of 70 articles. But the New York Times isn’t the only newspaper in the country.

The Berkeley Media Studies Group’s 2018 study of gun violence coverage in Californian newspapers found that domestic violence incidents (in which women are the vast majority of victims) were under-reported and that 90% of photographs of people accused of shootings were people of color. But in 2017, according to FBI statistics, only 56% of homicide arrests were of people of color. And that does not take into account any possibility of racial bias in the justice system itself.

But everyone has biases. I’m biased in favor of science and statistics. I’m biased in favor of liberty and equality. (Okay, that one doesn’t sound so bad.) But I’m a white man raised in America. I’m unconsciously biased against all the people I want liberty and equality for. And I’m biased against people who put ketchup on their hotdogs.

I don’t think biases are something to be ashamed of. At least not if you acknowledge them and do what you can to fix them. At some point in my life I’ve been racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, and probably any other prejudice you can think of. But I admit it and do what I can to change it and understand it’s a process that never ends. It’s time the news media does the same.

The experts I’ve spoken with and the articles I’ve read have suggested several ways the news media could improve its coverage of gun violence. David Ropeik, a risk consultant and expert in risk communication, told me, “We need to remember that as events are happening to take a slightly longer view than the just-at-the-moment view.” This lines up with the advice of the Berkeley Media Studies Group to ask more questions about context, talk to more than just law enforcement officials, and write stories for different sections of the paper about how gun violence affects other areas of people’s lives. For instance, there could be a story in the business section that investigates how gun violence in an area affects local businesses.

Journalists also need to be cautious when covering suicides and mass shootings. David Kennedy told me, “It’s well understood that suicide is contagious through public information.” Depictions of suicide often spur copycats, so reporters should be careful about sharing too many specific details about the act itself. Many gun violence experts also believe that many mass shooters are seeking fame and attention with their acts and extensive media coverage makes mass shootings more likely. Adam Lankford and Eric Madfis, criminologists at the University of Alabama and University of Washington Tacoma, respectively, wrote an open letter advising journalists, “Don’t name them, don’t show them, but report everything else.” Or as Gary Kleck told me, “You have to report the event, but you don’t have to make the killer famous.”

Finally, if you’re a scientifically-minded reporter like me, don’t forget to share people’s stories. Paul Slovic, the psychology professor, told me, “We know that individual stories are much more powerful than statistics.” For instance, Since Parkland, a collaboration between several news and nonprofit organizations (The Trace, the Gun Violence Archive, the Miami Herald, McClatchy, NowThis, and Global Student Square) is an online collection of 1200 stories about the 1200 children killed in the year following the Parkland shooting. Each story was written by a teenage reporter.

Stories like that of Daekwon Lee Tobar, age 17. “While walking home from the store in the cold with his grandmother, he was shot at multiple times,” Jenny Xu, 17, wrote. “He pushed his grandmother down in the snow, and was hit in the leg, hip and the back of his head by bullets. ‘He’s my hero,’ Theresa Brown, his mother, said. ‘He saved my mom. ... He tried to run and bullets caught him.’”

And Ava Grace Field, 4. “She lived in a world of pigtails and constant smiles; her dad was Superman, off saving the world, and her home was filled with her mom, brother and pet dog,” Macy Quinn-Sears, 19, wrote. Ava was killed when her father killed her, her mother, her brother, and then himself.

Or the story of Michael Pacheco, 17. “When he smiled, everyone around him seemed to smile, too. He was known to radiate joy," Madeline Levin, 15, wrote. Michael was killed when a gun went off by accident at his home in Massachusetts.

*

If I’m honest, I didn’t even remember my uncle David died in a gun accident until I’d been working on this project for weeks. It happened before I was born, and while I know the devastating effect it had on my family, it’s been almost 40 years. When I asked my father about it, I was nervous, but I shouldn’t have been. He shared what he could. He was twelve years older than David so they weren’t as close as they could have been, but he said they were starting to do more together as his brother started to mature. Now he wonders what David would be doing now, how he would have turned out. Would he have been a good man?

When my father told me David fiddled with electronics and played the guitar, I felt my uncle’s death more than I ever had before. My brother is six years younger than me. He makes his own guitar pedals.

This is why stories are important. This is why they make us feel. This has been my story, but it’s also the story of hundreds of thousands of American families over the years.

But be careful who you trust, including me. A vast majority of the time, journalists will have the genuine desire to convey what they see as the truth, but the same set of facts can tell different stories depending on how they are presented.

My bias pervades this story. What stories did I choose to tell and why? Who did I talk to? Who didn’t I talk to? If the story has a limited word count, what information did I choose to share with you? Which information did I omit? I learned a lot more about gun violence than I ever knew before. But there are still many aspects of the issue I didn’t address.

*

A young black man will be shot and killed in America tomorrow. He’s poor so you won’t read about it in the newspaper or see it on the news. Another victim of the violence epidemic infecting our cities. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The future is not inevitable. The long history of gun violence in this country does not mean the problem can’t be solved. Here’s another story.

A young black man’s life will be saved tomorrow. An activist in the community will intervene in a dispute between two rival gangs and convince them the cycle of violence doesn’t have to continue. A young reporter will hear about it and write the story and inform the community. And decades from now, when gun violence is a fraction of what it is today, people will look back and wonder why it took so long.

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