On the 14th February 2018, nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland, Florida and shot thirty-four students and staff. Of those thirty-four, seventeen were killed, the youngest victims were fourteen years old. This kind of mass shooting is unfortunately not unique in America. There had been twenty-nine mass shootings since January 2018, prior to the Florida disaster, and since then there has been a further eighteen according to the Gun Violence Archive (2018). The public and media reaction to this tragedy has been one of outrage, despair and anger. One response I would like to focus on in particular is an article published by The Boston Globe.
The above was written in the wake of the shooting and its author, Nestor Ramos (2018), believes that, ‘in America, mass shootings have become so familiar that they seem to follow the same sad script’. With this article, Ramos is highlighting the dominant media discourse that is used when discussing mass school shootings.
Media discourse plays an important role in shaping our ideologies. Norman Fairclough, a prominent figure in the study of discourse, states that ‘language use – any text – is always simultaneously constitutive of social identities, social relations and systems of knowledge and belief … That is, any text makes its own small contribution to shaping these aspects of society and culture’ (Fairclough, 1995: 55). By highlighting these main strands of discourse that are reproduced when reporting on such events, Ramos is identifying what Jenny Kitzinger (2000) would call a ‘media template’. Kitzinger (2000: 61) writes that templates ‘are instrumental in shaping narratives around particular social problems’. They provide a stable rhetorical device which is used by journalists to shape news stories and guide a reader’s understanding of an issue. These templates can also be used to ‘highlight patterns in particular issues or social problems’ (Kitzinger, 2000: 76). One aspect I will not explore in the ‘template’ laid out by Ramos is how he describes the usual response to such tragedies.
This did happen in the wake of the tragedy, with President Donald Trump stating, ‘this isn’t a gun’s situation … this is a mental health problem at the highest level’ (Baker, 2017). The rhetoric used by President Trump, amongst others, to describe the perpetrator as mentally ill is troubling and potentially stigmatising. Words such as ‘savage sicko’, ‘insane monster’, ‘nuts’ and ‘crazy’ have all been used when describing the Cruz. This use of derogatory language feeds into a wider media discourse which frames those with mental health issues as being prone to violence, ‘media images of mental illness imply an association or link between mental illness and violence that does not exist’ (Harper, 2005: 466-467).
Also, by shifting the attention away from guns onto the subject of mental health provision, President Trump could be seen as promoting the agenda of the National Rifle Association (N.R.A.). They are an immensely powerful organisation, has been accused in the past of ‘manipualting gun owners and the media’ (Luo, 2017). With Donald Trump, who just so happened to receive ‘more than thirty million dollars’ from the N.R.A. during his campaign, in the White House, ‘the N.R.A. is certainly at a crest in power today’ (Luo, 2017). According to Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips (2002:62) ‘discursive practices which construct representations of the world, social subjects and social relations, including power relations ... [further] the interests of particular social groups’. Whilst organisations like the N.R.A. and those in high positions of power are used to dominating the news feed, something unique is happening with the responses from survivors of the MSD high school massacre.
The ‘thoughts and prayers’ offered by politicians are seemingly not enough for people anymore. According to CNN (2018), ‘there has been no major gun-control legislation in the nearly six years since Sandy Hook’. Sandy Hook was, of course, the shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut in which twenty-eight people, most of them children, were killed. Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the MSD tragedy, has become the face of a new movement which is hoping to promote policy change and increase young voter turnout. This all started when a video featuring Gonzalez giving a passionate and poignant speech at a gun control rally went viral.
In this video she calls out the government for sending only “thoughts and prayers” and states that ‘it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see’ (Gonzalez, 2018). Her call to action has inspired an entire movement and has subsequently prompted organised mass school walkouts as well as a worldwide protest, March for Our Lives, which has been dubbed ‘the biggest gun control protest in a generation’ (BBC News, 2018). The Washington Post (2018) recently released an article in which they state ‘beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours’. These students, the ones who live to survive these shootings, are rarely remembered by the media, instead, we are exposed to ‘news icons’ (Bennett & Lawrence, 1995). These are ‘memorable images’ deployed by journalists to ‘push certain problems to the forefront of the news agenda and thus engage public attention’ (1995: 22, 26).
Images of survivors fleeing the school, victims being transported away in ambulances, parents crying down the phones for some news from their loved ones, these are the images which get recycled with every shooting. The people may be different, the location eerily familiar but the stories are all the same. The students of MSD high school are disrupting the cyclic reproduction of news icons by becoming organised and politically motivated. Gonzalez and her fellow students turned activists could be seen as becoming ‘culturally challenging news icons’ who have forced journalists to rewrite the scripts and discuss these events in new ways, thus they are ‘challenging the template’ (Bennett & Lawrence, 1995: 24) (Kitzinger, 2000: 71).
With the advent of digital news and the 24-hour news cycle, stories can be drowned by a tidal wave of constant news updates, ‘public opinion rarely remains focused on any one issue for very long regardless of the importance of the issue to society as a whole’ (Muschert & Carr, 2006: 752). Whilst this tragedy and its survivors are still dominating the news cycles in the US, it has only been just over two months since the massacre. The momentum of the story coverage has been kept alive with their protests, rallies and walkouts, as well as high profile celebrity support for the cause, including Ariana Grande, Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. They have even been featured on the front cover of Time magazine.
On the surface it may appear that there has been some success for the survivors as a new law has been signed which ‘bans bump stocks, raises the age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 and allocates more money for arming teachers’ (Cillizza, 2018). believe that arming teachers is a potentially troubling idea and the fact that they want to solve this issue by bringing more guns into schools will only further the profits of the N.R.A as well as create more opportunity for easy access to firearms. Recently the decision to increase the minimum age was blocked by the N.R.A after they attempted to sue the state of Florida (Almasy, 2018).
Gonzalez hopes that with a continued fight for more gun control, ‘we are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we're going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because … we are going to be the last mass shooting’ (Gonzalez, 2018). There is no denying how the immense political activism started by the survivors of MSD, has created a shift in the way that school shootings will be discussed by the media. However, whilst the fight for stricter gun control laws is being heavily documented, whether or not there will be any long-term policy changes is yet to be seen. If President Trump’s twitter account is anything to go by, these students may be in for the long haul.
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