Everyday gun violence devastating marginalized communities should be our focus, says The Guardian’s Lois Beckett in this evergreen “On The Media” interview. 

While there’s lots to admire about the way the media has been reporting on the recent tragedies in Buffalo and Uvalde, there is a small but growing concern among some journalists and observers about the narrow focus on mass gun violence and on school gun violence coverage in particular.

Everyday gun violence is a massive, society-wide problem. Gun violence is now the top cause of death among young people. However, mass gun violence is terrifying but still relatively unusual. And school gun violence, while horrific, is still extremely rare. But media coverage tends to focus more on these events.

Far as I can tell, these concerns go back to 2019, when The Guardian’s Lois Beckett told On The Media’s Brooke Gladstone that mainstream coverage of gun violence was overly focused on mass shootings rather than on everyday gun violence affecting marginalized communities.

“We continue to have the same conversation over and over trying to prevent 1% of people from dying,” according to Beckett, “and not caring about the other 99%.”

School gun violence coverage is also part of the problem, according to Beckett.

“Credulous coverage that accepts the false belief that children are most at risk of being shot in schools is incredibly dangerous,” says Beckett, both because it overstates the risks and distracts from “Black and brown kids dying outside of school” in everyday gun violence.

Credulous coverage that accepts the false belief that children are most at risk of being shot in schools is incredibly dangerous.

While the victims and survivors in Buffalo and Uvalde were overwhelmingly Black and Latino, the tragedies are still outliers. Beckett’s insights are still so timely that On The Media broadcast the segment again a couple of weeks ago.

“Our whole gun violence conversation is driven by mass shootings, which are incredibly horrific and statistically, still, even now, very rare events,” says Beckett. “It is primarily people dying from suicide, that’s two thirds of it, and people dying in everyday shootings in local cities and places where there has been concentrated gun violence for decades.”

We’re covering gun violence wrong — still. School gun violence coverage is part of the problem. Maybe it’s time to rethink some of what we’re doing?

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Note: This interview segment was originally broadcast and transcribed by On The Media on September 6, 2019, as How To Report on Gun Violence In America. Published with permission.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

“We continue to have the same conversation over and over trying to prevent 1% of people from dying and not caring about the other 99%.”

 

“Americans are having fierce and furious debate about whether to ban the kind of gun that is not used in the majority of gun murders.”

 

“There is so much tremendous focus on school safety and fortifying schools and surveilling students and adding video cameras and watching what students are doing online. Almost none of this has any evidence behind it.”

 

“Credulous coverage that accepts the false belief that children are most at risk of being shot in schools is incredibly dangerous.”

 

“Even though the mainstream media gun control debate is overwhelmingly focused on these military style rifles, Walmart and its policies are actually focusing on changing the kinds of guns that kill the majority of people.”

 

“I think the most important thing for good journalism on this issue is to challenge people’s fears and conceptions and to say what violence actually looks like in this country.”

 

FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

BROOKE GLADSTONE Okay so you have, for a long time, been an advocate of solutions in the coverage. How do you propose incorporating solutions?

LOIS BECKETT There are lots of policies that make tiny amounts of difference that can be helpful. And there has actually been a tremendous amount of progress at the state level even as there has been political gridlock in Washington. So when we talk about solutions journalism, I think what we’re saying is we want to push back against the inaccurate biases of our readers, of our listeners, that nothing can be done, that nothing is possible. I don’t think we need to overstate claims but I think it’s really important that we’re accurate about what we do know about what works to save lives.

BROOKE GLADSTONE When we examined solutions journalism, one thing that a very strong advocate Tina Rosenberg told us, is that it’s not always about solutions that work, sometimes it’s solutions that don’t.

LOIS BECKETT If you think about the single policy that’s getting the most attention right now as part of America’s gun control debate it’s whether or not the country should ban military style assault weapons and whether there should be even a mandatory buyback of the assault weapons that Americans currently own. Public opinion surveys suggest that a majority of Americans support a ban on assault weapons, even nearly half of Americans support a mandatory buyback — something that, until very recently, was not even conceivable on the political agenda.

BROOKE GLADSTONE In fact we have a clip of Beto O’Rourke advocating that very thing.

BETO O’ROURKE Americans who own AR15s, AK47s will have to sell them to the government. We’re not going to allow them to stay on our streets, to show up in our communities, to be used against us in our synagogues, our churches, our mosques, our Wal-Mart’s, our public places. [END CLIP]

LOIS BECKETT And the fact is two things are true at the same time. It is undeniable that guns like the AR15 are a fetish object for mass shooters that have been used in one terrible public mass shooting after another. And it is also true that handguns have always been responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun homicides and handguns are actually used in a large number of mass shootings overall. Americans are having fierce and furious debate about whether to ban the kind of gun that is not used in the majority of gun murders.

Americans are having fierce and furious debate about whether to ban the kind of gun that is not used in the majority of gun murders.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Even though the AR15 is maybe the most popular gun in the market, at least according to Meghan McCain of The View.

MEGHAN MCCAIN The AR15 is by far the most popular gun in America. So if you’re talking about, again I was just in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, you’re talking around going and taking people’s guns away from them. There’s gonna be a lot of violence–.

JOY BEHAR But they lived without them for many years during the ban.

MEGHAN MCCAIN I’m not living without guns. I–I [END CLIP]

LOIS BECKETT Meghan McCain saying that she thinks that a mandatory buyback of assault weapons would lead to violence. This is actually a pretty mainstream conservative view. There was a report in 2009 from the Department of Homeland Security which warned about the dangers of white nationalist radicalization and domestic terrorism. And it identified guns and gun confiscations as central to that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE The NRA suggests that the second amendment includes the right to wage civil war. And, of course, Tucker Carlson says, “confiscation is basically a call for civil war.”

TUCKER CARLSON You’re calling for a civil war. What you’re calling for is an incitement to violence. It’s something that I wouldn’t want to live here when that happened, would you? [END CLIP]

LOIS BECKETT It’s really hard to know what might happen if Congress actually passes an assault weapons ban with mandatory confiscation. I think it’s certainly true that a lot of people won’t comply. They’ll bury their AR15s in the backyard. Nobody knows they have them. There’s no gun registry. I think it’s also true that there are a significant number of law enforcement officials who will not comply with this law. We’ve already seen that in some states that have passed universal background checks like Colorado or Washington state, that the number of background checks conducted in those states hasn’t actually gone up since the law passed. And the suggestion is it’s just not being enforced very much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE OK, so you said we have no gun registry. That’s another proposal. If we license people to drive cars, why not to use guns. And then of course the common-sense legislation that people referred to like universal background checks, there’s the red flagging issue, which of these do you think would be helpful or do you think none of them are?

LOIS BECKETT So if we talk about policies that have more science behind them, extreme risk protection orders, which are sometimes called Red Flag laws are really promising. Conservatives are more open to them. The laws are based not on the government knowing when someone is dangerous or not but on the judgment of someone who is closest to a person at risk, whether that’s law enforcement, family members, people at school or co-workers. And the idea is that the bar for getting your gun rights removed permanently under federal law is really high. And the thing about extremist protection orders are they don’t remove your gun rights forever. The idea is that it tries to line up the law more closely with when people are actually in danger of hurting themselves or someone else.

And the second reason that this policy is so good is that it’s gotten a lot of attention because of mass shootings, but it tends to be used most often to help people who are suicidal. And that’s so important because gun suicide is two thirds of all gun deaths in the United States. And so rather than a policy that’s just driven by the rarest kind of violence, these protection orders are actually relevant to the most publicized and well-known kinds of violence and the kinds of violence that’s actually hurting the most people.

Protection orders are actually relevant to the most publicized and well-known kinds of violence and the kinds of violence that’s actually hurting the most people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Don’t you think, though, that the media’s focus on school shootings and other high death toll tragedies prompt more outrage and potential for change than suicides and domestic homicides, say, that may be less relatable to the people who might push to make changes.

LOIS BECKETT So there’s two ways of looking at that. One is more optimistic, one is the fact that, you know, after Sandy Hook there were a lot of suburban white parents who did not think that gun violence was relevant to them at all, who started getting involved in the gun control movement. And as part of doing that, they began to learn that gun violence didn’t look like they thought it did. I talked to a woman in suburban Indianapolis who met a Black mom from the center of Indianapolis and realized that, you know, the way that that mom’s son got shot didn’t meet her expectations of what gun violence looked like. And so the fact of people getting involved in activism no matter what brings them in, that you will learn through that.

But on the other hand, if you were trying to fix a problem and you are fighting for the wrong solutions, that getting more people involved to advocate for things that even might be counterproductive is incredibly dangerous.

There is so much tremendous focus on school safety and fortifying schools and surveilling students and adding video cameras and watching what students are doing online. Almost none of this has any evidence behind it. And the best thing that we know is that more police in school and more surveillance in school and spending a lot of moneys to turn schools into bunkers, has actually led to more violence, has made students less safe and it’s all being done by parents who want to protect their children and they are doing the wrong things.

There is so much tremendous focus on school safety and fortifying schools… Almost none of this has any evidence behind it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You’ve written about the changes that Columbine made.

LOIS BECKETT Columbine really fueled a focus on zero tolerance policies in schools and continue to push to put police officers in schools to protect students from extremely rare school shootings. What researchers and activists have found is that that appeared to disproportionately affect students of color, and fueled the school to prison pipeline. The attempt to make American kids safer by putting police officers in schools seems to have just left a lot of kids in the criminal justice system. And that doesn’t make anybody safer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE What about the solution reported by NBC Nightly News earlier this week on a $48 million school that’s “designed to deter active shooters in Fruitport, Michigan?”

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT No more lockers in the hallways, instead short lockers in a common area so teachers can see 900 students at once.

MALE CORRESPONDENT And we also installed these wing walls to provide safety for students to hide behind if there’s a threat down the hallway. A grant from Michigan State Police paid for impact resistant film on the windows and a special system to lock down specific sections of the school. [END CLIP]

LOIS BECKETT That kind of credulous coverage that accepts the false belief that children are most at risk of being shot in schools is incredibly dangerous. There are 13,000 American school-aged kids who die every year from gunshot wounds, 700 from gun homicides, 500 from gun suicides, about 90 from gun accidents. And if you look at the data going back for decades, schools are actually the place where American kids are least likely to get shot, of all school-aged homicides going back for 20 years, less than 2% of those are in schools. And so what we have right now is a society in which kids are getting shot in their homes and in their neighborhoods and they’re safest at school and our response to that is to design barricaded fortresses of schools. And one of the saddest things is that The Trace, which is an outlet that covers gun violence exclusively, did an analysis trying to find every kid who had been killed in a gun homicide since Parkland. And in looking at all of those individual cases, what they found was that more kids were actually killed by their parents in murder-suicides and domestic violence than were killed at school — about twice as many in fact. And so there’s just a complete disconnect between the conversation that we have and the fears that parents have about what puts their children at risk.

Credulous coverage that accepts the false belief that children are most at risk of being shot in schools is incredibly dangerous.

BROOKE GLADSTONE OK so what do you think the press should be reporting on? What do you want to see in the coverage?

LOIS BECKETT I think one of the things that journalists really can do is focus on solutions, but also focusing on what their individual readers or listeners have the power to do. Because if you talk to longtime gun violence prevention advocates, people like Nicole Hockley who lost her son at Sandy Hook, they will say that the biggest enemy really isn’t the National Rifle Association or gun rights advocates. It’s the cynicism and exhaustion of everyday Americans who just don’t see any evidence that anything can be done to help except maybe buying a gun to protect their own families because there’s nothing else that they see that they have power to do. And so I think we not only need to focus more on policy and things that are working but also think more about providing people with information. Like what do you do if you’re worried about someone in your life. Because what we do know about mass shootings is that there are almost always red flags that people are nervous, that people thought something was wrong, but people also don’t want to hurt someone that they care about and they just don’t know who to go to for help. And so I think we need to do a lot more work in trying to think how do we serve not just people who are watching these shootings terrified at home but what journalism are we providing for the people who have a bad feeling in the pit of their stomachs, who think something is wrong and they don’t know what to do.

BROOKE GLADSTONE And what about the countless shootings of people of color in communities that are largely invisible to much of the mainstream coverage of this issue?

LOIS BECKETT So what we’ve been doing at The Guardian this year is focusing a yearlong series on the Bay Area. Because in the past decade, the Bay Area has seen gun homicides drop by 30 percent and some cities have seen even bigger drops, 50%, 60% drops. And so we’re trying to put sustained attention on what’s working to save lives. New York has seen historic drops in gun violence. It’s safe like it’s never been safe before. Oakland and Richmond, places where there was generational gun violence, have seen real reductions.

So part of it is just trying to put the focus there and to remind people that things aren’t always getting worse. And part of it is just investing the time and money to make those stories interesting. And part of what makes our project is that we hired a young reporter from Richmond who’s grown up here, who can be a voice in the newsroom, from a community that’s been affected by gun violence and provide coverage that she thinks is most relevant for the people who are living with this every day.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You mentioned New York and California, I can’t help but think part of the reason is that it’s really hard to get guns in those states.

LOIS BECKETT One of the challenges here of course is that it’s really easy to go back and diagram one particular horrific act of violence and talk about exactly how it played out and really difficult to know when violence doesn’t happen, who’s responsible or what’s responsible. Probably California’s and New York’s strict gun laws do play some kind of role in the reductions, but at the same time, what we’ve seen is really dramatic short-term drops in gun violence even though there haven’t been dramatic gun control laws passed in that period. Our best experts in the Bay Area, for instance, say that they think it’s local intervention programs and that really person-focused gun violence prevention that’s probably responsible for the majority of that 30% drop in gun homicides over the past decade.

BROOKE GLADSTONE So what do you think about the action of Walmart’s CEO earlier this week?

MALE CORRESPONDENT Largest retailer in America will now discontinue all sales of ammunition for a short barreled rifles and handguns. Walmart is eliminating handguns from stores in Alaska, the only remaining state that still carries them in their stores. And retailer are also asking customers to no longer openly carry firearms in stores where open carry is legal.

BROOKE GLADSTONE I mean this move followed The New York Times article by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It was an open letter to the CEO Doug McMillon, forcefully asking him to have an impact on this issue. That piece was written right after the tragedy in El Paso last month. What do you think?

LOIS BECKETT I think a lot of gun violence prevention advocates are looking at this and feel really heartened because it is big action by a very powerful entity. And what’s fascinating at looking at Walmart’s choices is that it is talking about ammunition for AR15s and similar military style rifles. But Walmart actually stopped selling handguns in most of its stores in 1993 and now it’s not selling handgun ammunition anymore. Even though the mainstream media gun control debate is overwhelmingly focused on these military style rifles, Walmart and its policies are actually focusing on changing the kinds of guns that kill the majority of people. So there is a way in which Walmart’s policies are actually way more in line with the data on what is most dangerous to Americans than our whole debate is.

Walmart and its policies are actually focusing on changing the kinds of guns that kill the majority of people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Don’t you have to assume that they were bottom-line considerations in making this decision.

LOIS BECKETT Absolutely. But I think shifts like this do matter in applying commercial pressure when there is a blockade in Congress for passing any gun control legislation. You know, change is possible and one of the facts about the American gun control debate that we don’t talk about enough is that gun owners are a minority in the United States. According to a variety of public opinion polls 70 to 80% of Americans said that they do not personally own a gun and about 60% say that nobody in their household owns a gun. And it’s true that there are more guns in America than there are citizens, but that gun ownership is actually really concentrated. And so that when we talk about America’s gun culture, its history with guns, we are talking about something that is tremendously psychologically important in this country but that in actual fact most people don’t own these guns.

So when looking at Walmart’s choices, I think it’s really important to recognize the fact that really extreme gun absolutists, the people who don’t support any new gun control laws, who really think they have a constitutional right to carry any gun they want, in any place, at any time, that they are a minority within a minority. Something like fewer than 10 percent of all gun owners in United States are members of the NRA. Gun owners have been able, through very aggressive and focused and single minded organizing, to control the policy debate despite being a very tiny number of people. If even a relatively small number of people with very different views can organize against them, that could dramatically shape the landscape of this debate. But it’s taken a long time for people who are concerned about gun violence to organize in as focused and as dedicated away. But we’re definitely seeing that happening now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE So if you were going to issue a guide to journalists covering this issue, what would you suggest the three things they should stop doing and the three things they should start doing?

LOIS BECKETT I think the most important thing for good journalism on this issue is to challenge people’s fears and conceptions and to say what violence actually looks like in this country. Fact checking all of these different school safety measures, talking very particular terms about what kinds of guns are actually most dangerous in the circumstances in which people die, that you can look at the coverage and say: Is this coverage pushing back at my assumptions about what’s happening, my assumptions about what more make the most difference? Does this coverage include solutions? Am I learning about the different things that people are trying to make a difference in this issue?’ And also is it honest about when solutions don’t actually work that well that not all gun control laws might be that helpful. Is this coverage looking at the big picture? Because that’s a real public health approach to gun violence. It’s not just about legislative action there are a lot of different methods and approaches to this.

I think the most important thing for good journalism on this issue is… to say what violence actually looks like in this country.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You’ve been doing this for seven years, do you think that’s about how long a person can cover this stuff?

LOIS BECKETT Yeah, I mean I think it’s about as long as I can cover this stuff. I mean one of the things that’s so difficult is that gun violence in America overall is down dramatically in the past 25 years. It’s down about 50% and at the same time, these relatively rare mass shootings are increasing. And that doesn’t mean that more people are dying, but the level of fear and anxiety in this country is tremendous. And then that has real affects. Your ability to feel safe in a public space, the psychology of worrying about your kids at school, all that takes a toll.

And so there’s also a real limitation to trying to focus on data and sort of the objective facts of what’s going on. And one of the frightening things is just the knowledge that with the more violence that there is in the media, with the more focus there is on these horrific acts that we are seeing, that encourages more Americans to arm themselves. And that means that then the rare incidents in which someone misuses the gun that they own with domestic violence or with suicide, that those might be increasing. And so it’s hard to look at this and know that no matter what the data says, our fears are going to make us less safe and that there is — what we’re seeing now is a continued escalation. And what we really need to do with this whole issue with the media and everyone else is de-escalate and remind ourselves the reasons that we have to trust each other and not be afraid.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Lois, thank you very much.

LOIS BECKETT Thanks for talking.

Lois Beckett is a senior reporter for The Guardian and has covered gun violence and many other topics. This is a segment from OTM’s September 6, 2019, program, Pressure Drop. Many thanks to OTM and Beckett for their permission to republish. 

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Misleading coverage of school shootings in 2018

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The Grade

Launched in 2015, The Grade is a journalist-run effort to encourage high-quality coverage of K-12 education issues.