El Paso residents mourn victims
of the mass shooting at a shopping center.John Locher/AP
A weekend of mass shootings in El Paso,
Texas and Dayton, Ohio left at least 31 dead, dozens injured,
and countless grieving Americans.
In recent years, Mother Jones has made it a newsroom priority to
investigate the scourge of gun violence and mass shootings. Amid
sensational details and inevitable politicking in the wake of
the devastating weekend, here are some big-picture Mother Jones
investigations to help you understand the background dynamics of
these twin tragedies:
Mass shootings have become deadlier
Sunday’s shooting in Dayton was the 114th mass shooting since
1982, according to Mother Jones‘ open-source mass shootings
database. As Mother Jones noted in 2014, “An analysis of this
database by researchers at Harvard University, further
corroborated by a different study from the FBI, determined that
mass shootings have tripled in frequency in recent years.” When
the shootings do occur, they’re more deadly: The five deadliest
mass shootings have all occurred since 2007.
Gun violence is horrific—and expensive
In addition to devastating communities, gun violence (which
includes, but is not limited to, mass shootings) is very
expensive, costing the United States some $229 billion in 2012,
according to another award-winning Mother Jones investigation.
That price tag includes “direct costs,” like money spent on
emergency services, police investigations, medical care, and
prison for the perpetrator. About 87 percent of these costs fall
on taxpayers. It also includes “indirect” costs, like lost
income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life.
Watch how we tallied the numbers, below:
The
copycat effect is real
Mass shooters are often inspired by news of other mass killings.
“When real life for these individuals is so blighted in terms of
love and work, they turn to the anti-heroes,” Reid Meloy, a
forensic psychologist at the University of California-San Diego
and a leading researcher on targeted violence, told Mother Jones
in 2015. “They don’t just want to be like them—they are envious
and want to one-up them,” Meloy explained.
Mother Jones found stark evidence of the “Columbine effect”: The
nation’s deadliest high school massacre inspired at least 74
plots and attacks across 30 states as of 2015. According to the
investigation, Columbine copycats’ goals “ranged from attacking
on the anniversary of Columbine to outdoing the original body
count. Law enforcement stopped 53 of these plots before anyone
was harmed. Twenty-one of them evolved into attacks, with a
total of 89 victims killed, 126 injured, and nine perpetrators
committing suicide.” Our follow-up investigation published in
April found that the problem has continued to grow in the two
decades since the 1999 high school tragedy in Colorado.
Media can help—and hurt
Today, mass shooters often express their motives and desire for
fame in manifestos posted online. “They do this to claim credit
and to articulate the grievance behind the attack,” Andre
Simons, who led an FBI team assisting local authorities in
heading off violent attacks, told Mother Jones in 2015. “And we
believe they do it to heighten the media attention that will be
given to them, the infamy and notoriety they believe they’ll
derive from the event,” he added.
When it comes to covering mass shootings, the media should stick
to some basic guidelines: Keep the perpetrator’s name out of the
headlines, minimize images of the perpetrator, report on the
perpetrator dispassionately (e.g. avoid terms like “lone wolf”),
and avoid publishing material from perpetrators’ videos or
manifestos except when it has clear journalistic value that is
in the public interest.
