Still Missing From The Aurora Coverage: Gun Violence Context
It's been one week since the former medical student-turned-gunman opened fire inside an Aurora, CO movie theater, shooting 70 people and killing 12. News of the massacre continues to generate enormous amounts of press coverage, most of which has been accurate and helpful.
However, what's been often lacking has been useful context about gun violence in America and the disturbing truth that the Aurora rampage represents the latest chapter in a long, active line of U.S. shooting sprees. And that far from happening in a vacuum created an isolated villain, the mass murder was connected to a sweeping cultural and criminal problem, one that gun proponents and conservatives don't want to address.
In 2009, in the wake of a rash of deadly shooting sprees, I noted how gun rampages no longer seemed to generate interest from the press and that the news media treated them as though they were isolated incidents and there was no public policy issue that tied them together. The press essentially had embraced the lazy NRA mantra: Guns don't kill people. People do.
Worse, the press often covered shooting sprees the way it covered killer tornadoes: One-day stories that were acts of nature, and that all people could really do is try to stay out of the way.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/27/still-missing-from-the-aurora-coverage-gun-viol/187364
