It’s Time To Say “New Normal”
Photos in image are from various news sources.
The same day Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a homemade gun, July 8, I checked to see how many violent firearms deaths we had had so far this year in the United States. The number was somewhat north of 10,000. We also generally clocked twice as many suicides and accidental deaths by firearms.
Reports are, that Japan has had a couple dozen gun-related criminal cases in the past year resulting in one death and four injuries. Most of the cases involved gangs. A few days after Mr. Abe was killed with a homemade gun, 15 people died when a group of men drove up and opened fire in front of a local tavern in Johannesburg’s Soweto township in South Africa. This just days after July 4th shoppers at a Copenhagen, Denmark, mall scattered after a 22-year-old with a rifle sprayed bullets, killing three and injuring more than a dozen.
These overseas events make it into the international news feeds every time because they are rare and horrible. Because they are not normal, they garner news coverage. The United States clearly is not Japan or Copenhagen. I reflected on the estimated 19 million guns sold in the United States last year. I matched this with the more than 200 deaths that occurred over the July 4 weekend alone. It’s fair to acknowledge that gun violence happens across the globe but in the United States we might make more headway on fighting gun violence if we accept that violent and self-inflicted gun deaths are our new normal.
In the United States, gun violence is so prevalent, that news organizations triage how and when they choose to cover shootings. A recent story in the Washington Post highlighted the reality that covering death by firearm is a hit and miss proposition – pun intended. The Post interviewed NBC anchor Lester Holt who explained that the mere location of the shooting – a 4th of July parade – made it clear to his organization that NBC’s coverage should be big, and he should report from that location.
Other news reporters and producers interviewed said they had to be smart about using limited personnel and financial resources. There is no set formula, they explained to the article’s writers, Jeremy Barr and Elahe Izadi. Sometimes they tap a local reporter. Sometimes they send large teams and top anchors to a shooting. Plainly, the collective decision making came down to this: “Many journalists have a similar triage process, prioritizing shootings based partly on death tolls, partly on a subjective sense of horror and shock,” the story says. “Inevitably, that means most do not end up receiving significant national coverage.”
Many might counter that the news media is sensationalizing and praying on the already damaged community. But aren’t we as news consumers also to blame for our own pandering? News organizations are in the business of making money too by giving news consumers what they want; a reason to come to their pages, to click on their Twitter feed, to tune into nightly news, or leave the television on in the den for eight hours of coverage. Ratings shed light on how we have chosen to consume the news. We want “horror and shock,” or we aren’t interested. We have collectively turned how we consume news coverage of shootings into the same desire that takes us to the theater to see the latest action moving, forsaking the kinder, art house tale.
The epidemic of firearms violence in the United States isn’t just a mass shooter in a school. It’s a distraught farmer who pulls a trigger when his loans are due. It’s an immature teenager handed a gun and told to prove he belongs to the gang. It’s the four-year-old who picks up his family’s unsecured handgun from the shoebox in the closet and pulls the trigger as he turns to show his five-year-old sister. Let’s stop ratcheting up the bar and pretending we are looking for something new that will meet our sense of horror and shock. We didn’t meet the bar 20 years ago when kids who don’t know how to add and subtract to ten were murdered and left in a pile of blood and torn flesh in a school bathroom. No bar is high enough.
This is the new normal.