Media Coverage Misses the Gender Issues at the Heart of Mass Shootings

Media Coverage Misses the Gender Issues at the Heart of Mass Shootings
11/21/2022 by Jackson Katz
Guns are woven deeply into cultural narratives about American masculinity.



A man views rifles during the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention on May 28, 2022 in Houston, Texas. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)

Amidst outpourings of heartache, grief and outrage about the latest gun massacre, why are so few voices in mainstream American media talking about the gender issues at the heart of these incidents? As the U.S. experiences yet another mass murder, what is so hard about saying—out loud—that the overwhelming majority of these killings are done by boys and young men, and then going a little deeper and asking why? Since the spring of 1998, media coverage of these shootings—with just a few exceptions—has followed an embarrassingly predictable and superficial script that imposes gender neutrality on a highly gendered phenomenon. It’s remarkable how many gender-neutral terms commentators come up with to describe the perpetrators of these heinous crimes: “shooter,” “18-year-old,” “loner” “killer,” “terrorist,” “student,” “teenager,” “young person,” “armed individual.”

People think it’s so obvious the shooters are young men that there’s literally no point in saying so. In that sense, ‘gunman’ is internally redundant; everyone knows that ‘man’ follows ‘gun.’ The one gendered term people do often use is “gunman,” a word whose very constituent parts—gun/man—offer a clue as to why gender-neutral terms are so popular on this topic. People think it’s so obvious the shooters are young men that there’s literally no point in saying so. In that sense, “gunman” is internally redundant; everyone knows that “man” follows “gun.” One way to think about the near-invisibility of gender in this debate is to consider the word “gunwoman.” The awkward but revealing dictionary definition of this uncommon word is “a female gunman.” The need for such a word barely exists—because in 98 percent of mass shootings, the murderer is a man.


Brad Fowler of San Antonio, Texas, lights up candles at a memorial dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on June 3, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed on May 24 after an 18-year-old gunman opened fire inside the school. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

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The two academics have developed a remarkable data base of school shootings dating back to 1966. They found that school shooters typically have four things in common:

They suffered early childhood trauma.
They were angry or despondent over a recent event, sometimes resulting in suicidality.
They studied other shootings online.
They possessed the means to carry out the attack.

But like most analysts, the authors didn’t highlight or examine gender as something almost all the shooters have in common. They did mention it in a subsequent paragraph, in which they suggested—helpfully—that schools can adopt curricula focused on “teaching positive coping skills, resilience, and social-emotional learning, especially to young boys.” Then they buried the most critical data point at the end of the paragraph, in parentheses—***********“(According to our data, 98 percent of mass shooters are men)”—and said nothing further about it. *********

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But as long as men, young and old, have easy access to high-capacity killing machines at the same time their society furnishes them with endless heroic masculine narratives about redemptive violence, the next tragedy is always going to be just around the corner.

https://msmagazine.com/2022/11/21/gun-violence-men-mass-shooting/