By now, the images are seared into the minds of Americans.
Terrified students from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, walking through the parking lot with their hands on their heads, while 17 friends lie dead inside the school’s classrooms.
Or was that Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, where 10 were killed?
It might be Sandy Hook Elementary School you’re thinking of, where 28 were murdered.
Or it could be Virginia Tech, where 33 students were gunned down.
School shootings in America are now so commonplace that it is easy to confuse one scene shakily filmed from a news helicopter from another. The numbers are staggering: 62 school shootings occurred during the 1990s, including the Thurston High School (4 dead) and Columbine High School (15 dead) shootings; 63 during the 2000s, including Virginia Tech; 149 already just eight years and three months into the 2010s, including four shootings with seven fatalities since the Stoneman Douglas shooting on February 14 of this year.
Although the National Research Council stated that the assault weapon ban, in place from 1994 to 2004, “did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence outcomes,” while the ban was in place the USA averaged one school shooting every 63 days, with only one resulting in more than 10 fatalities. In the 14 years since the ban expired, that number has risen to one school shooting every 26 days, with five separate incidents tallying double-digit fatalities.
And that’s just school shootings.
According to the FBI, between 2009 and 2016 there were 156 mass shootings—defined as an incident in which at least four people, excluding the perpetrator, are shot—resulting in 848 dead and another 339 injured. More than half of those shootings were related to domestic violence incidents; one quarter of the fatalities were children.
Per the World Health Organization, the USA is the runaway leader in gun homicides among high-income countries. Just how unbalanced are the numbers? There are 36 homicides per 1 million people in the USA. The next-worst countries are Portugal and Canada—who watch the same movies and play the same video games as the USA, and who also have mentally ill citizens—who both check in with 5.
After a mass shooting, questions are asked. Why were the victims chosen? Why did the killer do it? Was there anything in his past—98 percent of mass shooters are male—that should have served as a warning sign?
But what of the people asking the questions? Who trains journalists how to handle a mass shooting as respectfully and ethically as possible? Who prepares them for the bloody and horrific scenes that may await them?
At the UO, that is journalism instructor Lori Shontz, one of a group of instructors nationwide who is helping journalism students prepare for the reality awaiting them after graduation.
On October 1, 2015, Shontz was en route to Portland with nine School of Journalism and Communications students for a conference about improving ties between journalists and their communities. Upon their arrival, they heard the news: a student at Umpqua Community College had shot and killed an assistant professor and eight students before turning his gun on himself, in the deadliest mass shooting in Oregon’s history.
The group watched President Barack Obama’s press conference, and Shontz was struck by Obama’s comment that the news coverage of mass shootings had become routine.
“I was at this really innovative conference where people were talking about problems and issues and opportunities I hadn’t really fully thought about,” said Shontz, “and all I could think of was, ‘This is a routine, and how do we [break the routine]?’”
In response, Shontz and SOJC associate professor Nicole Dahmen launched the Reporting Roseburg project, where they interviewed 19 journalists who covered the UCC shooting—including reporters who had covered the Sandy Hook and Thurston shootings—and documented their thoughts about covering mass shootings. Dahmen was interested in studying what the journalists thought about during the coverage. Shontz was more interested in figuring out how to train her students to cover similar incidents in a more ethical manner.
“We have conversations with students in ethics classes, and the idea behind it is that when they're in the heat of the moment, what I always like to say is, ‘Nobody convenes a meeting of the ethics committee,’” said Shontz. “It's not all WikiLeaks. It's not all Pentagon papers. But you make these little choices every day. So I started to think about shootings that way.”
Shontz started by asking the journalists who covered UCC how they knew what to do. How they knew who to talk to. How they judged who was and wasn’t traumatized, and which questions to ask and avoid. Were names used, and if so, how? Were photos used, and if so, how?
That information formed the basis for her lessons, which are discussions about the ethics of covering mass shootings. Do you name the perpetrator? If so, do you name him in the headline? The lede? Throughout the story? Do you run the perpetrator’s photo? Do you even call him a perpetrator, or do you opt for shooter or murderer?
“In the abstract, they’re very good with engaging with the ideas,” said Shontz. “But when I say, ‘I want you to think now, what if, God forbid, this happened, what would you do?’ It completely changes the classroom. And I worry about that, because that’s scary, but I genuinely think it’s irresponsible to send students out of my reporting classes without having considered that for even fifteen, twenty minutes.”
Shontz, along with peers at the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, and faculty members at Temple University and the University of Missouri, teaches students how to cover mass shootings. But while other instructors turn that into a full-term class, Shontz is incorporating the ethical discussions into classes she is already teaching.
“I feel really strongly that, at the beginning level—because you never know when [a shooting] is going to happen—that just putting a small module in and making people think about it occasionally makes a difference,” Shontz said.
“I have some guidelines that I give them, but mostly it’s a conversation in a class to say, ‘I hope this never happens to you, but you’re going to have to cover a tragedy at some point in your career. And I don’t want you to show up and say, ‘I’m going to do it just like I covered everything else I’ve ever done,’ because it’s not the same.’”