Seventeen lives ended prematurely one year ago Thursday. A mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida created nationwide sympathy for the school’s community and led to a movement to prevent similar tragedies from occurring again.
Several students who survived the shooting, including David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, used the national spotlight to organize and push for stronger gun laws through the #NeverAgain movement and the nationwide March for Our Lives demonstration.
In total, well over one million supporters attended a March for Our Lives rally at one of the hundreds of locations in the United States on March 24, 2018.
The effects resounding from the impassioned speeches of Hogg and Gonzalez and the movement they helped to create led to the enactment of more gun control laws.
According to the Giffords Law Center, an advocacy group that supports gun control, 26 states and Washington, D.C., passed 67 new gun control laws in 2018, which is more than three times the number of gun control laws enacted the year prior.
Florida, where Parkland occurred, passed legislation that increased the minimum age to buy guns and created a waiting period for firearm purchases, along with more reforms.
Much could be done to increase gun safety measures nationwide. The majority of both Republicans and Democrats believe that the federal government should prevent people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns, bar people on the no-fly list from purchasing guns and institute background checks for private sales and gun show sales, according to Pew Research.
News publications like ours can only do so much to urge the passage of common sense gun safety measures, but news publications are in control of how they tell the stories of mass shootings. Focusing on the victims and survivors of mass shootings is paramount. Newspapers and cable television must stop glorifying the perpetrators of these tragedies.
Research on the “contagion effect” — how media coverage of mass shootings can affect future shootings — suggests that publishing pictures and profiling suspected shooters can be dangerous for the public.
No Notoriety, a group founded in the aftermath of the mass shooting that took place in a theater in Aurora, Colorado, is pushing media outlets to cite a shooter’s name at most once per article, to never use the name in headlines and to reject any broadcasting of a shooter’s statements, videos or manifesto.
Highlighting the killer takes away from the role that guns played in mass shootings. It’s sad that many of us can’t remember the names of the victims even though we might recall the name and face of the killer.
The names of the people who died should be the most recognizable aspect of a mass shooting. Let’s recognize not only the names, but the lives that were taken away from the world one year ago:
Alyssa Alhadeff
Scott Beigel
Martin Duque Anguiano
Nicholas Dworet
Aaron Feis
Jaime Guttenberg
Christopher Hixon
Luke Hoyer
Cara Loughran
Gina Montalto
Joaquin Oliver
Alaina Petty
Meadow Pollack
Helena Ramsay
Alexander Schachter
Carmen Schentrup
Peter Wang
