(C) Minnesota Reformer
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How is the far-right outrage machine going to pivot away from gun policy this time? • Minnesota Reformer [1]
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Date: 2025-08-29
As a scholar who studies media coverage of gun violence, my first thought upon hearing the horrifying news of the mass shooting at Annunciation Church in south Minneapolis wasn’t shock.
After all, as Americans, these shootings make up the background radiation of our lives. It wasn’t even a pang of fear for the safety of my own school-aged kids, although surely any Minnesotan with a beating heart read about this brutal attack on innocent children with a heavy, fearful weight in our chests.
No. It was: “How is the far-right outrage machine going to hastily pivot away from gun policy this time?”
Over 25 years ago, in 1999, the Columbine school shooting horrified and captivated the nation. Cable news coverage of the Columbine shooting is credited with inventing the term “mass shooting” — and many of the now-familiar tropes and myths that accompany it.
The mass shooters at Columbine obtained their guns using the American gun show loophole, which allows private citizens to sell guns to buyers on the spot with no background check. But did media coverage of this attack lay the blame on this unusually permissive American gun policy? No. Instead, we scapegoated bullying, violent video games, and even the music of Marilyn Manson, although it later became clear that the two shooters were not bullied — they, unsurprisingly, were bullies.
Twelve years later, in Tucson, a local man opened fire at an event for U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords. The shooter legally bought a Glock 19 after passing a background check, despite a significant personal history of mental instability. Again, did we grapple with the enormous holes in our federal gun policy that allow even men with documented histories of threats, violence and delusion to access deadly weapons? No, this time, inexplicably, we pivoted to blaming incivility in American politics.
It doesn’t matter the year or the context — we’ll blame anything but guns. After the Newtown and Virginia Tech shootings, we blamed the abysmal mental health of the shooters. But people experiencing mental illness are actually far more likely to become victims of violence than perpetrators. Further, while every country on the planet is home to people with mental illness, the United States is the only county in the world that experiences near-constant mass shootings.
This time? Right on cue, a ready-made hook for the screeching hatred and bleating ignorance of the Trump era — this time, apparently, we’re blaming the fact that the shooter was transgender. Mass shootings carried out by transgender shooters are about as common as mass shootings carried out by women, which is to say they are rare, comprising less than 2% of all mass shooters. Meanwhile, the cisgender, white, and most crucially, male identity of thousands of other mass shooters is ignored, forgotten or unnoticed in most media coverage.
The mass shooting phenomenon in the United States stem from a crisis of both masculinity and gun policy. These two facts are inescapable.
Personally? I don’t care what motivates mass shooters. It doesn’t matter if they’re motivated by far-right white nationalism, QAnon, radical Islam, delusion, sexism or revenge. Without access to guns, these motives won’t result in mass shootings; it’s that simple. Further, giving these murderers a platform to explain or justify their actions, even posthumously, only inspires other young, radicalized men to seek infamy in exactly the same way.
The solution is twofold: stop sensationalizing and glamorizing these crimes in the media, and — most crucially — change the law to significantly overhaul access to guns so that no other parent ever loses their beloved child at school or church again.
The U.S. can look to the example of other countries to determine what works to reduce this risk.
In 1996, shootings a month apart in Scotland and Australia prompted sweeping sets of gun reforms in those countries, including buyback programs, increased background checks, and new bans on previously legal weapons.
In comparison to the hundreds (conservatively) of mass shootings that have taken place in the U.S. in the years since 1996, there has been only one mass shooting in the U.K. during that period, and zero in Australia. Following the gun buyback program in Australia, the rate of gun suicides dropped 65% in the decade after the reforms, while gun-related homicides decreased 59%, according to a 2010 study. And in the U.K., every year but one since has seen successive drops in the rates of gun crimes.
Policy changes work, if we ever develop the political will to stop this senseless tide of bloodshed.
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