The Arising Issue of Gun Violence

It seems that America has adopted a mass shooting culture within its recent history. “On December 14, 2012, a gunman fatally shot 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. This mass shooting occurred less than 6 months after James Holmes shot 70 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The Aurora shooting took place a year and a half after Jared Loughner shot 18 people, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, Arizona. In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho shot 57 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg” (McGinty). As time progresses in the United States, gun violence has simply spiked dramatically. But why? Is the country as a whole becoming eviler? Or perhaps is the country as whole normalizing violence? More realistically, the increase in mass gun violence is due to the increase in mass media coverage. It can be seen that gun violence in America, and more particularly, mass shootings, have been perpetuated by mass media through political agendas, easy accessibility to news sources, and the platform given to these shooters.