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      “Husband, father, coward, killer”: The discursive reproduction of racial inequality in media accounts of mass shooters

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          Abstract

          Relying on more expansive criteria for defining “mass shootings” than much existing research, we examine a subset of a unique dataset incorporating 7,048 news documents covering 2,170 shootings in the United States between 2013 and 2019. We analyze the descriptive language used to describe incidents and perpetrators and discover significant racial disparities in representation. This research enables a critical examination of the explanatory frames utilized by news media to tell the public who mass shooters are and journalistic attempts to explain why they occur. Data were analyzed utilizing a mixed methods approach, relying on content analysis to inductively code emergent categories of descriptions of shooters and binary logistic regressions to analyze the preponderance of descriptive categories when comparing news articles reporting on shootings committed by differently racialized shooters. Our results confirm some recent research showing that mass shooters racialized as white are more likely to be described with kind and compassionate language. With our larger sample, however, we also find that mass shooters racialized as white are additionally more likely to be described with negative language as “bad” or “evil” in comparison to shooters of color. We discuss how these data demonstrate that media reports present a more complex picture of white mass shooters for the public than shooters of color.

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          Most cited references34

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          Teasing, rejection, and violence: Case studies of the school shootings

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            Adolescent Masculinity, Homophobia, and Violence: Random School Shootings, 1982-2001

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              Effects of news media messages about mass shootings on attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness and public support for gun control policies.

              In recent years, mass shootings by persons with serious mental illness have received extensive news media coverage. The authors test the effects of news stories about mass shootings on public attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness and support for gun control policies. They also examine whether news coverage of proposals to prevent persons with serious mental illness from having guns exacerbates the public's negative attitudes toward this group.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                29 September 2022
                2022
                : 13
                : 966980
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Sociology Department, University of California, Santa Barbara , Santa Barbara, CA, United States
                [2] 2Human Development and Family Studies, Colorado State University , Fort Collins, CO, United States
                Author notes

                Edited by: Eric Madfis, University of Washington Tacoma, United States

                Reviewed by: Jason Silva, William Paterson University, United States; Scott Duxbury, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

                *Correspondence: Tristan Bridges, tbridges@ 123456ucsb.edu

                These authors have equally contributed to this work and share first authorship

                These authors have equally contributed to this work and share last authorship

                This article was submitted to Personality and Social Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2022.966980
                9557287
                b1b1c66a-a98e-43c2-87c4-bd479cee84e5
                Copyright © 2022 Bridges, Tober, Brazzell and Chatterjee.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 12 June 2022
                : 24 August 2022
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 9, Equations: 0, References: 35, Pages: 12, Words: 8556
                Funding
                Funded by: University of California, Santa Barbara , doi 10.13039/100007183;
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                mass shootings,mass shooters,gun violence,perpetrators,racial inequality,media representations,media bias

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