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We've learned a lot from five years of in-depth reporting. MoJo Reader, Good journalism is supposed
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We've learned a lot from five years of in-depth reporting.
MoJo Reader,
Good journalism is supposed to help people make sense of the world around them. Sometimes it's straightforward: Investigative reporting is able to reveal the truth when the powerful lie. But other times it's not that easyâlike in the aftermath of another tragic mass shooting.
So instead of continuing on with our fundraising drive, I wanted to share a piece I wrote that addresses what we've learned, somewhat painfully, from five years of in-depth reporting on gun violence: "[Here Is Exactly the Right Time to Talk About Gun Violence](."
For us, it began on a grim July morning more than five years ago. We sat in MoJo's daily news meeting, debating how to cover what felt, back then, like an unprecedented event: A man had walked into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire, killing 12 and injuring 70 more. We found ourselves wondering: How often does this happen? Is it growing more common?
Countless web searches and phone calls later, we had an unexpected answer: no data. No one in academia, media, or government had compiled a basic study of how often someone heads to a public place with a gun and murders strangers. Nor had anyone investigated the context to these killings: How did shooters get their weapons? What kind did they use? How many had symptoms of mental illness or psychopathy?
We also found out the reason for this stunning dearth of information. Much like the tobacco industry back in the day, the gun lobby sees data as its enemy. Thanks to gun industry advocates in Congress, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been prohibited from using government funds to investigate gun violence since 1996.
We couldnât let this go. So we began to compile the data ourselves, and soon we had a dozen entries. Then two dozen. Soon we had mapped and charted 62 mass shootings in the course of 30 yearsâa [dataset]( that we made available to anyone to use for free, as countless [journalists](, [academic researchers](, and [policymakers]( have done since.
One of the key things we learned from this research is that we, as journalists, also have a responsibility: It turns out media coverage plays a key part in motivating mass shooters, and there are ways to report on them that mitigate that problem. Similarly, it's important to not just focus on the shooters in these tragediesâthat's what they wantâbut to tell the stories of the victims and families in a way that respects their trauma. (You can see a [moving video]( from Las Vegas in the full article.)
One particularly [powerful story]( we ran is from Sandy Phillips, who lost her year 24-year-old daughter, a budding journalist, in Aurora. "On that day, I entered an inescapable nightmare," Sandy says. "A fire also began to burn inside of me. The following morning, I told Lonnie, 'We need to get involved.'"
"My husband and I respect the Second Amendment. We are longtime gun owners, who for 30 years made our home in Texas. We have no interest in taking away everyone's guns, as the National Rifle Association and other fearmongers like to claim. However, we believe our nation's laws can be vastly improved to save lives."
She has stayed involved, turning her grief into fuel for action, for five years. If she can find the strength, so can all of us.
For us at Mother Jones, that means continuing to chronicle this important issue, and the work that so many people are doing to find solutions. Itâs not our job to decide what those solutions should be. But we can gather the information needed to make sound decisionsâand to report on it from many angles, because the conventional he said, she said approach leads to gridlock.
The more we, as a society, grapple with the facts on this issue, the more reaction after tragedies like Vegas can shift from wonderment about "inexplicable" violence to insight and action. Mass shootings are only inexplicable if we let them be. So amid the grief and confusion, we're determined to keep on tackling the issue head on.
Thanks for reading, and for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is.
Monika Bauerlein, Chief Executive Officer
Mother Jones
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