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School Shootings And School Shootings

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This paper will seek to determine why have school shootings become familiar media events. On April 20th 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two students of Columbine High School, equipped with multiple firearms including explosives went on a killing spree, before committing suicide (Kohn, 2001). Wounding more than 20 people and causing the death of 13 people, the Columbine High School shooting is considered as one of the most important school shootings in history. School shooting is the action in which ‘multiple intentional killings’ are carried out in ‘educational institutions’ by one or more perpetrators (Böckler et al., 2013, p.3). The devastating event not only appeared on newspapers but it has since been adapted into an Oscar-winning …show more content…

Other globally notable school shootings, since the Columbine High School shooting, include USA’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Virginia Tech massacre, Red Lake Massacre, and Northern Illinois University shooting, Finland’s Jokela High School shooting and the Kauhajoki school shooting, Germany’s Erfurt Massacre and Winnenden School shooting, and Brazil’s Tasso de Silveira Municipal School shooting (Brooks, 2014). School shootings are becoming familiar media events since the Columbine High School incident, and have since persistently been given a place in newspapers and magazines, among other media …show more content…

For example, The Hunger Games is a novel by Suzanne Collins, and have been adapted to award winning films, which plot revolves around the Hunger Games — a televised fight which requires participants aged 12-18 to murder one another to survive and ultimately win the game. The multimedia franchise is marketed mainly to youths aged 9-18 years old, and is under public scrutiny because of its violent content, thus further exemplify the ability of media violence to attract attention for both economical and social capital (Clavijo-Kish, 2013). As aforementioned, the Columbine High School massacre has also managed to acquire that same degree of, if not more, attention and have become a genre of media events. Oxford Dictionary defined media event as a ‘staged event to draw publicity’ (Oxford DIctionary, n.d.). Although school shooting is not fictionalised nor staged, school shooting may be structured accordingly to fit it’s purposes whether for financial or socio-political gain. This process is called ‘media framing’, the manner in which media industries ‘actively process events that happened, through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration, to represent reality and current issues’ (Ruddock, 2013, p.104; Muschert, 2006, p.354).

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