MEDIA’S INFLUENCE ON THE PERCEPTION OF MORAL PANICS OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS Media is an important outlet in our society, particularly in informing the extent of crime in an area or cities or country, and even on international ground. Crime is a social phenomenon that tends to be out of the public view. People are often unaware of crime trends, whether they are rising or declining because they can best estimate the frequency of crimes based on the observation of the world that they see because they have a limited geographical scope of their personal experience to make such reliable inferences on the occurrence and gravity of such offences (Pfeiffer et al, 2005). This is where the media comes in. Society has to rely altogether on what is reported by the media regarding the crimes that occur in their neighbourhood and even on a larger geographical extent. Despite the fact that crime rates have fallen, it seems that people …show more content…
The first element is concern. The concern on school shooting is the issue of gun policy in the United States. The newspapers depicted the perpetrators as those who suffer from mental health problems or are troubled psychologically. An example of the perpetrator in one the case of school shooting is quoted from Johnson et.al, (2014) “Ryan Lanza, the suspect's 24-year-old brother, was questioned by law enforcement in Hoboken, N.J., and said Adam was believed to suffer from a personality disorder”. However, the media did not lay the blame on the shooters but rather on how easy it is for gun to be acquired in America, as stated in Diblasio et.al (2014)“ In a question-answer session on the social media site Tumblr, President Obama said that my biggest frustration so far is that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps" to curb gun violence”. Hostility is pointed towards the National Riffle Association (NRA), a non-profit organisation that lobbies