The Social Construction of Mass Shootings: Does Race and Ethnicity Matter?

• In Event: Media Representations of Mass Shootings and Violent Episodic Crime

Abstract

Mass shootings generate a tremendous amount of media coverage and these events can be socially constructed in various ways. Two of the more common constructions define mass shootings as a terrorist act or hate crime. This analysis is interested in determining the extent to which race or ethnicity of the offender determines the labeling of a mass shooting. Using a content analysis of newspapers, we examine four mass shooting events that occurred in 2015 including crimes by (a) Dylann Roof, (b) Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, (c) Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, and (d) Christopher Harper-Mercer to better understand how these criminal events and offenders were characterized. Preliminary results indicate that labels of these events do in fact vary by race and ethnicity. While the motives, nature of the criminal act, and offender characteristics are similar across all cases, there appears to be a reluctance to label acts by white offenders as domestic terrorism whereas crime committed by Muslim offenders are more readily described as terrorism.

Authors

• Jason Davis, Clayton State University

• Elizabeth Bonomo, Clayton State University