Are Americans Desensitized to Mass Shootings?

By Tiara A. Bryant

Haley Hernandez, a junior majoring in electronic media, has heard of so much bloodshed on the news that she fears a mass shooting will happen at Texas Tech.

“Every time I’m in a big lecture hall, I’m scared. I look for exits, “Hernandez said. “There are people with these hidden agendas all around us. We go to the second largest (contiguous campus) school in the United States, there are so many people who go here, and we’re becoming an open carry school that just increases the chances.”

Illustration from Canva.com.

But she thinks others are probably less concerned. Americans are becoming desensitized to mass shootings because so many are being reported on the news, she said.

“In my opinion, Americans take this information less heavy than they used to,” Hernandez said. “It doesn’t affect them the same way.”

There have been over 350 mass shootings in the U.S in 2015 thus far. On Nov. 27, a gunman attacked a planned parenthood in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing three people and injuring nine.

Less than a week later, on Dec. 2, a married couple in San Bernardino, California, attacked a work holiday party, killing 14 and injuring 17 people.

Mark Gring, an associate professor of communication studies, who specializes in terrorism and violence, said Americans are becoming hypersensitive to mass shootings.

“People are scared,” Gring said. “People are afraid. I don’t think that they’re desensitized to it; they’re probably in some ways overly sensitive to it.”

Jameka Walton, a resident of Irving, Texas, who has two sons, said the San Bernardino mass shooting has had less impact than the 1999 Columbine shooting because mass shootings have become more common.

“I think that Americans are empathetic to these situations, but I think that they just continue on with their lives, it’s just another story on the news,” Walton said.

As the mother of a child in elementary school, Walton said she would be devastated if another school shooting like the one at Sandy Hook happened again.

Nowadays, reminders of our mortality can be found well beyond the anatomy lab. Allison Terry/The HUb@TTU

Kourtney Kildow, a junior studying psychology, said people are starting to mentally prepare for mass shootings, wondering about how they could survive in such a situation.

“Yes, we are aware of what’s happening, and we are kind of brushing it off sometimes, but we are subconsciously thinking that’s going to happen to us,” Kildow said. “So it’s affecting us in a way that we’re always thinking about it, but when we see it happen, we aren’t shocked.”

People have the strongest reaction to a mass shooting if they relate to the circumstances in which it happened, said Alan Reifman, a professor of human development and family studies, said Reifman.

“For instance, people at Tech are in a college campus; where we see the Virginia Tech shooting on a college campus, it strikes a nerve with us,” Reifman said.

Preston Childress, a sophomore studying structural engineering at Texas Tech, recalls being on Facebook when he first saw an article about the San Bernardino shooting in November. He read the first couple of lines and kept scrolling.

Although he followed the news, Childress said Americans are becoming increasingly fed up with mass shootings.

“I just feel like if something happens over and over again, people start to get sick of it,” Childress said. “So it’s not so much of ‘Oh, another shooting, no one cares’; it’s more of people saying, ‘Enough already.’ People don’t want to turn on the television and constantly hear about it.”

The problem is that media tend to over-sensationalize mass shootings and “try to tell the story long before the story is even known,” Gring said.

Excessive news coverage can have unintended effects well beyond desensitization. For example, it can also encourage “copycat” killers, reports The Atlantic.

The coverage of mass shootings has also resulted in increased cynicism about the gun industry. The Polling Report shows 59 percent of Americans believe stricter gun laws could reduce gun violence.

“There is so much money to be made; who cares who buys it, they’re selling guns every day,” Childress said. “If I want to buy a gun, they may ask me what I’m going to do with it, if I just say ‘none of your business,’ they’ll sell it to me still.”

Added Reifman: “The U.S is a very violent culture. If you compare our rates of homicides and violence to other economically developed nations, like Canada and Britain and Germany, the U.S has a much higher homicide rate.”