Gun-related tragedies have left names that previously referred only to locations on a map with unshakable, secondary meanings. Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora and, most recently, Newtown lost their cartographic anonymity when shootings catapulted them into the headlines. As Americans struggle to come to terms with the mass-shootings of the past decade, the two most prominent questions in the national consciousness — “how?” closely followed by “why?” — have complicated the social and political fallout surrounding gun-control policies in unforeseen ways.
Though politicians join in chorus to condemn the violent acts, the concert ends in discord when policymakers try to debate the most effective means for protecting the public. Yet, regardless of political affiliation, most people are able to agree on one thing: the shooter never, ever should have had a gun.
But who is the shooter?
The American public, hungry for answers, has rushed to early and sometimes inaccurate news reports that the various shooters have histories of mental illness. Implicated mental illnesses in news media have run the gamut from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder and even (in the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter) autism. Many of these connections have since been proven false, though this has not quelled heightened suspicions and fears.
Emma McGinty, a PhD candidate with the Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, decided it was time to get the facts after the January 2011 attack in Tucson, AZ that killed six and wounded thirteen including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
“It just really struck me that there really was a lot of attention to the fact that it seemed like the shooter had some kind of serious mental illness, though at the time of the shooting, it was unclear,” McGinty said. “This apparent link between mental health and violence which is very misleading because, as we know, the vast majority of people with mental illness are not, in fact, violent.”
Scientists, doctors and mental health advocacy groups are concerned that the answers quickly sought by the public may lead to an increased stigma for those with severe mental illnesses. This stigma can cause issues for individuals with mental health issues who are looking to rent apartments or apply for jobs.
It turns out that this kind of stigma does not depend on the accuracy of the news report itself. Even in cases when the report was later rescinded, studies have shown that the initial impression of the story is what sticks in the public imagination.
McGinty sought to test how people’s perceptions of the connection between mental health and violence are affected by news reports about violent crimes perpetrated by mentally ill people. McGinty designed an internet-based experiment that asked people to read various types of news articles, then answer questions pertaining to mental illness and gun violence. Since it was impossible to find a group of people who hadn’t recently read anything about mass shootings, the study was conducted with the assumption that everyone had an initial opinion about mental illness and gun violence.
The trick was to design an experiment that tested the causal relationship between reading articles attributing violence to mental illness and changes in subjects’ perception of the danger of mentally ill people. McGinty compared online-survey results between subjects who had just read a news article about mental illness and gun violence to those who hadn’t.
“In the results, we found 10-20 percent more negative attitudes towards populations of mentally ill people than the control group,” McGinty said.
She acknowledged that the experimental environment was artificial. The study’s design — reading an article then immediately answering questions — made the findings time-sensitive. In real-world scenarios, people get news from many different sources throughout each day.
“But it’s a pretty decent proxy for the two weeks following mass shootings when all we hear about in the news media is, you know, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting,” McGinty said.
Advocacy groups for mental health and gun-control policies have been extremely interested in this study. Though gun-control advocates may capitalize on the discussions of stricter gun policies following a mass-shooting, mental health advocates are more concerned with the lasting effects for the population of mental health patients.
“They want to know whether talking about those policies or promoting these policies increased stigma,” McGinty said.
In response, McGinty tested subjects’ reactions to an article promoting gun-control policies that prevented people with mental illnesses from obtaining guns. Interestingly, she found that this kind of article did not increase the negative attitudes toward people with mental illness.
The result functions as a cautious assurance for mental health advocates that these reports will not end up stigmatizing the mentally ill in the public eye. Even so, McGinty predicts that the result from her study most likely to be cited in the world of academic literature is the fact that articles connecting violence to mental illness can increase public stigma.
It remains unclear what the policy implications of this research will be, and the solution may not come from reforming reporting practices or policy rhetoric.
“The news media isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong when they publish stories about shooters with mental illnesses,” McGinty said. “Sometimes we do know, so they’re just reporting the facts in that case.”
Communications research has also shown that the stigmas don’t rest on the media’s implication of causal connections between mentally ill people and mass shooters who happen to be mentally ill.
“All they have to do is say that a mass shooter has a mental illness and the public makes the connection all by themselves,” McGinty said.
Looking ahead, McGinty pointed to social media as an extremely important area for future research.
“We have to figure out how to do research with social media [on this topic] because it is so integral to our experience of news, and it is very different in that there is no editorial oversight over any of it,” McGinty said. “Yet, it is as powerful, or sometimes more powerful than getting news from an established source.”
