Media Should Stop Ignoring Gun Violence

The word Columbine invokes fear. The word alone conjures images of a school massacre that happened when no high school student today was even alive.
Two 12th-grade students at Columbine High School, in Colorado, murdered 13 students and one teacher. Many more people were injured. This event rang through the news, becoming one of the most covered news stories of the decade.
The word Columbine has remained relevant ever since.
What about the word Evergreen?
It’s doubtful most have any association with this high school, also in Colorado.
At Evergreen High School, a student fired 20 rounds in a span of nine minutes. Two students were injured, and the student with the gun shot and killed himself before being apprehended by police.
It was barely a blip on the nightly news.
The shooting at Evergreen took place on the same day that Charlie Kirk was shot. Both were tragedies, but Kirk’s assassination got much more news coverage than the Evergreen shooting.
It is understandable that Kirk’s assassination got a lot of news coverage. However, the Evergreen shooting not being covered much wasn’t just because of the other events of that day.
The news barely covers school shootings anymore, whereas, in 1999, it was all over the media because a school shooting was extremely shocking. Now, there are many more school shootings and they only get a few days of media coverage, if anything, because people have become desensitized to gun violence, due to it happening so much.
The Columbine massacre is considered the turning point for gun violence in schools. School shooting rates have gone up since that horrible day.
In 1999, there were six school shootings. According to CNN, there have been 64 school shootings in 2025 as of Oct. 27.
Although the number of shootings per year have gone up by a lot, they have less media coverage than the six shootings in 1999. The coverage of school shootings doesn’t stay in the news cycle for long.
Even when shootings happen close to home, they are not as widely covered.
On October 7, near Ben Lomond High School, a 16-year-old student was shot and killed. There was almost no coverage in the news. On KSL, readers had to scroll down the eighth article listed on the website to find the only article about this tragedy.
It should have been leading news.
But many of the shootings that have happened throughout the year are not getting the coverage that they used to for one simple reason – they are so common, they don’t move the needle anymore.
As shootings have become more and more common, people have started to wonder when the next one will be, not if there will be a next one. How sad for us student that they have become an expectation.
Without enough media coverage, many people aren’t aware of the sheer number of shootings happening around them. For most people, school shootings aren’t considered a problem unless it happens directly in their community, especially since they don’t see many school shootings on the news.
If these recent shootings happened in 1999, they would have all been lead stories. Based on the amount of coverage they get, nobody seems to be concerned about them as much as they should be, and how we can minimize them.
Schools have limited power when it comes to stopping shootings. They’ve held drills to prepare for moments like these, but that is almost all they can do. There are more fire drills than lockdown drills in schools, but most teenagers don’t worry about the next time their school catches on fire. But we all worry about a shooting.
It matters that people understand the seriousness of school shootings, but no one can if they don’t see it in the media. Gun violence in schools cannot be normalized and become a part of everyday life. As a society, we must spread the word about gun violence in schools to help fight against the normalization of guns.