News coverage following the February 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, FL provides a window into the ongoing public discourse about firearm violence and prevention policies, including temporary firearm removal laws. Six states first introduced ERPO policies after Parkland, and three of them passed such laws in the 2018 legislative session (one of the three non-passing states, Colorado, has since passed an ERPO law). Findings from this content analysis highlight several ways that ERPO media coverage appears distinct from coverage of gun violence more generally, as well as elements of coverage that may inform understandings of ERPO policy passage and implementation at the state level.
Past studies suggest that news coverage of gun violence often reinforces the idea that it is an inevitable and intractable problem rather than preventable [2]. Coverage of ERPOs is therefore unique in that it references an inherently solutions-oriented rather than problem-oriented approach to firearm violence. While relatively few articles in our analysis explicitly mentioned that a violent event was or could have been prevented by an ERPO (13.1%), this idea was significantly more likely to be mentioned in articles about passing states than non-passing states.
Evoking such a “prevention frame” in building support for ERPO policy aligns with prior evidence suggesting that the public is attuned to incidents of gun violence in which someone close to the shooter is said to have known something was wrong but lacked the tools to do anything about it [12]. In our analysis, use of the terms “warning signs” or “red flags” in reference to demonstrated signs of concern (but not in policy names) was more common in ERPO coverage about passing than non-passing states.
This focus on identifiable markers of risk for harm is also consistent with expert guidance and higher levels of public support for risk-based (rather than universal) firearm policies and interventions. For example, past research has found widespread public support (> 80%), including among gun owners, for health professionals talking with patients about gun safety in the context of risk reduction, but lower levels of support for such conversations “in general” [13]. A recent study indicates that public support for ERPO policies and personal willingness to use an ERPO across various risk-based scenarios is similarly high (> 70%) [14].
Our results also suggest that policy names may facilitate or hinder public support and political momentum, with coverage about passing states more often using only official ERPO policy names and non-passing states more often using only colloquial “red flag” policy names. The term “red flag law” has been criticized by gun violence prevention experts for being overly vague, stigmatizing individuals with mental illness, and minimizing the level of risk necessary to warrant firearm prohibition [15], whereas the name “extreme risk protection order” has been recommended for widespread use by violence prevention organizations because it “describe[s] the purpose of the law in common language and invoke[s] urgency to reflect the situations wherein the law would be used” [12]. Recent survey data from California also suggest that official policy names and the term “red flag law” are equally recognizable, though public awareness of EPROs is generally low (34%) [14].
Coverage of ERPOs, including articles about passing states, tended to use harsh and prohibitory language, such as “take away,” “seize,” “ban,” and “prohibit,” to describe the process of firearm recovery. Evidence suggests that gun owners may be more likely to support firearm recovery for someone in crisis if language highlights the temporary nature of such action, rather than a permanent prohibition [16]. In our analysis, although most articles used a combination of both prohibitory and preventive language, ERPO articles about passing states were more likely to exclusively use the word “prevent” to describe implementation of the law (e.g., “prevent access to firearms”), whereas articles about non-passing states more often exclusively used the words “seize” or “seizure.” Future research should explore the public’s reactions to variations in recovery language used to describe the ERPO process.
The phrase “gun control” appeared in one-third of articles in our sample. Findings from prior qualitative studies have emphasized the value of culturally-acceptable language, including avoiding “gun control” language, to engage gun owners in suicide prevention strategies that reduce access to firearms [17, 18]. Media analysis of universal background check laws after the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, CT has also found that “gun control” was mentioned less frequently in news stories published in states that passed such policies compared to news generally [1]. This same study also suggested that framing firearm policies as “common sense” may be an ineffective way to build policy support because it employs rational instead of value-based messaging; similarly, in our study, the terms “common sense” or “sensible” appeared more often in news coverage about states that did not pass ERPO legislation. In contrast, rights-based arguments, which activate the core values associated with gun ownership, may be more powerful than fact-based ones. In our sample, the term “Second Amendment” was used both in support of and in opposition to ERPOs, though it appeared more often in news coverage of non-passing states.
Contrary to recommendations from experts, victim advocates, and news media organizations [19,20,21], more than one in four articles in our analysis mentioned perpetrators of gun violence by name, particularly the Parkland shooter, and one in five described the specific firearms used. This practice was significantly more common in articles about passing states, though this may in part reflect that Florida—the state in which the Parkland shooting occurred—was included as one of our passing states (see the Table in Additional file 1 for findings by state). Of note, among the six states in our sample, articles about Florida were also most often published in news outlets outside of the state (see Additional file 2). While journalists may be inclined to provide details about perpetrators and their crimes to inform the public or spark action, focusing narrowly on the details of a single event (episodic framing) without looking at the bigger picture can not only obscure preventive, public health-oriented solutions to gun violence, but may also encourage copycat crimes [19].
Consistent with newspaper coverage of other recent public mass shootings, such as the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting [22], officials/politicians were by far the most commonly mentioned and quoted stakeholders in ERPO coverage overall. While officials/politicians appeared more often in articles about non-passing states, gun violence prevention advocates, such as Everytown for Gun Safety and student advocates, were mentioned more frequently in articles about passing states. This suggests that the public and, in turn, the policymaking process, may benefit from the perspectives of community groups, which may also be more active in states where ERPO legislation was successfully passed.
References to ERPO policies in other states or at the federal level were also more common in passing states than non-passing states. Similarly, although only one in four articles cited scientific evidence related to gun violence generally, articles about passing states were significantly more likely to cite the small but growing body of research about ERPO implementation and effectiveness. These findings point to the value of relevant data, likely in combination with the lived experience and advocacy efforts of those most impacted, for building policy momentum through the media.
Limitations
Our study has several limitations. First, our results do not imply causation, i.e., whether news media framing led to (or discouraged) policy passage. Policy process scholars have increasingly recognized the relationship between agenda setting in media and politics as a complex system with nonrecursive interactions and multiple feedback loops, rather than a simple linear process [3]. Our findings build on prior evidence suggesting that these processes are integrally related to each other.
Second, these findings characterize print news media about ERPOs after the Parkland shooting in states that had never before considered ERPO policy; as such, they may not be generalizable to news coverage of ERPOs in other states, during different time periods, or on television or radio. In addition, our inclusion criteria (which selected for policy-related articles) resulted in a sample of articles that was more solutions-oriented than news coverage of gun violence in general, but may resemble news coverage following other mass shootings, which research suggests has become increasingly thematic (vs. episodic) over time [22]. The generalizability of our results is strengthened by the geographic, cultural, and political diversity reflected across the six states in our sample.
Third, we operationalized news media framing as the presence or absence of terms, people, events, and other information; in some cases and in future research, further considering the context in which these items appeared may be useful for better understanding the nature and implications of the framing.
